Buried with a padlock on her foot and an iron sickle across her neck, \u201cZosia\u201d was never supposed to be able to come back from the dead. Entombed in an unmarked cemetery in Pien, northern Poland, the young woman was one of dozens feared by her neighbours to have been a \u201cvampire\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now, using DNA, 3D printing and modelling clay, a team of scientists has reconstructed Zosia\u2019s 400-year-old face, revealing the human story buried by supernatural beliefs.
\u201cIt\u2019s really ironic, in a way,\u201d said Swedish archaeologist Oscar Nilsson. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThese people burying her, they did everything they could in order to prevent her from coming back from the dead\u2026 we have done everything we can in order to bring her back to life.\u201d
Zosia, as she was named by locals, was found in 2022 by a team of archaeologists from Torun\u2019s Nicolaus Copernicus University.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aged 18-20 when she died, analysis of Zosia\u2019s skull suggests she suffered from a health condition which would have caused fainting and severe headaches, as well as possible mental health issues, Nilsson said. The sickle, the padlock and certain types of wood found at the grave site were all believed at the time to hold magical properties protecting against vampires, according to the Nicolaus Copernicus team.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Zosia\u2019s was Grave No. 75 at the unmarked cemetery in Pien, outside the northern city of Bydgoszcz. Among the other bodies found at the site was a \u201cvampire\u201d child, buried face down and similarly padlocked at the foot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Little is known of Zosia\u2019s life, but Nilsson and the Pien team say items she was buried with point to her being from a wealthy \u2014 possibly noble \u2014 family.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The 17th century Europe she lived in was ravaged by war, something Nilsson suggests created a climate of fear in which belief in supernatural monsters was commonplace.
Nilsson\u2019s recreation began with creating a 3D printed replica of the skull, before gradually building layers of plasticine clay \u201cmuscle by muscle\u201d to form a life-like face.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He uses bone structure combined with information on gender, age, ethnicity and approximate weight to estimate the depth of facial features.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt\u2019s emotional to watch a face coming back from the dead, especially when you know the story about this young girl,\u201d Nilsson says. Nilsson said he wanted to bring Zosia back \u201cas a human, and not as this monster that she is buried as\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Buried with a padlock on her foot and an iron sickle across her neck, \u201cZosia\u201d was never supposed to be able to come back from the dead. Entombed in an unmarked cemetery in Pien, northern Poland, the young woman was one of dozens feared by her neighbours to have been a \u201cvampire\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":454418,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[688],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-454412","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-infotainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454412","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=454412"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454412\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/454418"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=454412"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=454412"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=454412"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}