B ram Stoker never set foot in Romania and Vlad III, the Impaler, never resid- ed in Bran Castle. Well, okay, he may have spent one night there, though even that’s debatable. Nevertheless, the facts haven’t prevented millions of tourists from visit- ing Transylvania for decades, with a chill in their bones and slightly bizarre expectations that they will encounter the immortal Dracula during the misty night... and survive, of course. In the summer of 1890, the then 45-year- old Stoker selected a book in a library about the princes of Wallachia and Moldova. He didn’t read it, merely opened it at a certain page, wrote something down and returned the book. On his way home, he stopped by at the Whitby Mu- seum, where’d he studied maps and devised a route from the heart of London to the wild mountains of Romania. The story had already gained an outline in his imagination, so he re- turned to his notes from the library. It was writ- ten - the Duke (Dracula). In the Wallachian language the word drac- ula means devil, and locals gave it as a nick- name to people who stand out for some rea- son, whether due to courage, brutality, cunning, skill... Stoker liked to claim that everything writ- ten in the book probably happened, as it was told to him by friends who were characters in the story. He actually wanted to warn that ter- rible evil exists, and the fact that he claimed that it was real led to his publisher saying – no! When it finally saw the light on 26 th May 1897, the book was lacking 101 pages from the beginning, with numerous alterations having been made and Stoker’s words were cut, rag- ged... The original manuscript was only discov- ered in the 1980s, and was actually found in America – though nobody had any idea how it had crossed the Atlantic. Whatever the case, Dracula is partly the fruit of a writer’s imagination and partly the em- bodiment of legendary Romanian tyrant Vlad III, aka Vlad the Impaler. His story begins in the year 1410, with the founding of the secret so- ciety known as“The Order of the Dragon”. Vlad II, Duke of Wallachia, was accepted into the Or- der in 1431 in recognition of his contribution in battles against the Ottomans. Upon enter- ing the Order he received the nickname Dracul, which in Romanian means “dragon”, although – as Stoker himself stated – this word has an- other meaning in the local language: a devil. The same year that he was admitted into the Order, the duke became the father of Vlad III, aka Vlad the Impaler, the hero of this sto- ry. Given that the suffix“a”is added to a son or daughter’s name in the ancient Romanian lan- guage, he thus received the name Dracula, son of the dragon (devil). He was taken prisoner by the Ottomans as a child, so he learned the Turk- ish language, but also Turkish torture methods.
Bram Stoker nikada nije kročio u Rumuniju Bram Stoker never set foot in Romania
RUMUNIJA U FOKUSU
omania
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