On 16 May 1748, a group of inhabitants of Žrnovo on the Croatian island of Korčula went to a cemetery hoping to find and disable vampires. Their actions reached the Venetian authorities. A letter written by Girolamo Bragadin, the island’s count and provveditore, describes an inquiry into opened graves, a halberd and the people involved. It is a record of fear and grave disturbance, rather than confirmation that the dead had returned.
The surviving account is unusually useful because it distinguishes the villagers’ intentions, information given to officials and the results of an inspection. The investigators found two disturbed graves and skeletal remains. They did not report a moving corpse, a successful vampire killing or a medically demonstrated attack on the living. Those distinctions determine the case’s assessment as insufficient evidence for a supernatural event.
A letter from Venetian Korčula
Bragadin addressed his letter to the heads of Venice’s Council of Ten on 24 June 1748. The original is preserved in the Archivio di Stato di Venezia, in the Council’s correspondence from regional officials: Lettere Rettori, bundle 277, folio 300, pages 1–4. A transcription of the Italian document appears in the appendix to a 2013 study by Lovorka Čoralić, Željko Dugac and Sani Sardelić.
The letter places the cemetery beside the chapel of San Vitto, in Postrana near Žrnovo, which it spells Xernoua. These are historical forms of the local names. The place belongs to the jurisdiction Bragadin administered. Its setting is an inhabited island community within the Venetian state, not an isolated castle or a later fictional Transylvanian landscape.
The night in the cemetery
According to the letter, villagers expected to find vampires in the graves and intended to pierce them with an iron shaft or halberd. They believed this would stop further harassment and deaths. Bragadin characterises their belief as false and their motivation in religious terms. His language is evidence of his own official position; it should not be mistaken for a neutral account of what each participant privately believed.
The report does not provide a series of named victims, a clinical account of an illness or a firsthand description of a revenant entering a house. It presents the disturbance as an action taken under a belief about vampires. There is therefore no sound basis for adding an epidemic, repeated nocturnal assaults or a single named vampire to fill out the story.
Two sworn statements later placed the grave-opening on the night of 16 May. The letter names four principal participants and several companions. It says the group stopped after encountering decomposed, offensive-smelling bodies. Their intended further action and what they actually completed are different parts of the account. An intention to pierce a vampire does not establish that a body was successfully staked.
How the inquiry began
The court received the initial information on 8 June, several weeks after the cemetery visit. Bragadin then took a deposition from the village procurator, identified in the Italian text as Martin Radovanović. The procurator confirmed the serious disturbance and reported that a halberd had been found in the cemetery grass. It was being kept at the home of the parish priest, Don Antonio Tvrdeić.
The priest had supplied accusations concerning parishioners’ involvement. His role in the surviving document should therefore be stated with care. The letter does not simply show a priest directing a vampire hunt. It shows him connected with information about participants and with custody of a weapon whose history the authorities wanted to clarify.
The inspection and the bones
Bragadin ordered an inspection involving civic officials, a surgeon and a public-health representative. Precautions were discussed before the graves were opened. This detail shows that the officials treated the handling of remains as a practical sanitary matter as well as an offence requiring inquiry. The document gives no basis for turning those precautions into a modern diagnosis of the dead.
The inspection found two graves that had recently been disturbed and closed. When reopened, they contained remains reduced to bones. The letter says injury to the bodies could not be established in that condition. This is narrower than a positive finding that nothing had ever happened to them. It is also very different from finding fresh, blood-filled bodies that supposedly resisted decomposition.
The graves were closed again. Officials returned to the town and continued gathering evidence about the people responsible. Their observations establish the physical disturbance and the condition seen during the inspection. They do not test every rumour that may have circulated before the villagers went to the cemetery.
Why a halberd mattered
The weapon gives the report a concrete focus. It was allegedly found in the cemetery, then kept by the priest. Bragadin wanted the priest examined to clarify its provenance and the circumstances surrounding it. The request to Venice concerned authority to take that testimony. The administrative problem was therefore not simply whether a supernatural being existed.
An official correspondence file can preserve a paranormal belief because it intersects with weapons, damaged graves, testimony and jurisdiction. The presence of the story in state papers does not mean the state accepted its supernatural explanation. In this case, the author expressly rejected the belief while still treating the conduct it prompted as serious.
The limits of the recorded ending
Notes attached to the document refer to directions sent to the provveditore-general in Dalmatia, a decision dated 19 July 1748 and another reference dated 26 September 1749. They do not supply a full narrative of the final local proceedings. A later administrative reference is not a second vampire incident and does not extend the event’s incident-year range into 1749.
The record reviewed here does not establish a final sentence for each participant or the outcome of the proposed examination of the priest. Those are genuine documentary gaps. They should remain gaps, rather than being replaced by an invented execution, official exorcism or successful removal of a haunting.
Place, image and assessment
Approximate map area: 42.94523, 17.11028, the GeoNames village reference for Žrnovo in Dubrovnik-Neretva County. The pin is a broad locality marker, not a plotted grave, a private residence or permission to enter a cemetery. The public-domain photograph shows the village setting. It does not identify the disturbed graves or depict the 1748 participants.
The date entered for the case is 1748, based on the cemetery visit and contemporary letter. The 2013 journal publication is the date of the scholarly presentation, not the incident. The letter supports a documented episode of vampire fear and a subsequent official inquiry. It supplies insufficient evidence that a dead person returned or caused the deaths the villagers feared.
Sources and further reading
The primary text used is Bragadin’s Italian letter of 24 June 1748, transcribed on pages 72–73 of Čoralić, Dugac and Sardelić, “Vampires in Dalmatia: The Example of the Village of Žrnovo on the Island of Korčula in the Eighteenth Century,” Review of Croatian History 9 (2013), 61–76. The complete paper provides the archival reference, transcription, translation and historical discussion. This article paraphrases the historical letter, with its evidential limits preserved.
The locality reference is GeoNames, Žrnovo. Image ownership and reuse were checked on the exact Commons file page linked in the caption. Source checks: 13 November 2026.