Vampires were been discussed in German literature as of early because after Austria gained control of northern Serbia and Oltenia [part of modern-day Romania] with the Treaty of Passarowitz in 1718, officials noted the local practice of exhuming bodies and “killing vampires”. These reports [widely publicized between 1725 and 1732] received a lot of credits in the royal courts and continue to be looked upon to the day – among them I refer ~Visum et Repertum~ from 1732.
The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first appearance of the word vampire in English from 1734, in a travelogue titled “Travels of Three English Gentlemen” published in the Harleian Miscellany in 1745.
The English term was derived (possibly via French vampire or from the German Vampir] from the early 18th century Serbian вампир/vampir
The Serbian form has parallels in virtually all Slavic languages but the exact etymology is unclear.
The first recorded use of the Old Russian form Упирь (Upir‘) is commonly believed to be in a document dated 6555 (1047 AD). It is acolophon in a manuscript of the Book of Psalms written by a priest who transcribed the book from Glagolitic into Cyrillic for the Novgorodian Prince Volodymyr Yaroslavovych.
The priest writes that his name is “Upir’ Likhyi ” (Оупирь Лихыи), which means something like “Wicked Vampire” or “Foul Vampire”. This apparently strange name has been cited as an example both of surviving paganism and of the use of nicknames as personal names so it is also possible that, in this context, Upir is simply a transliteration of Norse name Öpir.
Another early use of the Old Russian word is in the anti-pagan treatise “Word of Saint Grigoriy”, dated variously to the 11th–13th centuries, where pagan worship of upyri is reported.
Scarlett Memories 