The First Vampire: Jure Grando, the Strigoi of Istria
A Knock in the Night
The streets of Kringa, a small Istrian village in modern-day Croatia, are silent under the weight of midnight. Stone cottages huddle together, their shutters barred tight against the chill. You linger in the narrow lane, mist coiling low around your feet. Then, the sound comes: three heavy knocks against a wooden door. The sound rings far too loud in the night air.
No one answers, yet you know what it means.
For the villagers of 17th-century Kringa, this sound wasn’t just ominous—it was fatal. It meant that death itself had come knocking, carried in the form of a man long buried. His name was Jure Grando Alilović, and his story has earned him a chilling title: the world’s first recorded vampire.
The Legend
Jure Grando was a stonemason, born in 1579. He lived a simple life in Kringa until his death in 1656. But death didn’t keep him in the ground. According to local accounts, Jure rose from his grave, transformed into something neither fully man nor entirely corpse. The villagers called him a štrigon—a word tied directly to the Romanian strigoi, a restless undead spirit that feeds on the living.
For sixteen years, the people of Kringa lived under his shadow.
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At night, he wandered the streets, knocking on doors. In the days that followed, someone inside would die.
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He appeared to his widow, Ivana, gasping and grinning in her bedroom, pressing on her chest until she could barely breathe.
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Some said they glimpsed him wandering through the mist, pale-faced and smiling, though his body lay buried in the churchyard.
This was no vague superstition. The villagers were convinced Jure Grando had become a strigoi, the kind of undead predator that drained both life and courage.
Finally, desperate for peace, they gathered to end the nightmare.
The History Behind the Legend
What makes Jure’s story different from countless vampire folktales is this: it was recorded. In 1689, Johann Weikhard von Valvasor included the tale in his monumental book The Glory of the Duchy of Carniola. His account described the villagers’ fear, the repeated knocking deaths, and the horrifying confrontation at the grave.
This makes Jure Grando the first named individual in Europe to be documented as a vampire.
Valvasor noted the villagers tried prayers and exorcisms first. The local priest even attempted to banish Jure with holy rites, but the hauntings persisted. Eventually, the prefect of Kringa, Miho Radetić, led a group of men to the grave. When they opened the coffin, they found Grando’s body perfectly preserved, his cheeks flushed with color and a cruel smile frozen on his lips.
The men tried to drive a hawthorn stake through his heart. The stake splintered. Next, they attempted to cut his head with an axe, but it bounced against his neck. It wasn’t until one villager took a saw and began to cut that the horror truly began. Witnesses claimed the corpse screamed, blood spurted from the wound, and the body writhed. When the head was finally removed, peace returned to Kringa.
Sightings and Stories
The villagers’ stories of Jure Grando paint a portrait of terror:
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The Widow’s Torment: His wife Ivana described him visiting her bed at night, suffocating her with his weight while grinning grotesquely. Imagine the horror of seeing your dead husband’s smiling face in the dark, his breathless gasping pressing against you.
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The Knock of Death: Families reported the dreaded sound of knocking. Within days, someone in that household fell ill and died. It was as if Jure chose his victims, sealing their fate with three simple taps.
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The Villagers’ Vigil: Armed with stakes, axes, and prayers, the men of Kringa approached his grave. Each failed attempt only deepened their dread until they resorted to the saw. The scream that followed haunted their memories for years.
Even centuries later, these accounts are remembered not just as folklore, but as testimony of something villagers believed they truly lived through.
How to Stop the First Vampire
The rituals used against Jure Grando reveal much about early vampire lore:
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Stakes and Hawthorn: Folklore often insists that vampires can be killed with a stake to the heart, but in this case the hawthorn wood splintered uselessly.
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Holy Rites: The priest’s attempts to exorcise Jure with blessings and prayer failed—suggesting that not even the church could banish this strigoi.
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Beheading with a Saw: What finally ended him was gruesome but effective. By sawing off his head, the villagers severed the second soul from the body.
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Symbolism: Later vampire panics in Serbia and Romania would echo these methods—staking, burning, and beheading became part of Europe’s vampire “toolkit,” codified in chronicles and folklore.
Jure’s case helped define how Europe thought a vampire could be destroyed.
Similar Legends
The tale of Jure Grando isn’t just about one man in one village—it’s part of a much larger web of legends stretching across Europe.
