The Kisiljevo vampire: Peter Plogojowitz and the first printed vampyri (1725)

Kisolova, 1725. A village in the Rahmer district of Habsburg-ruled Serbia, a land the empire had held only since the Treaty of Passarowitz in 1718. Today it is probably Kisiljevo, near Veliko Gradište, about 100 km east of Belgrade.

A peasant named Peter Plogojowitz, in Serbian Petar Blagojević, had died about ten weeks before. Then the village began to die too.

Nine people, old and young, fell ill. Each was sick for about 24 hours, and each died. Within eight days, nine were gone, and on their deathbeds they named the same man. Plogojowitz, they said, "had come to them in their sleep, laid himself on them, and throttled them." His widow said he had come home after his death and asked for his opanci, his peasant shoes, and she left Kisolova for another village for her own safety.

The villagers wanted the grave opened. At once. Waiting for permission from Belgrade, they argued, could let the vampire destroy the whole community, as had happened "in Turkish times." If refused, they would leave the village.

The district's Imperial Kameralprovisor, Frombald, gave way, and attended with the parish priest of Gradište. There was no smell of death. The body was fresh, except the nose, and hair and beard had grown. New skin and nails had replaced the old ones, which had peeled away. There was fresh blood in the mouth, which the villagers said he had sucked from his victims.

They "grew more outraged than distressed." They drove a sharpened stake through his heart. Fresh blood ran from the ears and mouth. Then came other "wild signs," which Frombald declined to describe. The body was burned to ashes.

Frombald asked not to be blamed, since the villagers, he wrote, were "beside themselves with fear." The authorities apparently took no further action. But the report travelled, and on 21 July 1725 it appeared in the Wienerisches Diarium, today's Wiener Zeitung. It contains the phrase "so sie Vampyri nennen," which they call vampyri, widely called the first printed use of the word that became "vampire." The Leipziger Zeitung copied it, and a 1725 broadsheet called it a terrible event.

Michael Ranft read it and wrote of grief: "This death, whatever it is, can provoke in the survivors the visions they had after his death." Gerhard van Swieten, writing for Maria Theresa, later put vampire cases down to natural causes. In 1988 Paul Barber argued in Vampires, Burial, and Death that the signs at the grave fit normal decomposition: bloating, purged blood, slipping skin. In 2024 the Vreme reporter Nemanja Rujević suggested an infectious outbreak, which would fit the swift illnesses. Clemens Ruthner has called the vampire label an administrative error.

Kisiljevo has never settled on how to remember him. In 2013 David Ono of ABC7 found a descendant who said: "They never talked about Petar." In 2024 the anthropologist Danilo Trbojević said locals were trying to erase the local vampire from collective memory. In 2025 the local historian Nenad Mihajlović showed a roughly 300-year-old headstone, rediscovered with a dowsing rod, and former mayor Mirko Bogićević said of the 1725 exhumation: "Petar Blagojevic was found completely intact." The grave may not be his, and the man who gave Europe a word still has no certain resting place.