Centuries before Dracula, an Istrian village recorded a story that still unsettles historians
In the mid-17th century, the Istrian village of Kringa lived by the rhythms of the land — harvests, marriages, storms rolling in from the Adriatic. Then one night, something stranger than bad weather arrived. Or rather, returned.
Jure Grando, a stonemason who had lived a quiet life on the edge of the village, died in 1656. According to official Venetian reports — rare for stories like this — he didn’t stay dead. Villagers claimed he began appearing at windows after nightfall, knocking on doors, and visiting homes where someone later fell ill. Fear spread quickly; in rural Europe, the unknown never stayed private for long.
The parish priest, Giorgio, tried to confront the apparition. Contemporary notes describe him standing over Grando’s grave, cross raised, demanding the restless soul return to peace. The nightly disturbances stopped briefly. Then they resumed.
By 1672, the community decided the haunting had to end. A group of villagers, led by the local prefect, Mihovil Mišković, opened the grave. What they found became the backbone of the legend: the body, they wrote, appeared “strangely preserved,” a phrasing that would echo through vampire literature for centuries.
When the usual tools failed, the villagers turned to the bluntest solution they had — a stake and a prayer. Only then, the report claims, did the terror cease.
What makes the story remarkable isn’t the supernatural claim — Central Europe is full of ghost tales — but the paper trail. In 1689, the respected historian Johann Weikhard von Valvasor published a detailed account in his monumental The Glory of the Duchy of Carniola, giving Jure Grando the dubious honour of becoming the first named vampire in European written history. Long before Stoker, before cinema, before vampires became metaphors for everything from disease to desire, there was a frightened Istrian village and a man they could not forget.
Today, Kringa leans into the legend with a wink, but the story’s core remains unresolved. Was it fear, folklore, or a misunderstood illness? TIME would say this: stories endure not because they’re true, but because they reveal what people believed at the moment belief mattered most.
And on that lonely stretch of Istria, belief — and fear — once shaped an entire village.