Vukodlak or Werewolf

Among the Bosnian folk the name Werewolf is often used for a vampire even though we are talking about two separate mythological beings. According to legend, werewolf is created when an evil man is possessed by a demon and then he turns into a hairy night monster that kills livestock, mostly sheep and sometimes even humans. The belief in werewolf's goes far back in time, the time when our forefathers the Illyrians inhabited Bosnia which worshiped the god of forests and mountains Vidasus which is described in legends as a male body completely covered in hair.

 

A human being can become a werewolf in case of a demon intervention or a magical ritual. In Trebinje, according to ethnological data, a case of lycanthropy happened in the 19th century, the woman who practiced the ritual of transformation was a witch and she knew the secret pagan transformation rituals. Every time she wanted to transform into a werewolf she would take a rope and make a circle out of it on the ground. She would then take off all of her clothes and place it into the middle of the circle. She would then perform a forward somersault three times, making thus a circle with her body, in the meantime she would transform into a werewolf. She would repeat the same process if she wanted to transform back into a human. This case, like many others, wouldn't be recorded if the witch in the form of a werewolf didn't kill 40 sheep's to some landowner and him reporting it to the local authorities who undertook a search and found the culprit and the way in which the crime unfolded.