In 1833, an Ottoman official reported that invisible beings were disrupting households in Tırnova, now Veliko Tarnovo in Bulgaria. A paid specialist identified two graves; their occupants were exhumed and burned. The account reached the state newspaper, giving this vampire-like story a contemporary documentary trail. That trail preserves a report of fear, accusation and action. It also preserves a political message: the supposed revenants were former Janissaries, members of a military corps violently abolished seven years earlier.
A report inside the official gazette
The surviving scan of Takvim-i Vekayi, issue 68, is a three-page digital file containing an opening page, a two-page spread and a final page. Its masthead identifies the issue; the Tırnova report runs across the later printed pages. The scan is attributed to Ankara University’s newspaper collection. It is a contemporary printed witness to the story’s publication, rather than the official’s original handwritten dispatch.
The reporter is Ahmed Şükrü Efendi, identified as Tırnova’s naib, or deputy judicial official. Modern discussions sometimes call him the town’s judge without preserving that distinction. The gazette issue is dated 21 Cemaziyelevvel 1249, identified as 6 October 1833 in Gökhan Demirkol’s research. The report’s closing date is a different date in the preceding Islamic month. These are document dates, not a securely established day on which the disturbances began.
Tırnova’s position within the Ottoman Empire explains why the report travelled to Istanbul. The reported events belong geographically to present-day Bulgaria. The newspaper’s place of publication does not relocate the case to Turkey, and the surviving account does not identify a modern house or cemetery that can responsibly be marked as the precise scene.
Disturbances after sunset
Legal scholar Emre Öktem provides an English rendering of the account. In it, the disturbances begin after sunset. Household provisions are mixed together or spoiled with earth; bedding and bundles are pulled apart. Stones, soil and crockery are thrown, while the agents remain unseen. Some inhabitants describe being pressed by a weight comparable to a water buffalo. Residents of two neighbourhoods reportedly leave their homes.
The account says that townspeople agreed these events were the work of evil spirits called cadı. Nikola, a man known for dealing with such beings in İslimye, was brought in for an agreed payment of 800 kuruş. That named intermediary and recorded price are useful historical particulars. They identify a claimed transaction within the story; they do not independently establish the cause of the household disturbances.
The newspaper places the extraordinary allegations inside an administrative narrative. Reports are heard, an explanation is accepted and a specialist is engaged. Even if all those procedural steps occurred, the conclusion about invisible attackers remains a conclusion reached by the people described, rather than a finding that modern readers can reproduce from the surviving evidence.
The painted board and the graves
The report can also be followed through the Latin-script Ottoman transcription in Cem Doğan’s 2013 study, pages 229–230. Nikola’s method involved turning a painted wooden board on his finger. The direction in which it stopped was taken to identify a grave containing the hostile being. Before a crowd, the procedure indicated two former Janissaries, Ali Alemdar and Abdi Alemdar.
According to the report, opening the graves revealed enlarged bodies, extended hair and nails and blood about the eyes. The account presents these features as signs that the dead harboured evil spirits. They are descriptions transmitted by the official narrative, not measurements accompanied by a medical examination, burial record or independent physical evidence. Later versions differ over the amount of supposed enlargement; no numerical growth claim is needed to understand the accusation.
The attempted remedy was violent. Wooden stakes and boiling water were used on the corpses before Nikola declared that burning was necessary. The report invokes religious authority for that last step and says that the bodies were burned. It then announces relief from the trouble. The reported destruction leaves no remains available in this source for any later examination.
The documentary force of the account is therefore uneven. It is strong evidence for the form of the published story and the actions its author claimed had been authorised. It offers much less leverage over what originally disturbed the houses, what the bodies actually looked like or whether every element of the narrative happened as presented.
Why former Janissaries mattered
Anthropologist S. Yetkin Işık examines the case in “Tırnova Cadıları Yahut Sözlü Kültürlerde Halk İnançlarının Siyasal Manipülasyonu”. His interpretation places the newspaper story within the aftermath of Mahmud II’s destruction of the Janissary corps in 1826. Seven years later, the two accused dead were still represented as a threat to ordinary people. The report joins allegations of misconduct during their lives to allegations of supernatural harm after death.
Işık argues that this was government propaganda drawing upon familiar beliefs. He suggests that the intended audience extended beyond the newspaper’s direct readers: a printed account could circulate through spoken repetition and reach people who never read the issue. In that reading, the revenant story helped maintain hostility towards surviving or former Janissaries.
The political content is not merely a modern association attached to an otherwise neutral ghost tale. The report concludes with a declaration of loyalty and hostility towards the abolished corps. Yet identifying a political purpose does not by itself settle how the story was assembled. Publication, selection, exaggeration and invention are different possibilities, requiring different kinds of supporting evidence.
A disagreement about fabrication and fear
Historian Zeynep Aycibin explicitly addresses that uncertainty in “Osmanlı Devleti’nde Cadılar Üzerine Bir Değerlendirme”, especially page 59. She accepts that the authorities could have used the report to discredit Janissaries, but objects to assuming in advance that the government invented the entire affair. Her wider argument emphasises migration: frightened people leaving their homes could become an administrative and fiscal problem, whatever officials privately believed about revenants.
Aycibin relates Tırnova’s two departing neighbourhoods to earlier Ottoman discussions of supernatural fear and movement of inhabitants. This explanation shifts attention from proving the creature to explaining official intervention. A government concerned with keeping households in place had reasons to address a scare, even if the reported supernatural cause was mistaken.
Doğan takes a firmer view of the anti-Janissary fabrication argument. He also challenges the inference that a few expense-register entries establish a permanent class of state-employed witch-finders. Nikola’s fee in this particular narrative and a general government profession are separate propositions. This disagreement cautions against expanding a single documented payment into an elaborate institution without further records.
Cadı, vampire and haunting
Terminology changes the impression of the case. Demirkol’s comparative study notes that Ottoman cadı accounts combine return from death with disruption of daily life. The Tırnova beings are described as invisible during their attacks, with visible bodies later identified in graves. The narrative does not need the familiar literary image of a caped, blood-drinking aristocrat.
“Vampire-like revenants” conveys the resemblance while leaving the historical vocabulary visible. “Haunting” also captures the household disturbances, but should not erase the treatment of the dead. The case concerns what living people reportedly believed and did about alleged returning corpses, rather than a modern investigation that photographed or captured an apparition.
What survives for assessment
The strongest surviving object is the printed account. Read alongside published transcriptions, translations and competing historical interpretations, it shows how a local supernatural accusation could acquire official authority and political meaning. The original Ottoman scan has been visually checked here; the narrative has been followed through the published renderings, without claiming a new diplomatic edition or independent translation of every line.
No modern diagnosis can be established for unnamed inhabitants from these few descriptions. Nor can the appearance of the bodies be reconstructed from a hostile narrative after their reported destruction. The defensible conclusion is narrower: an official gazette circulated a detailed revenant story, and historians disagree about the relationship between local fear, administrative interests and state propaganda.
For another tradition whose documents and later supernatural interpretation need to be distinguished, read the Rosenberg White Lady. Explore Ghosts & Hauntings or return to the historical case directory.