thumb|The Vampire, by [[Philip Burne-Jones, 1897|alt=A black and white painting of a man lying on a table, while a woman is kneeling over him.]]
A vampire is a mythical creature that subsists by feeding on the vital essence (generally in the form of blood) of the living. In European folklore, vampires are undead humanoid creatures that often visited loved ones and caused mischief or deaths in the neighbourhoods which they inhabited while they were alive. They wore shrouds and were often described as bloated and of ruddy or dark countenance, markedly different from today's gaunt, pale vampire which dates from the early 19th century.
Vampiric entities have been recorded in cultures around the world, but the term vampire was first popularized in Western Europe following reports of an 18th-century mass hysteria drawing on a pre-existing folk belief in Southeastern and Eastern Europe. This delusion led, in certain cases, not only to individuals being accused of vampirism, but also to the corpses of such suspected vampires being pierced with stakes.
Local variants in Southeastern Europe were also known by different names, such as shtriga in Albania, vrykolakas in Greece and strigoi in Romania, cognate with Italian , meaning 'witch'.
In modern times, the vampire is generally held to be a fictitious entity, although belief in similar vampiric creatures (such as the chupacabra) still persists in some cultures. Early folk belief in vampires has sometimes been ascribed to the ignorance of the body's process of decomposition after death and how people in pre-industrial societies tried to rationalize this, creating the figure of the vampire to explain the mysteries of death. Porphyria was linked with legends of vampirism in 1985 and received much media exposure, but has since been largely discredited.
The charismatic and sophisticated vampire of modern fiction was born in 1819 with the publication of "The Vampyre" by the English writer John Polidori; the story was highly successful and arguably the most influential vampire work of the early 19th century. Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula is remembered as the quintessential vampire novel and provided the basis of the modern vampire legend, even though it was published after fellow Irish author Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's 1872 novel Carmilla. The success of this book spawned a distinctive vampire genre, still popular in the 21st century, with books, films, television shows, and video games. The vampire has since become a dominant figure in the horror genre.
Etymology and word distribution
The exact etymology is unclear. The term vampire finds its earliest records in English, Latin and French, and references to vampirism were found in Russia, Poland and North Macedonia. The English term was derived (possibly via French ) from the German , in turn derived in the early 18th century from the Serbian (). Despite this being a popular explanation, it may be noted that a pagan worship of was already attested in Old Russian in the 11–13th century. Some claim an origin from Lithuanian. Oxford and others maintain a Turkish origin (from Turkish , meaning "witch" The belief is alleged to have spread across the Eurasian steppes through the migrations of the Kipchak-Cuman people, after having its origins in the regions surrounding the Volga (İtil) River and the Pontic steppes. Parallels are found in virtually all Slavic and Turkic languages: Turkish: , Tatar language: (), Chuvash language: (), Bulgarian and Macedonian (), Bosnian: (), Slovene and Croatian , Czech and Slovak , Polish and , Old East Slavic (), Ukrainian (), Russian (), and Belarusian (). Many of these languages have also borrowed forms such as "vampir/wampir" subsequently from the West; these are distinct from the original local words. In Albanian the words and are used; the latter seems to be derived from the Gheg Albanian words 'tooth' and 'to drink'.
The term was introduced to German readers by the Polish Jesuit priest Gabriel Rzączyński in 1721.