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Strigoi (Romania): The Strigoi were believed to be troubled spirits of the dead who rose from the grave to torment the living. Some were invisible, draining the life force of their victims in secret. Others walked as flesh-and-blood corpses, much like Jure. Villagers often identified Strigoi when a corpse failed to decompose or when the body appeared bloated and ruddy with blood. To stop them, Romanians drove stakes into the heart, decapitated the corpse, or burned the remains. Jure’s title as štrigon places him firmly in this tradition, making him one of the earliest named Strigoi.
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Strzyga (Poland): Unlike Jure, the Strzyga was marked from birth. With two souls and sometimes two hearts, she was destined to return after death. Villagers feared her not just for blood-drinking but for consuming flesh and entrails. Protective rituals included scattering poppy seeds on her grave, forcing her to waste the night counting until dawn. While Jure’s haunting was rooted in knocking and suffocation, the Strzyga was more animalistic—an owl-like predator with claws and wings. Both, however, terrified their villages enough to be buried with heavy safeguards.
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Shtriga (Albania): The Shtriga blurred the line between witch and vampire. Alive during the day but transforming into a creature of the night, she drank children’s blood by turning into an insect. Unlike the remorseless Strigoi, she carried the possibility of redemption—if she spit the stolen blood back into her victim’s mouth, the child might live. This glimmer of hope separates her from Jure, whose fate seemed fixed. Yet all three figures—the Shtriga, Strzyga, and Strigoi—share the common thread of wasting illness and unexplained death, fears that stalked every European village.
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Petar Blagojevich (Serbia, 1725): Nearly seventy years after Jure, another vampire made headlines. Blagojevich reportedly returned to demand food from his family and later attacked them when they refused. His body, too, was found fresh and lifelike in the grave, with blood at his lips. The Austrian government documented his exhumation, making it one of the most influential vampire cases in Europe. If Jure was the first, Blagojevich was the one that ignited international hysteria.
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Arnold Paole (Serbia, 1726): Just a year later, Paole’s case spread like wildfire. He had claimed to be attacked by a vampire in life and took precautions, but after his death he allegedly returned to attack villagers and livestock. Austrian officials investigated, and their reports circulated widely, cementing the idea of the vampire as a cultural threat. Compared to Jure, Paole’s case shows how belief in vampires could spread beyond folklore and into government documents and medical debates.
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The Roman Strix: Centuries before Jure, the Romans whispered about the Strix—a screech-owl demon that drank blood and fed on children. Ovid wrote of them, describing their feathers, talons, and insatiable hunger. The connection to Jure is more than coincidence. The very word štrigon comes from strix, proof that old pagan fears survived into Christian Europe. In many ways, Jure’s story is the Strix reborn—an ancient nightmare given a new name.
Together, these legends trace a path from myth to reality, from faceless demons to named men like Jure Grando. And that’s what makes his case extraordinary: he wasn’t just a creature of story. He was a neighbor, a husband, a man with a gravestone—and, if the villagers were to be believed, the first vampire in history.
The First Vampire in Media and Popular Culture
Today, Kringa has embraced its eerie claim to fame. The village features vampire-themed cafés and commemorative plaques celebrating its infamous resident. In 2011, a short film titled Vampir moga zavičaja (“Vampire of My Homeland”) retold his story. Travelers who come to Istria seeking wine, stone churches, and medieval lanes often stumble upon its darker claim to fame—the home of the first vampire.
In scholarly circles, Jure Grando is cited again and again as the earliest named vampire in Europe. His story appears in vampire anthologies, academic studies, and folklore podcasts. For horror fans, he offers a rare treasure: a vampire with a name, a place, and a story written down decades before the word “vampire” entered English.
Conclusion
Jure Grando’s tale lingers not because of the gore, but because it captures the moment folklore became history. For sixteen years, villagers believed they lived under the shadow of a corpse that smiled in its coffin and knocked on doors to summon death. When they cut off his head, they weren’t just ending a haunting—they were writing the first chapter in Europe’s long obsession with vampires.
He was a man, a husband, a stonemason. And yet, in death, he became something far more enduring: the first vampire. A strigoi before the world knew the word. A legend carved into history with the teeth of a saw.
So if you hear knocking on your door in the dead of night, think of Kringa. Think of Jure Grando. And ask yourself—are some graves ever truly silent?
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