During his winter stay on Mykonos in 1700–1701, the French botanist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort described an island frightened by a dead man. An unnamed peasant, reportedly murdered in the fields, was accused after burial of entering houses, extinguishing lamps and disturbing their occupants. Exhumation, prayers and the burning of his heart failed to end the complaints. Tournefort’s narrative ends with the destruction of the remaining body on 1 January 1701.
The principal source is his travel account, read here in John Ozell’s 1718 English translation, A Voyage into the Levant, volume one, Letter III, printed pages 103–107. It is a detailed account by a visitor who claimed to have attended the examination of the corpse. It is also an openly hostile description of the islanders’ beliefs. Those two features need to be considered together: proximity to an event does not remove the author’s prejudices or turn every reported disturbance into something he personally witnessed.
From an unexplained death to a revenant accusation
Tournefort calls the dead man quarrelsome and ill-natured, without supplying his name. He says the man was killed in the countryside, but that neither the manner of the killing nor the killer was known. His characterisation supplies the narrative with an explanation for why this particular person might be feared after death. It is the traveller’s description of the victim, not a surviving finding from a murder investigation.
Two days after burial in a town chapel, rumours began that the man was walking at night, moving possessions, putting out lamps and seizing people from behind. According to Tournefort, the first response was laughter. Complaints became more serious when socially prominent inhabitants and priests accepted them. The text thus presents belief as something that spread through successive endorsements, rather than a single clear encounter observed simultaneously by the whole town.
The name used in the translation is Vroucolacas, with variations in spelling. Tournefort explains it as a corpse believed to be reanimated by the Devil. The episode is often discussed as a vampire story, but the actions listed here concern intrusion, assaults and household disorder. It would change this particular source to add a scene of blood drinking or a named victim draining away under an attack; neither is supplied in its account of the Mykonos peasant.
What Tournefort says he examined
After meetings involving leading inhabitants, priests and monks, the community waited until nine days after the burial had passed. On the tenth day a mass was said in the chapel and the body was exhumed. A local butcher was assigned the removal of the heart. Tournefort describes the procedure as confused and the smell as overpowering. Frankincense was burned, adding smoke to the already crowded scene.
Several people, he reports, interpreted apparent smoke from the body, red blood and warmth as signs that the corpse was not properly dead. The butcher’s claim of warmth and other people’s recollections that the body had not stiffened were incorporated into the accusation. These details matter because the supposed evidence was not simply an apparition outside the grave. Ordinary properties attributed to a decomposing body were being read through an existing expectation of a revenant.
Tournefort places himself and his companions close to the body, saying they approached to make their observations more exact. Their conclusion, he writes, was that the man was thoroughly dead. They offered decomposition as an explanation for the reported warmth and fumes, and rejected the description of the material on the butcher’s hands as convincingly fresh red blood. These are the visitors’ observations and explanations as Tournefort later published them. The source does not preserve a modern examination report, measurements or samples that can now be independently checked.
Failed remedies and continued disturbances
The heart was burned on the shore, but complaints continued. Tournefort lists more violent allegations: blows at night, damaged doors and roofs, rattling windows, torn clothes and emptied vessels. He says that the consul’s house, where the visitors lodged, seemed to escape. Families moved their beds into a public square, while some wealthier residents withdrew to the countryside. Whether each incident occurred as reported is a separate question from the narrative’s description of collective fear.
Debate shifted to possible failures in the ceremony. Some residents reportedly argued that the mass should have followed the removal of the heart, since performing it first allowed the Devil to escape temporarily and return. Processions, fasting and repeated sprinkling of holy water followed. Tournefort depicts each unsuccessful remedy as producing another explanation for why the procedure had not worked. His account records an escalating effort to restore security, without providing independent testimony from the people whose homes were involved.
There was also a practical response. The visitors urged the magistrates to organise a night watch, and Tournefort says several people were caught whom he believed had taken part in the disorder. He calls them vagabonds. Yet the narrative supplies no names, trial record, confession or detailed description of what each was caught doing. He suggests that the wrong leaders may have been detained, or that the prisoners were released too soon, because attacks on unattended wine stores resumed.
This passage supports the possibility that living people exploited deserted homes during the alarm. It does not establish that a particular group caused every disturbance, still less that a complete organised fraud was proved. Tournefort’s own uncertainty about the arrests is part of the evidence. A simpler retelling in which investigators caught the culprits and solved the entire case would omit what his text actually leaves unresolved.
The burning on Saint George’s island
Further attempts included swords placed over the grave. A visiting Albanian reportedly argued that Christian sword handles formed a cross, preventing the Devil from leaving, and proposed Turkish sabres instead. Tournefort treats this intervention sarcastically. Eventually, with families preparing to leave for Syros or Tinos, the magistrates ordered the remaining body carried to the point of the island of Saint George. A pyre was prepared with pitch and tar.
Tournefort explicitly dates the burning to 1 January 1701 and says that his party saw the flames while returning from Delos. This is a carefully limited claim of observation: he describes seeing the fire on the return journey, not standing beside every stage of the final disposal. He reports that no further complaints about the revenant were heard afterwards, and that ballads were made about the episode. The disappearance of reported complaints is his stated outcome; it does not by itself demonstrate the supernatural theory behind the burning.
The account also describes an aftermath involving authority. Tournefort says priests avoided the burning for fear of the bishop’s response to an unauthorised exhumation and destruction of a corpse. He further claims that Ottoman authorities later made the community pay for its treatment of the dead man. No corresponding administrative document is reproduced in the chapter, so these consequences remain attributed to his account rather than presented as independently documented penalties.
A traveller’s testimony and the missing local record
Historian Dimitris Dimitropoulos revisited the episode in Sailing in the Aegean with History at the Helm (2015), in the Mykonos chapter, pages 95–103. He notes the absence of a trace in the island’s archival documents, which prevents an independent local cross-check, while stressing that absence does not prove the story never happened. He also criticises the traveller’s mocking portrayal of inhabitants and contrasts it with communal records showing organised decision making and everyday concerns.
That criticism can be seen in the primary text itself. Tournefort moves from this particular episode to sweeping disparagement of contemporary Greeks and their religious understanding. His confidence in the visitors’ reasonableness is inseparable from that polemical setting. The surviving narrative therefore supports a historical case about a reported revenant alarm, contested observations and a destructive communal response. It supplies no verified observation of a dead man walking, and leaves both the original murder and the individual nighttime incidents unresolved.
The map marks a verified modern photographic viewpoint at Chora’s public old harbour. The source does not identify the original chapel or grave precisely enough to map either. Related reading: Kringa’s Jure Grando tradition, Ghosts and Hauntings and the Historical Cases directory. Sources and image rights checked 5 November 2026.