Hortdan is the walking dead of Azerbaijani folk belief: a buried person, often one who died impure, unavenged or under a curse, whose corpse quits the grave after dark to terrify, sicken or drain the living and, in the grimmest accounts, to feed on other dead. It is a close kin of the wider Turkic and Balkan revenant tradition. To end its wandering the villagers reopen the grave and stake, dismember or burn the body. The figure was potent enough in nineteenth-century Azerbaijani culture that the writer Mirzə Fətəli Axundov adopted 'Hortdan' as a satirical pen-name.