“Per favore, non succhiarmi il pollice!”: sangue e spiriti nella Grecia dopo l’antichità

In our imagination, the bloodsucking creature par excellence is the vampire. But if one examines the traditions of what constituted the true incubator of Western vampirism, late Byzantine and post-Byzantine Greece, one discovers that hematophagia is not a trait associated with the undead. Using as a litmus test two Hellenic fairy tales that belong to the international types ATU 451, The maiden who seeks her brothers, and ATU 331, The spirit in the bottle, but have their own peculiarities, it will be shown that it is rather other imaginary creatures that suck blood in medieval and modern Greece. On the one hand we have the infanticidal demon Gello and his acolytes, the geloudes, and on the other, some demonic figures associated with the late antique pseudepigraphic text known as the Testament of Solomon.