Vampire hunters

Vampire hunters are professionals whose job it to clean an area from vampires that may affect it. In the ancient time, especially in Greece and Serbia, it was a recognized profession. Today, a few people still pretend to hunt vampires as Manchester from the Highgate Vampire story.

In fiction, a vampire hunter or vampire slayer is someone who specializes in finding and destroying vampires and sometimes other creatures of dark fantasy as well.

As they are people who believe they are real vampires, other considers their life as a holy crusade. In modern lore, Human Living Vampires define slayers as people who hunts, stalks, threatens, or does harm to someone because he or she is a vampire, or because the hunter believes them to be so; or which gathers information to report those who are vampires.

Conspiracy theories are popular among those hunters who believe there is a plot afoot by Vampires and by the Goth movement through out the world especially in America, Germany and some other countries.

Professional vampire hunters played some part in the vampire lore of the Balkans (especially in Bulgarian, Serbian, and Romania).

In Bulgarian, the terms used to designate them included glog (lit. “hawthorn”, the species of wood used for the stake), vampirdzhiya, vampirar, dzhadazhiya or svetocher .

Most hunters were Christian, but there was a few instances of Jewish hunters and Muslim hunters. They are usually convinced that the vampire is a servant of the Devil and feel it is their duty to destroy vampires.

In s1ome traditions, the killing of vampires was only performed by vampire hunters. Aside from the well-known manners of execution (staking the corpse, burning it, etc.) that were normally entrusted to them, the hunters were also capable of using other methods such as enticing the invisible creature with music and then shooting it, or throwing its hat or head-cloth into the water and telling it to go fetch it (which caused it to drown).

They were usually either born on Saturday (then called Sabbatarians, Bulgarian sâbotnichav, Greek sabbatianoí) or the offspring of a vampire and a woman (typically his widow), called a dhampir in Romani or a vampirovic in Serbian. (More about dhampirs) 

A dhampir could become a professional or semiprofessional vampire hunter and charge a village for his services. According to surviving accounts, the dhampir began his work in a village by telling those who hired him that there was a bad smell in the air. He would then appear to attempt to locate its source. He might, for example, take off his shirt and look through the sleeve as if looking through a telescope. He would describe the shape that the invisible vampire had taken. Once he located the vampire, he might engage it in a dramatic hand-to-hand fight or simply shoot it. Once killed, the vampire smelled even more and might leave a pool of blood on the ground. Sometimes it could not be killed, in which case the dhampir would attempt to run it off to another village.

Among the more notable dhampirs was one named Murat, who operated in the 1950s in the Kosovo-Metohija area of Serbia.

In Bulgaria the vampire hunters were called vampirdzhija or djadadjii. They tended to operate in a more traditional fashion. Their main task seemed to have been to locate the particular grave that held the resting vampire’s body. In this task they used an icon, a holy picture in the Eastern Orthodox tradition. After locating the vampire, the villagers would impale it or burn the body.

In the case of the Sabbatarians, it was believed in some places that they needed to be fed meat from a sheep killed by a wolf (Bulgarian vâlkoedene); this would enable them not to fear the things that only they were able to see.

In Croatian and Slovenian legends, the villages had their own vampire hunters that were called kresniks, whose spirits were able to turn into animals at night to fight off the vampire or kudlak