Vrykolakas

The vrykolakas is the Greek undead: an undecayed, bloated corpse that walks out of its grave to plague its village. Seventeenth-century churchmen and travellers described islanders exhuming and burning suspect bodies, and Tournefort's eyewitness account of such a case on Mykonos became famous across Europe. Greek and Ottoman-era graves with corpses nailed or weighted down show how old and how practical the fear was. Its contagious, door-to-door spread makes it one of the closest folkloric relatives of the modern zombie plague.12