Leo Allatius, a Roman Catholic, describes a corpse which he found in an undecomposed condition. He implies that the Greeks connected the circumstance with the power invested in them by the text: “Whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven,” and by which they hold that the soul is excluded from all hope of participation in future bliss so long as the body remains undecomposed. Poqueville, another writer, also states that whenever a bishop or priest excommunicated a person he added to the general sentence of excommunication the words: “After death, let not thy body have power to dissolve.” A manuscript was discovered many years ago in the Church of St Sophia at Thessalonica, which is an interesting commentary upon the power claimed by the Church over excommunicated bodies. The manuscript states that: (1) Whoever has been laid under any curse or received any injunction from his deceased parents that he has not fulfilled, after his death the forepart of his body remains entire; (2) Whoever has been the object of any anathema appears yellow after death, and the fingers are shrivelled; (3) Whoever appears white has been excommunicated by the divine laws; (4) Whoever appears black has been excommunicated by a bishop. It was held possible to discover, by means of these signs, the crime for which, as well as the person on whom, the judgment had been pronounced. One horrible result of this ghastly superstition was the custom which was at one time prevalent among the Greeks of Salonica, as well as the Bulgarians in the centre of European Turkey, and other nations, of disinterring indiscriminately the bodies of the dead after they had been buried for twelve months, in order to ascertain from the condition of the remains whether the souls were in heaven or hell, or perambulating the neighbourhood as vampires. This assumed ecclesiastical power acted occasionally, however, injuriously on the clergy themselves. There is on record one instance where a priest was killed in revenge for the death of a man whose illness was attributed to the sentence of excommunication that had been passed upon him. On another occasion a bishop of some diocese in Morea was robbed by a band of brigands as he was passing through a portion of the Maniate territory. When the deed was done the mountaineers bethought themselves that the bishop would, in all probability, excommunicate them as soon as he reached a place of safety. They saw no means of averting this, to them, dreadful calamity, except by the committal of a further and more heinous crime; and so they set out in pursuit of the unfortunate bishop, whom they eventually overtook and murdered. Many years ago a Greek of Keramia complained to the Pasha of Khania that the papás of his village had excommunicated him and so been the indirect cause of his having been bewitched. The Pasha sent for the priest, threw him into prison, and only released him upon payment of a fine of 300 piastres.