"Here is Romania, trying to join the EU, a club of nice countries, and it is saddled with a bloodthirsty image that Dracula only accentuates," said Duncan Light, a professor from Liverpool Hope University College in England. He is spending a year in Romania to study its folklore.
For others, the Dracula link is a sad case of identity distortion and historical falsification. The cinematic Dracula has become inexorably linked with Vlad the Impaler. Romanians by and large admire Vlad for relentlessly beating back Ottoman Empire invasions and safeguarding Christianity in Europe. He never morphed into a bat.
Bran Castle, a medieval fortress, near the city of Brasov, has embraced the Dracula story and is drawing tourists even though there is no indication that Vlad the Impaler spent time there.
(By Daniel Williams - The Washington Post)
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"How would you like it if someone said Abraham Lincoln was a vampire?" asked Constantin Balaceanu Stolnici, the last surviving blood relative of Vlad's family. He is a direct descendant of Vlad the Monk, one of the Impaler's brothers. He is a neuropsychologist whose genial hospitality is somewhat offset by the jarring display of a plastic brain on his desk. He blames the whole Dracula fad on globalization. "This is an example of a simple, local culture being dominated by a powerful one," he said. "Hollywood rules."
Now, let's get a few facts straight. Bram Stoker, an Irishman, never visited Transylvania. Stoker discovered the name Dracula in a book that included tales of Vlad the Impaler, a 15th-century warrior. Vlad got the name Dracula from his father, who was honored by Germans with a chivalrous "Order of the Dragon." The Romanians had no word for dragon, so they transliterated it into "drac," which means devil. Vlad Jr. called himself Vlad Dracula, i.e. Vlad, Son of the Devil.
Perhaps an unfortunate choice for a nickname, but then Vlad generally suffered from bad public relations. The Turks pinned the Impaler moniker on him because he habitually executed foes by driving them onto stakes. It was a common execution method in the 15th century, though Vlad seemed to have been an especially enthusiastic practitioner. He even impaled tax evaders. Sometimes he dined while watching the victims' bodies slide down the poles. There are, by the way, various accounts of Vlad's own death -- at the hands of Turkish enemies, vengeful local nobility or by his own soldiers -- but none includes the hammering of a stake through his heart.
As early as the 1970s, the Romanian government explored the commercial possibilities of exploiting moviedom's Dracula. It built an ersatz castle near the Borgo Pass, the place where the imaginary Castle Dracula was supposed to be. But the Ceausescu government was clearly of two minds about promoting imported superstition. It never allowed any of the Dracula movies to be shown on TV nor the Stoker book to be sold. In any case, the exploitation stopped at Borgo Pass; Ceausescu became more interested in self-aggrandizement, exemplified by construction of a huge palace in Bucharest that is purportedly the world's second largest building.
Currently, with capitalism taking hold, the Dracula tide seems inexorable. "It's a problem. On the one hand, Dracula promotes a negative image. On the other hand, he has become a kind of attractive figure in the West, a sex symbol. So he's becoming digestible even for us Romanians," said Nicolae Paduraru, director of the Company of Mysterious Journeys, which organizes Dracula tours.
Paduraru embodies a certain ambivalence about Dracula. Although he runs tours to Borgo Pass and to Vlad's reputed tomb on Lake Snagov, he is also head of the Transylvanian Society of Dracula, dedicated to spreading the truth about Vlad the Impaler.
"Vlad Dracula is a genuine heroic figure. No matter how hard we try to distinguish between him and the film legend, there is going to be confusion between the two," he said.
The vampire issue erupted in controversy three years ago when investors laid out a project for a Dracula theme park near Sighisoara, reputed to be the birthplace of Vlad the Impaler. Sighisoara is a well-preserved, walled medieval town. Environmentalists and historians fought and killed the project on grounds that the park would diminish the area's pristine, historic value.
