HISTORY & MORE
1920 - 1947
THE MYTH OF COUNT DRACULA
Dracula, the character of the novel of the same name written at the end of the 19th century by the Irishman Bram Stoker, is a Transylvanian count, owner of a castle built somewhere on top of a high cliff, from where he watches over the river valley winding through the Principality of Transylvania.
He is often confused with Vlad Tepes, the Wallachian prince, lord of the castle, now in ruins, in the Principality of Wallachia. As Bran Castle is the only one in Transylvania that corresponds to Bram Stoker's description, the whole world refers to it as Dracula's Castle. In Chapter 2 of the novel "Dracula", on May 5, the author depicts the count's castle as being situated on the edge of a terrible abyss furrowed from time to time by deep cracks - a chasm crossed by silver threads, by rivers crossing the forests through deep gorges.
BRAM STOKER
Bram Stoker never visited Romania. In describing the imaginary Dracula's Castle, he based his work on a depiction of Bran Castle available in England at the end of the 1865th century. Indeed, the castle, as it appears in the engraving printed in the first edition of the novel "Dracula", bears a striking resemblance to Bran Castle, and only to it. In fact, it is suspected that to describe the fictional Dracula's Castle, Stoker used the illustration of Bran Castle from Charles Boner's work "Transylvania: Its Product and Its People", (London; Longmans, XNUMX).
Dracula – as he is perceived today – is a fictional character. His name derives from the nickname given to Vlad the Impaler, ruler of Wallachia between 1456-1462 and in 1467, whom for political reasons historians of the time describe as a ruthless and bloodthirsty despot.
The character Count Dracula first appears in the novel “Dracula” written by the Irish writer Bram Stoker and published in 1897 in England. Originally, the name Dracula is not at all scary. It derives from the name given to a Crusader order, the Order of the Dragon, with which both Vlad the Impaler and his father Vlad Dracul (a member of this order) were associated. The rest of the Dracula myth is due to the influence of Transylvanian legends and popular beliefs about ghosts and vampires.
Stoker's Count Dracula is a centuries-old vampire, a Transylvanian nobleman who claims to be a Szekler descendant of Attila the Hun. He lives in the ruins of a castle somewhere in the Carpathian Mountains. Conversations with the character Jonathan Harker give Count Dracula the opportunity to show himself particularly proud of his noble culture, of his predilection for his past. It seems that Dracula studied Black Magic at the Scholomance Academy in the Carpathian Mountains, not far from the city of Sibiu (later known as Hermannstadt).
Stoker carefully avoided creating a real historical connection between his Count Dracula character and the historical personality of Vlad the Impaler. Although Stoker's character Van Helsing reflects on the possibility that Count Dracula is one and the same as Voivode Dracula, Dracula, Count of Transylvania, is certainly not Prince Vlad the Impaler of Wallachia, Stoker himself being reluctant to associate his hero with a real historical figure.
The character Dracula is born from these myths
In the villages surrounding Bran, and beyond, there was a belief in the existence of evil spirits, called ghosts or stereogoi (a variant of the word strigoi). It refers to apparently living people, the strigoi, those who lived a normal life during the day. With the coming of night, while they were sleeping, the spirit left their bodies, to haunt – from midnight until the first rooster crows – the sleep of the villagers, draining them of their strength.
“The undead (the undead, vampires) suffer from the curse of immortality,” writes Stoker, “they traverse time multiplying the number of victims, spreading evil throughout the world.” The character Dracula is born from these myths.
The historical figure Vlad Tepes
The historical figure Vlad the Impaler, the ruler of the Wallachians, does indeed have a connection with Bran Castle.
He led several campaigns to punish German merchants in Braşov, who refused to obey him and pay the taxes to the throne resulting from trade.
The path to Wallachia passed through Bran, the pass closest to Brașov, which in turn provided the connection with Târgoviște, the seat of Vlad the Impaler.
The customs office where the tolls for passing on this road were collected was located, as it is today, at the foot of Bran Castle, in its western part.
Relations between Vlad the Impaler and the nobility of Brașov
Relations between Vlad the Impaler and the Brașov nobility, whose representatives were hostile to him, were therefore not exactly cordial. It is not known whether Vlad the Impaler conquered Bran Castle or not.
Written documents do not attest to this. The archives relating to Bran Castle are generally administrative and refer to the income and expenses of the Bran Fortification (Castle) domain, less to political and military matters.
Autumn of the year
1462
It seems, however, that in the fall of 1462, not far from the Podul Dâmboviţei fortress, which is also located near Rucăr, Vlad the Impaler was taken prisoner by the King of Hungary, Matthias Corvinus, and imprisoned for two months in Bran Castle, a fact recently attested in Gheorghe Lazea Postelnicu's volume "Vlad the Impaler - Dracula", published in 2002 by the Mirador publishing house in Arad. From Bran, Vlad the Impaler was taken and imprisoned in the Visegrad Fortress.
It is desirable that visitors to Bran Castle distinguish between the historical reality of Bran and its character. Count Dracula from his novel Bram StokerDracula was and remains an imaginary character.