Today, the village of Jawornik is almost completely depopulated, with only a handful of residents. As of 2020, it has only 25 inhabitants. Although life once thrived here, little evidence of it remains.
The dark village of Jawornik. The inhabitants were terrified of vampires
Jawornik is a village that almost ceased to exist after World War II when the residents were displaced. What remains are overgrown cellars, wells, foundations of former houses, and... history. And that history is quite dark.
The local Lemko population was very afraid of vampires. They believed that the dead would rise to harm the living. However, they found a way to protect themselves by performing special funeral rites that can still send chills down your spine today.
Vampire burial - what did it look like? The eerie practices of the villagers
The deceased suspected of being a vampire had their teeth knocked out, their heads decapitated, their legs broken, or bricks shoved into their mouths. Oskar Kolberg described these rituals in his work "Sanockie-Krośnieńskie."
In the village of Jawornik near Osławica, there isn't a single person buried in the cemetery who doesn't have a nail driven into their head or their head cut off and placed at their feet. To prevent the vampire's posthumous wanderings, they wrap the deceased's neck with a young hawthorn shoot and drive a nail from a harrow or three iron nails into the heart. To repel the Evil, they also cut off the head and place it face down at the feet
- he wrote.
To this day, remnants of the old cemetery can be found in the abandoned village, located on a sloping hillside. There are both old and new tombstones, so some of them might be those of vampires.
