Before Dracula and Nosferatu: The Story of Jure Grando, First Recorded Vampire in history

A drawing of Kringa (minus the spooky bat) from Valvasor’s book The Glory of the Duchy of Carniola.

While everyone’s hyped about Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, let’s talk about the earliest known report of a vampire.

Surprisingly, he lived in Kringa, Croatia—just a 20-minute drive from my hometown! Jure Grando, a 17th-century peasant and stonemason, led a quiet, ordinary life with his wife Ivana and their two children. The real trouble began after his death.

Jure died and was buried in 1656, only to rise from the grave nightly to rape his widow and torment the village. Every house that received a knock on the door by Jure soon ended up with a resident dying. For 16 long years, the village lived in fear! Finally, led by their mayor and a priest, the bravest people of Kringa assembled and dug up his coffin.

The location of Kringa, a village on the Istrian peninsula.

They found a preserved, smiling corpse. Neither a hawthorn stake nor a crucifix worked to subdue him so a villager called Stipan Milasic cut off his head! Jure screamed and blood filled the grave.

At last, peace returned to Kringa.

Not long after, the natural historian and polymath Johann Weikhard von Valvasor visited Kringa during his travels and chronicled the chilling tale as told by eyewitnesses. Published in his 1689 work The Glory of the Duchy of Carniola, it became the first written account of a vampire.

There are signs that the tale of Jure Grando, through the works of Polidori and Byron, eventually evolved into the seductive predator in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The vampire of Kringa didn’t just haunt his village; he helped define an entire literary (and later cinematic) tradition.

---

If you want to learn more

Jure Grando on Wikipedia & Istrapedia
An amazing stop-motion film about Jure Grando by Fearghous