Visiting Dracula

I've been terrible about updating this blog recently but I have been traveling more than usual and absolutely slammed at work in between all the travel. Which also means that I'm pretty much perpetually tired from the never-ending jet lag cycle. But I finally have a few days off work to relax, celebrate Thanksgiving and actually update this blog!

So about a month ago I packed some warm clothes and headed off to Romania to celebrate Halloween in Transylvania, something that has always been on my bucket list. But before I launch into a description of my trip, I should probably tell you why I wanted to go to Romania so badly. For starters, in my much younger days I was a "goth" kid and went through a vampire phase (fortunately this was long before the "Twilight" craze and I had respectable Anne Rice vampires to obsess about) and, as both a goth kid and a history nerd, I naturally researched the real Dracula, Vlad Tepes. And so began my interest in traveling to the region...

Dracula was a 15th century prince in Wallachia, a region of Romania that was on the edge of the Ottoman advance into Europe. His father had joined the Order of the Dragon, a Christian secret society committed to stopping the Ottomans, and so his father was renamed Vlad Dracul, dracul meaning "dragon". By adding the "a" to the end of Dracul it merely meant "son of", so the son became Vlad Dracula and, like his father, was committed to stopping the Ottomans, which was of critical importance to Europe after the Ottomans defeated and then claimed Constantinople in 1453. 

Vlad Dracula

As a child, Dracula and his brother were held as hostages at the Ottoman court for years. He grew up witnessing torture and war and knew that his life was always at stake. When he finally returned to claim his Wallachian throne in 1456, he was a hardened man and ruled with an iron fist. To consolidate his power, one of the first things he did was bring the Wallachian nobles into line. He invited the nobles over to celebrate Easter and when they showed up in their finery, he locked the doors and killed off most of the men. The women and children he forced into slavery to build his castle, Poenari Castle, high up on a mountain. The story goes that they slaved away in their Easter finery until the clothing disintegrated from their bodies and then they toiled in the nude until they died.

Poenari Castle - an earthquake destroyed most of the castle in the 1800s, but you can still visit the ruins after climbing a grueling 1400 steps to the top. The mannequins try to recreate the impaled victims that one would have seen when nearing Dracula's castle.

While his actions towards the nobles might seem unusually cruel, the nobles had previously killed his  older brother by burying him alive. These same nobles, most of whom were German, also controlled trade and limited opportunities for ethnic Romanians. And, finally, they used their power to try to control the princes of Wallachia, which Dracula clearly wasn't having. So while his methods were cruel, they were not necessarily unjustified.

In addition to cleaning up the nobility, Dracula also took very hardline approaches on theft, adultery and other crimes. Theft was punishable by death and his favorite form of killing was impalement, though he also employed a myriad of other ways to torture, kill and maim. Sometimes he'd impale people through the stomach so they would die quickly - other times he would have a blunt stake pushed through a person's anus until the stake slowly made its way through someone's body, eventually killing them after a few incredibly painful days. And often once he impaled someone he would leave the stakes up, as a reminder to others. He impaled so many people that another one of his nicknames is Vlad the Impaler.

But it worked. There was virtually no crime in Wallachia at the time and the story goes that he used to leave a gold cup at a fountain in the city square for anyone to drink out of and the cup was never stolen. And he was the only European leader of the time to turn back the Ottomans. In 1462, the Ottomans under Mehmet II were advancing on Wallachia. When they neared Dracula's castle they encountered the forest of the impaled - over 20,000 victims, many of them Turks, impaled on sticks leading up to Dracula's castle. Mehmet II was so horrified by Dracula's cruelty that he turned around and returned to Constantinople, thereby saving Wallachia from being overrun by the Ottomans.

Dracula was killed around 1476/1477 and it was believed that he was buried at Snagov Monastery, a monastery that he helped support and which he supposedly favored due to its remote location on an island.

Snagov Monastery

Supposedly he was buried at the head of the church, where the priests would walk over praying every day, thereby helping to atone for all the sins he committed in life. However, when archaeologists dug up his remains in 1931, they found that the casket was only full of animal bones. Rumor has it that at some point Dracula's body was moved to a less holy place in the monastery, and a different casket was discovered with a human skeleton missing a head. Some believe that was Dracula's true final resting place, though rumors abound about other burial locations (and whether he's truly resting at all!).

Supposedly the location where Dracula was buried in Snagov Monastery

While Dracula is most often portrayed as a villain or a cruel and bloodthirsty tyrant, Romanians look to him as a national hero. He fought off the Ottomans, wrested control away from the German nobles, advanced Romanian national causes and made Wallachia a safe and crime-free area to live in. His rules were strict and his punishments appalling, but during a dark time in Eastern European history Wallachians had stability and security and a national champion.

But how did the story of one cruel Romanian prince in the 1400s turn into a vampire legend and make its way to Bram Stoker, an English chap in the 1800s who never even traveled to Romania? Long before Stoker told his tale, Germans, Russians and other Europeans were telling stories about Dracula, embellishing on his atrocities and creating supernatural causes for his tyranny. Pamphlets in Germany were printed during Dracula's lifetime and these early manuscripts, which became bestsellers at the time, tied him to vampires and demons and all sorts of supernatural evils. By the time Stoker turned Dracula into a household monster, Europeans had been telling the tale of Dracula for hundreds of years.

1499 German woodcut showing Dracula dining among the impaled corpses of his victims - this also helped add to the vampire myth, since Dracula did drink blood and did eat food covered in the blood of his victims

So yes, growing up I was a little obsessed with Dracula, who is also rumored to be one of the sources for Machiavelli's "The Prince". But apart from the Dracula history, I also wanted to see the country. I'd heard that the Carpathian Mountains were spookily beautiful and that Romania is one of the last few places in Europe where bears and wolves still exist in large numbers (in fact, there are more bears in Romania than in all of the rest of Europe).

Carpathian Mountains

Spooky Carpathian Mountains

And finally, the Soviet historian in me wanted to check another post-Soviet country off my list. Romania's Soviet dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu, was one of the worst of the Soviets and Romania had a  harder time catching up to the rest of Europe after the fall of communism. It's still a very poor country by European standards - in fact, in the villages, a major mode of transportation still remains the horse and cart, which we saw repeatedly.

If you drive in Romania you have to learn to share the road with all the horse-drawn carts