Looking after Dracula in Transylvania

A bust of Vlad the Impaler sat atop a stone pedestal. His eyes were mean and cold beneath thick matted hair. Laid around the base were a collection of offerings; ground saltpetre overlaid with flowers. The petals were bound tightly in cotton and the stems handbroken and twined into a circle. Shockingly, in the middle lay a dead sparrow, tiny feet pointing upwards. A trickle of blood congealed into a sticky pool. I couldn't begin to guess the significance, but it made me shudder. Welcome to Transylvania.

I was in the central Romanian city of Sighisoara. The walled settlement sat on a bluff enclosing narrow cobbled streets too tight for cars. In Ceaucescu’s time, agriculture drove the town’s economy, now it's unashamedly tourism. Pastel coloured houses fronted cobbled plazas, many with chipped stucco and dark painted shutters. Cameras clicked at a mustard coloured house; Vlad the Impaler’s birthplace, now a restaurant with sullen service. I sat patiently for ten minutes as the waiter finished his newspaper. Finally he sloped past. I asked for coffee. He looked at me with distaste and returned with a Fanta.

Dracula's author, Bram Stoker, never visited Romania. He wrote most of the Transylvania chapters from his writer’s retreat in Aberdeen but it's still possible to follow the novel's journey through the region. The historical parallel with Vlad Tepes (The Impaler) is pure fable. The fictional Dracula is a composite character drawn from diverse sources. Part Jack the Ripper, part Romanian folklore, but the name Stoker borrowed for his creation belongs to a barbaric and very real individual.

Vlad Tepes was the son of a warlord known as The Dragon (Dracul in the local vernacular). The Impaler suffix came later, synonymous with Vlad’s favoured method of execution. Those who displeased him; such as thieves, the workshy, or particularly the Turks, were bound to a cross and violently slaughtered with sharpened stakes.

I left Sighisoara just after dawn, travelling south by modern train and rickety bus, arriving in Bran at midday. Transport is cheap, even by Central European standards. It's in this tiny town that Transylvania's number one tourist attraction lies; Dracula's Castle. It's called Dracula's Castle because the Romanian Tourist Board know an opportunity when they see one. In reality, Vlad didn't live here, in fact he may even have attacked it once. Filtered through the lens of countless Hollywood movies, it has the trappings of the gothic imagination, all hidden doors and secret stairs. "A vast ruined castle, from whose tall black windows came no ray of light, and whose broken battlements showed a jagged line against the sky" reads the book. It is uncannily accurate.

From Bran I bussed north along bumpy roads and up onto the high plains. I was heading away from the historical context and back into the imagination of Bram Stoker. Like Jonathan Harker, the hero of the novel, "it was on the dark side of twilight when I got to Bistrita." I headed into town, reading as I walked, "Dracula directed me to go to the Golden Crown Hotel, which I found, to my great delight, to be thoroughly old fashioned." Well, my guidebook suggested the same approach but old fashioned it isn't.

The hotel was built during the nineteen-eighties. Nearly one hundred years after the events described in the book. I ate dinner in the Jonathan Harker suite, drinking the sweet Golden Mediasch wine just like the protagonist himself. Two German lads rolled in and ordered beers. They told me of a hotel not far from the Bistrita Pass, where the Dracula connection was camped up even further. Staff jumped out of hidden cavities to frighten guests. "But no longer!" A Canadian tourist had been so shocked by the sudden appearance of a vampire he died from heart failure. The hotel was now struggling to break even.

Jonathan only managed two glasses of Golden Mediasch. I polished off the bottle surrounded by stuffed bats and red velvet drapes. A waitress pulled a rope and the drapes opened to reveal a widescreen television. The Germans found a channel showing football and I crept off to bed. I could hear their shouting from six floors up.

In the morning I headed away from the charming and back towards the charmless, destination Bucharest. Once the train had threaded through a narrow pass in the Carpathian Mountains and swayed away from the fields of Transylvania, the prettiness faded. The capital began to swallow up the rural heartland with battered factories and dreary estates. I read Stoker’s closing description of Transylvanians, "the women looked pretty, except when you got near them." I laughed and thought of Stoker writing his sinister book in Scotland with no idea of what these people looked like, or how beautiful their country was.