August 3, 2007
Vlad the Impaler and Count Dracula
By Dan

We are in the medieval market town of Brasov, which provides a good excuse for me to tell you about one of Transylvania’s more colourful characters – The Fifteenth Century prince, Vlad III, more commonly known by his nickname, Vlad the Impaler.

He earned his reputation from the brutal way he executed his enemies.
A horse would be tethered to the victim's legs, and a sharpened stake would slowly be forced into their body through their anus until it appeared from the mouth.

According to legend Vlad came here to Brasov in 1459 and had 30,000 of the city’s merchants and officials impaled for refusing to accept his authority. There is a famous woodcarving showing him feasting among the corpses, still hanging for their stakes.

I wondered down to the historic town square, where no doubt Vlad’s victims were rounded up. It was filled with relaxing locals and tourists, nothing more sinister than a souvenir vender. But the wooden beams that support the roofs of the surrounding buildings had sagged leaving the skylines warped into curved lines, lending an authentic medieval feel to the atmosphere.

Vlad’s cruelty is legendary – apparently when Ottoman Emissaries failed to remove their headgear after entering his court, Vlad ordered their hats nailed to their heads.
He basically said: “If you’re so keen to wear your hat, I'm gonna nail it to your head.” And so he did.

An old Romanian story claims people were so afraid to commit crimes in Vlad’s day, you could leave a bag of gold in the middle of the street, then return and pick it up the next day.

To be fair to Vlad he had a tough upbringing – His father was executed by the Hungarians, who ‘scalped’ him - they sliced a line around his head, then literally tore his face off while he was still conscious.
And his older brother Mircea also fell victim to his political opponents, who blinded him by jabbing hot iron stakes into his eyes and then buried the poor bugger alive.
Vlad himself was held hostage for years by the Ottomans, who kept him in an underground cell and occasionally brought him out for a good flogging. So you can understand why he had a few issues.

Despite his indiscretions he’s regarded as a folk hero by Romanians for driving off the invading Turks. Historians believe he impaled as many as 100,000 Turkish Muslims, and legend has it that Mehmed II, the famously ruthless Ottoman king, turned back from invading Vlad’s capital when he saw the impaled remains of 20,000 soldiers outside the city gates.
He was so successful at protecting Christian Europe’s eastern frontier that the Holy Roman Emperor appointed him to a secret sect called the Order of the Dragon, Societas Draconis, and it is from the Romanian translation of Dragon that Vlad takes his most famous title: Dracula.

It is probably from Vlad that Bram Stoker took the name for his famous vampire count in his 1897 novel Dracula.
What’s strange about Count Dracula’s popularity is that he’s the creation of an Irish theatre manager, who wrote an English horror novel after being inspired by a visit to a Scottish castle.

Yet this entirely fictitious Count is now Transylvania’s most famous figure, and draws legions of tourists, particularly to here – Bran Castle, commonly known as Dracula’s Castle.

In fact the castle has few links to the real Walachian Prince Dracula, or the fictitious Count Dracula. But why let the facts get in the way of the tourist industry?

It isn’t a particularly impressive castle, and there is a full on Dracula market outside the gates selling all manner of tat.
Unsurprisingly we arrived too late to get in, so decided to camp overnight.

We found a great spot by a church, near a graveyard, overlooked by the castle. A couple of families lived nearby and, when the police turned up to try and move us on, the families intervened to let us stay.

We drank the local moonshine while OJ knocked up some pasta over the campfire. We had a merry old time, Megan drank a little to much and regaled us with streams of nonsense, Istvan lightened up and started offering head massages.
Later that night we could hear the sound of bass lines rolling through the hills, so a few of us set off into the night and eventually stumbled across an outdoor party, where we danced with locals and tourists.