After Ninety Years: The Story of Serbian Vampire Sava Savanovic

A classic of Slavic vampire literature from 19th century Serbian author Milovan Glisic, 'After Ninety Years' tells the tale of Sava Savanovic, who haunted the watermill in the village of Zarozje. Because Glisic wrote 17 years before Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' introduced bats and Transylvania to the vampire trope, he based his story on the folktales and folk beliefs of villagers in the mountains of western Serbia along the Drina River valley. As such, it represents a treasure trove of ethnographic information and offers insights into authentic vampire lore before the creation of the modern pop culture vampire.The language Glisic employs is the vernacular of the uneducated and illiterate rural population in the mountainous regions of western Serbia along the Drina River valley in the 18th and 19th centuries. In contrast to the heavily ornamented and wordy prose so common among his 19th century contemporaries in Russia and the west, Glisic deliberately wrote in a sparse, plain, and raw