Pijawica/Pijauica

The term pijawica means “red-faced with drink” is a term used to describe a town drunk in Croatia.  But pijawica is also a type of vampire in Eastern Europe.  They believed that a person who lived a life of sin is cursed and condemned to turn into a pijawica  just like the cursed transformation of the other undead.  But what separates pijawica, is that there is a certain type of sin that can transform you into this creature.  If you are a person that exhibits incest especially to your mother or son then you are surely to become a pijawica.

According to the old legend, the pijawica can be killed using a fire.  But fire will only work once it is awake.  A pijawica can be killed on the traditional method once it is sleeping.  People must exhume his corpse and decapitate his head.  They would then have to place his head behind his arms or in between its legs to prevent it from rising up again.  A certain type of incantation is also believed to work against pijawica.

Ancestors also believed that if you placed a wine or cloves of garlic in all the opening of the house, the pijawica would not be able to enter your house since wine and garlic is believed to possess substance that can repel the manifestation of the vampire.

Accounts of this type of vampire creature can also be found on the book of Montague Summers: The Vampire-His Kith and Kin:

“Ralston must certainly be quoted in this connexion, although it should be borne in mind that he is a little out of date in some details. The Songs of the Russian People from which (p. 410) I cite the following passage was published early in 1872. Of Vampires he writes: “The name itself has never been satisfactorily explained. In its form of vampir [South Russian upuir, anciently upir], it has been compared with the Lithuanian wempti = to drink, and wempti, wampiti = to growl, to mutter, and it has been derived from a root pi [to drink] with the prefix u = av, va. If this derivation is correct, the characteristic of the vampire is a kind of blood−drunkenness. In accordance with this idea the Croatians called the vampire pijauica”