Talk:Vrykolakas

Merge with Vampire?
DreamGuy deleted this article and made it a redirect to vampire, with the comment "This is just the Greek word for vampire and there is some info there on it (though it could be expanded), so redirecting to that article)". I have reverted this change for the following reasons: So I would argue that this article should be kept as is. DreamGuy, if you still don't agree with me, could you please at least wait to see what other wikipedians think before changing it again?
 * Yes, Vrykolakas is "just the Greek word for vampire", but gladius is just the Latin word for sword, and menorah is just the Hebrew word for lamp. That doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't have useful articles under those headers.
 * 1) If you read this article you will notice that the traditional folklore of the vrykolakas is not 100% identical to the standard vampire, and in fact it could be argued that it doesn't have much at all to do with the vampire (see for example the outside link given in the article). The last paragraph deals with how this word has become more or less synonymous with vampire in Greece, but this seems to be a fairly recent development.
 * 2) There is NO info on the vrykolakas under vampire. I just added the one sentence there today, and you've changed it to say "Medieval and later Greek folklore features the vrykolakas, the Greek word for vampire." This pretty much renders even that scant sentence pointless.
 * 3) Many of the other vampire types given in that same list have their own articles, e.g. liogat, aswang etc. Indeed, there's even a Category:Vampires. I'm sure in many of those cases it could also be argued that we are simply dealing with a foreign word for "vampire" too, but wikipedians have seen fit to give them their own entry.
 * 4) Similarly, both the French and German Wikipedias have seen fit to include separate articles on this creature. (I won't count the Latin one, because I wrote it ;) )

Thanks, Iustinus 01:50, 23 August 2005 (UTC)


 * I'm also against such a merge. In most cases, it's better to have specific articles provided there is enough material and enough justification, as here. The article Vampire is too large and ungainly as it is already, without merging more material into it. Alexander 007 02:07, 17 December 2005 (UTC)


 * Recently this article was merged again with the vampire article, and I too am against such mergence, so I reverted the change because its seems like others also feel a seperate article is justifiable. The vampire article is too large and ungainly (as Alexander 007 said). I don't beleive it adequetly covers the topic. I also added a new section and refrences when I reverted the merge.

Feedback would be much appreciated. Abby01050105 (talk) 07:27, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

non-stub
Hey, just a heads-up that I removed the stub tag, since it seems to be a full article.Elizabennet 03:18, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

Merge 2015
Can we just redirect it to Vampire already? It's never been a separate topic. It should get one sentence in the real article about how the werewolf stories sometimes get mixed. This is a lot of verbiage for nothing. DreamGuy (talk) 17:08, 8 November 2015 (UTC)


 * Oppose. The term is not historically synonymous with nor etymologically related to vampire. This is an element of Greek folklore that shows an exchange with Slavic sources. It most certainly deserves its own article. &#58;bloodofox: (talk) 18:58, 8 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Oppose. Most people know Werewolf more than Vrykolakas. Qwertyxp2000 (talk &#124; contribs) 23:29, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

Opposition to merge with "Werewolf"
I have respectfully removed the proposal to merge this article with Werewolf. As I explained earlier in my edit summary, a vrykolakas and a werewolf are not the same thing. They are indeed very similar, but they are still different. The Greek vrykolakas has many similarities both vampires and werewolves, but is not the same thing as either of them.

Furthermore, the two concepts have very different histories and origins. The word "werewolf" is of Old English origins, whereas the word "vrykolakas" is Greek. There are many Greek stories about vrykolakai that are not applicable to werewolves and many western European stories about werewolves that are not applicable to vrykolakai. To combine this article with the article on werewolves would eliminate the delicate distinction between the two.

Finally, there is a great deal of useful information in this article about Greek traditions and folklore that would need to be deleted if this page were to be merged with the article on werewolves. This subject well and truly deserves its own article all to itself. --Katolophyromai (talk) 20:06, 22 March 2017 (UTC)

External links modified
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I have just modified 3 external links on Vrykolakas. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20090331041243/http://www.svevlad.org.rs/knjige_files/petrovic_mitologija.html to http://svevlad.org.rs/knjige_files/petrovic_mitologija.html
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20160227133758/http://bgrod.org/Vjara/index.php?p=bogove&page=vrkolak to http://bgrod.org/Vjara/index.php?p=bogove&page=vrkolak
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20071024035846/http://bgrod.org/Vjara/index.php?p=bogove&page=vampir to http://bgrod.org/Vjara/index.php?p=bogove&page=vampir

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View on merging with anything
My view is there is enough information on this southeastern European folkloric thing to keep it separate, mainly because the information seems to straddle both werewolves and vampires really. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 23:39, 12 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Werewolves and vampires are kind of Hollywood (or literary) inventions anyway, they're not well-defined mythological categories. Many folk beliefs do not clearly fit into one or the other.--Pharos (talk) 00:16, 13 March 2018 (UTC)
 * The evolution of the vampire was not as clear-cut as that, which I found out while doing the vampire article. Agree that drawing lines between many creatures can be rather arbitrary. However, given we are writing discrete articles, we have to do this somewhere (generally reflecting what popular or scholarly literature has done.) Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 00:39, 13 March 2018 (UTC)
 * I did find the vampire article pretty well-handled, and I'm glad you'd found the right lines for that. At some point, we'd benefit from having a comprehensive project one level up, at undead.--Pharos (talk) 04:27, 13 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Oh god I had never seen that page before...where to start.....Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 08:04, 13 March 2018 (UTC)

Etymology
If βρυκόλακας is the source of Salentin brucolaco, it's highly unlikely that it was borrowed from a Slavic language. Greeks have lived in Italy for centuries, since Antiquity (certainly in the times when β was still pronounced /b/, perhaps so early that υ was still pronounced /u/). Slavs, on the other hands, only crossed Danube around the end of Antiquity, then started to assimilate various older Balkan peoples, acquiring part of their folklore. I'm aware of Slavic borrowings in Greek, but in this case the Slavic forms are both messy & possibly influenced by folk etymology (wilk in wilkołak), while the corresponedence of βρυκόλακας & brucolaco presents no problems. Are there really no sources considering a different etymology? 2A02:A310:8241:8280:585D:735C:C185:EA6F (talk) 04:45, 12 April 2020 (UTC)