 My obsession to travel to every site related to either the fictional Count Dracula or his real historical counterpart, Prince Vlad Dracula the Impaler, grew out of a visit to Whitby, England, where part of the novel Dracula takes place. I stood on the cemetery hill where, in Bram Stoker's Dracula, Lucy Westenra and Mina Murray spent hour after hour sitting on their "favourite seat" (a bench placed over a suicide's grave near the edge of the cliff), gazing out toward the "headland called Kettleness" and the open North Sea beyond--while Count Dracula slept in the crypt just beneath them.
In my mind's eye, I could see the un-dead Count Dracula rising at night from the flattened slab of the suicide's gravestone to drink the blood of the living. |
With its weathered limestone tombstones blackened by centuries of assault by the biting North Sea winds, the graveyard looks the part that it plays in Bram Stoker's novel where Count Dracula spent his days sleeping in the sepulcher once belonging to a suicide. That graveyard made the novel more visible, more visceral, to me, and I wondered if the sites in Transylvania and in the remote mountains of southern Romania would evoke the same feelings. As I was to discover, they did. |
At that moment I decided to visit and photograph every site in England and Romania that is closely related to either Bram Stoker's fictional Count Dracula or his historical counterpart, Prince Vlad Dracula the Impaler--to literally walk in their footsteps and to write a book about my experiences.
But my journey would have to be postponed. The country of Romania was in the grip of the ruthless regime of Nicolae Ceausescu, and travel there was impossible. I waited for years and continued my research. When Romania was opened to Western tourists and I could finally fly there, I planned my return trip to Whitby in England's North Yorkshire to coincide with its April Gothic Weekend (see http://wgw.topmum.co.uk/). My pictures of Whitby's Dracula-related sites would be enhanced, I was sure, by the costumed revelers thronging the town. I wasn't disappointed (see picture below).
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In the weeks that I traveled the Dracula Trail, I encountered so many sites, some that I'd seen before and others I had only dreamed of, systematically stripping away the layers of myth about Count Dracula and Prince Vlad the Impaler to find the reality within. I discovered in broken stones and parchments signed in blood why Prince Vlad's monstrous deeds in life would brand him forever with the name of Vlad Tepes (pronounced Tzeh'pish), Romanian for Vlad the Impaler, soon after his death.
In my research and travels I discovered two fascinating coincidences that link the historical and the literary Draculas. First and foremost is that Bram Stoker chose to name his villain "Dracula," based on the translation of the Romanian word "dracul" into "devil," never knowing that the historical Voivode (Prince) Dracula he had read about was also Vlad Tepes, with a horrific and compelling biography of his own.
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Vlad the Impaler Surrounded by his Victims |
Bram Stoker's Transylvania was the pipe dream of an armchair traveler with a genius for writing: real enough for the 19th Century reader, but bearing little resemblance any Romania that ever existed. For example, Stoker wrote of "hay-ricks [haystacks] in the trees" based on illustrations of Transylvanian haystacks built around stakes, with the ends of the stakes poking out like branches. Thus, generations of Dracula readers assumed that Transylvanians put their haystacks up in trees.
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The second coincidence is the uncanny resemblance of the real Castle of Dracula--Vlad Tepes' fortress at Poenari, which Stoker had no knowledge of--to Count Dracula's fictional castle in Transylvania. Perched on a remote peak near a glacial moraine in the Fagaras Mountains of southern Romania, Poenari, in its time, mirrored Count Dracula's fictional castle at the top of the Borgo Pass almost stone for stone.
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The people I encountered and the places I became aware of in my journey along the Dracula Trail were unique and will be etched in my mind forever. Harry Collett, Whitby's "Man in Black," and northern England's foremost authority on the town and Bram Stoker in particular, is one of those people.
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Anyway, Harry told me of how Bram Stoker first began writing a play titled The Un-Dead. At Whitby's tiny public library in what is today the Quayside Fish Restaurant, Stoker first discovered the name "Dracula" in a book published in 1820 by William Wilkerson titled An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia. The play itself, which had as its central character a vampire named Count Dracula, was in five acts and took 4½ hours to perform. It was a total disaster.
Stoker rewrote The Un-Dead as a novel, working day and night, and returned to the play's publisher in early May of 1897. In an inspired moment, the publisher took his blue pencil out of the top drawer of his desk, crossed out the title The Un Dead, and wrote in its place: Dracula. Three weeks later, Dracula was published, and since then it has never been out of print.
