Lord George Byron’s 1813 poem The Giaour, misleadingly labeled as a “fragment of a Turkish tale” in its subtitle, is a tale that serves to define the atmosphere of vampiric narratives while also framing its entire story through a lens of orientalism. Orientalism, defined in Edward Said’s 1978 book Orientalism, is a writing convention that uses myths or imitations of elements of the Eastern world, often written in western territories, to add an element of mysticism centered around those very elements. The Giaour is a piece that is directly orientalist, as it exoticizes narratives about the Ottoman Empire with a white hero in the form of the eponymous Giaour opposing and eventually slaying an antagonistic Ottoman lord. Even the existence of a vampire, defined as one who will “suck the blood of all thy race” (Byron), is framed as a legend that is not European in origin, but is instead referenced by an Ottoman narrator as a potential divine punishment for the deeds of Byron’s enigmatic rider as though it is something normal among Ottoman officials. The Giaour is heroic, in a certain sense of the word, and his romantic pursuit of Hassan’s concubine Leila is treated as a worthwhile effort; in contrast, it is simply presumed that Hassan shall murder Leila through drowning for her indiscretion so that the protagonist can seek to avenge her from this wrong, which is perceived moreso as a misdeed done unto him, the white man, than unto Leila, who is the victim of this murder.

Amid the center of this discussion of orientalism is the simple fact that The Giaour is a narrative not only about a white man in opposition of a man from the Ottoman Empire, but that Byron writes a story about the Ottoman Empire and its traditions built not upon the true traditions of the many cultures that made up the empire, but instead upon numerous western-crafted assumptions that provide an easy method by which Hassan can be made into an antagonist for the story’s tragic hero as well as a narrative device Byron can utilize to display apparently outlandish or supernatural things.

Orientalism is, by its very nature, something built on imperialist ideals. It is something that permeates history, and its xenophobic implications play a significant role in the entire vampire genre. Bram Stoker’s Dracula, while not necessarily orientalist, has an enormous xenophobic subtext in its portrayal of vampires not only as a foreign phenomenon that England could never have, but portraying foreigners from Eastern Europe as invaders who have come to, in the case of vampires, literally prey upon innocent English women. While cases like this do not technically involve any region further than Europe, The Giaour is an enormous example of similar conventions. Hassan is portrayed as predatory toward Leila, and therefore the Giaour’s romantic pursuit of her is portrayed as tragic; similarly, the Giaour himself is only speculated as becoming a vampire by a member of the Ottoman Empire with no attention paid to the idea that this is religiously outlandish to the Ottoman Empire. All of these ideas would recur in similarly xenophobic vampire-centric literature, and though The Giaour may not have introduced these concepts, it did carve out the conventions that would be visible in these instances.