Witches, vampires, werewolves, goblins… anything served in past times to explain all those misfortunes that our ancestors found incomprehensible. Not only were apparently uneducated people who believed in these beings, but theologians, preachers and priests contributed to weaving their legends. For a long time in a small town in Poland they lived in fear of the legend of Brodka, the beautiful Polish witch who became a «vampire»and not in a normal vampire…, in a «chewer.»
The legend of Brodka, the Polish witch
In 1751 a French theologian named Dom Agustín Calmet He wrote a book about vampires and ghosts. In his work he spoke of a special type of vampire: chewers. Calmet believed that these vampires were into a strange hunger which caused them to devour the fabrics of their shrouds. He was not the first to speak of these beings. The legend of Brodka was woven in the 14th century.
Hajek de Libotschan collected in his Bohemian Chronicle the case of a chewing vampire related by the Abbe Neplach Opatowitz. in the year 1370. The story that became legend goes like this:
In 1345 there lived in Lewin a potter married to a woman who had a reputation as a witch named Brodka. One day Brodka appeared dead in her house, brutally murdered. The villagers and her husband believed that the woman had summoned some kind of spirit evil and they had killed her. Since they didn’t want to bury her on sacred ground They buried her at a crossroads.
Terror gripped the villagers when some shepherds claimed to have seen her in the countryside. taking the form of various animals and hunting their flocks. On other occasions she showed herself with the same shape it had in life and he appeared in his town and in the surrounding ones, getting to speak with the neighbors and causing great mortality every time he did it. Terrified, they decided to exhume his body to see if it was really missing from his grave. When they reached the body they saw, horrified, that had devoured half the veil that covered his head. They pulled it out of his throat completely blood stained.
The villagers acted towards the supposed witch as if she were a vampire. They drove an oak stake into him and legend says that despite the time that has passed since his death, the wound fresh blood gushed. They buried her again thinking that after her action her problem was solved. But apparently it wasn’t like that. She appeared again and caused even more deaths. Neplach Opatowitz’s report narrates that she was reburied and found that the stake had been pulled out with his own hands. They consulted the authorities and decided to stake him again and burn it. They did so and legend says that in the place where the woman’s body burned, several whirlwinds were recorded for a few days.
The explanation This phenomenon of chewing vampires lies in the gases produced by the body after death and in the custom of covering the face of the deceased with a veil. If the mouth is left open, the gases produce a vacuum effect and the shroud is introduced into the throat. These bodies that were thus discovered, especially during plague epidemics, contributed greatly to spread the vampire myth, which for centuries terrorized Europe, especially in the areas near the Rhine. The corpses really seemed to have devoured their shrouds and people’s imagination fabricated the rest.
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