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A second unforgettable encounter was with Father Varahiil Banateanu, who is the sole caretaker, in a line of monks that stretches back hundreds of years, of Vlad Tepes' tomb in the inner chamber of a stone monastery church that dates back to 1521, on Snagov Island, about 25 miles north of Bucharest, Romania.
A visit to the tomb of Vlad Tepes confirms the reverence still felt for the historical Prince Dracula as someone who defended the cross, as opposed to the literary Count Dracula, who abhorred it. The tomb (see picture) is covered by a stone slab surrounded by golden icons and giant candelabras. An antique lantern rests on the left side of the slab, a silver engraving of Vlad Tepes is at the center, and a vase of fresh-cut flowers graces the right.
On one of the church walls, below Vlad's portrait, is the following inscription (recreated verbatim): King Vlad the Impaler Dracula
He was a great European personality in fighting against Turkish Empire for Christianity. His courage was admired also by Turkish Army & leaders.
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Although Father Banateanu speaks only Romanian, I was able to communicate with him through a friend named Daly who came along with me from Bucharest. Daly speaks only German and Romanian, and fortunately I can converse in German.
Daly found Father Banateanu's cell phone number posted on a narrow wooden pier on the shore of Snagov Lake near the island and arranged for a ride.
Father Banateanu arrived at the pier in his rowboat, dressed in his civvies. He wouldn't allow me to take his picture until he was properly attired in his cassock and cap, and, well, compensated a bit. But after that it was understood that Daly and I would have the entire island to ourselves, with permission to photograph everything. And that's exactly what I did.
As I took in the medieval splendor of the tomb of Vlad Tepes, Father Banateanu handed me a leaflet that read in part:
" . . . Prince Vlad the Impaler was known in all Europe as Prince Dracula; he was a great fighter against the Turkish Empire. It is a strange story isn't it?"
I had to agree with that. It is a strange story, even more strange than I knew at the time.
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One of my favorite places on the Dracula Trail is Sighisoara, in Transylvania, the birthplace of Vlad Tepes Walking from the train station, across the Tarnava Mare River, and then along the "Passage of the Old Ladies," which leads through the city gate, I was enchanted the moment I entered Sighisoara's Upper Town.
All at once I was in the middle of a perfect storybook medieval village enclosed by thick fortress walls, with cobblestone streets and Easter-egg-colored houses leaning every which way. Guarding the town square was a spire-roofed and turreted 14th Century clock tower replete with carved wooden figures that circle a track to mark the passage of time.
In one window, a drummer plays to signal the hours; below the drummer, the angel of the night replaces the angel of the day at the final stroke of midnight. In another window, gods and goddesses appear, changing for each day of the week.
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I was fortunate to be in Targoviste, the site of Vlad Tepes' royal palace in Wallachia, Romania, on Easter Sunday for the Eastern Orthodox Christians (87% of the Romanian populace is Eastern Orthodox), just in time to catch the town's tiny but utterly charming parade. |
And then there is Poenari, the real Castle of Dracula, situated high on a cliff overlooking the Transfagsrasan road which climbs high into the Fagaras Mountains. The ruins of Poenari are part of a larger complex of structures called the "Royal Court of Tirgoviste." Construction of the watchtower within the complex has been attributed to Vlad Tepes and is referred to as Vlad's Palace.
I had traveled to other remote, forbidding places before entering the dark forest of Poenari: Near Albania's southern border, I hiked the Vikos Gorge, a dozen miles from the nearest stone-housed village; I endured the unrelenting sun of the Timna Valley close to the Red Sea, where 120º in the shade is considered picnic weather. But never before or since have I felt the apprehension and isolation I did while climbing to Vlad Tepes' mountaintop fortress at Poenari. The forest was as quiet as a tomb; I can't recall hearing the song of even a single bird.
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When you take up your own search for the infamous count, be sure to walk along the top of the thick fortress walls of Poenari, look northward, where you will see part of the Transfagarasan Road, leading to a glacial moraine and one of the deepest lakes in the world. (According to local legend, a dragon sleeps at the bottom of the lake, and the villagers nearby will caution you not to throw stones in the water lest the dragon awake.) From the fortress the distant view to the south reveals the Arges River where it flows through a valley of the lower Carpathian Mountains, and even farther, the road to Curtea de Arges, one of the oldest cities in Romania and another of my favorite sites along the Dracula Trail. |
For the Complete Story:
Steven P. Unger's book, "In the Footsteps of Dracula: A Personal Journey and Travel Guide" is available through World Audience Publishers (http://worldaudience.powweb.com/pubs_bks/Dracula.html) or through Amazon.com
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