I currently live in Romania, which really doesn’t celebrate Halloween at all except as a kind of “fad” to observe some western holidays (like St. Patrick’s Day for instance). That being said, one of the key figures in Halloween is Dracula, which most definitely has ties to my new homeland.
The name “Dracula” refers to a character in the book of the same name, written by “Abraham” Bram Stoker in 1897 about a vampire. The word “dracula” is a corruption of a Romanian word meaning “the devil” and/or “dragon” and many vampire legends come from Romania, especially the area where I live – Transylvania.
Dracula is also loosely based on the most famous Romanian in history, known in English as “Vlad the Impaler” and in Romanian as Vlad Ţepeş. His last name in Romanian roughly translates to “spike”, referring to his preference of impaling people on a sharp pole. Although he was only in power for 6 years, he is estimated to have killed 100,000 people, largely by this method.
At the time Vlad ruled, his nation was under control by the Hungarian Empire. Vlad’s father (known as Vlad II) belonged to an order of knights called “Order of the Dragon”, which the Latin word for dragon is “draco”. Therefore both Vlad and his father were known as Vlad “the dragon” but in Romanian it also means “the devil”, giving it a double meaning. Interestingly, the Turks called him “Kaziglu Bey”, which also means “the impaler prince”. Now that is a reputation.
Vlad “The Impaler” was born in the beautiful town of Sighisoara, and if you’ve been a reader of my blog for a while, you know that a large part of the medieval aspect of this city still remains. The house where Vlad was born still exists and is a popular destination for tourists.
Although Vlad’s father’s kingdom was under the control of Hungary, he also had to pay tribute to the Ottoman Empire. Vlad’s father was eventually murdered on the orders of the Hungarians and a puppet king was installed. This angered the Turks and they released Vlad “The Impaler” (who had been held in Turkey as a kind of ransom guarantee). He then lost his kingdom as soon as he got it, the next king switched to being a puppet of the Turks, then Vlad came back in power but then got into an argument with King Matthias Corvinus, then regained the favor of the Hungarians.
Although Vlad’s reign was very short, his kingdom (then called Wallachia) was right on the buffer zone between Christian Europe and the Muslim Ottoman Empire. In that capacity, Vlad led an army into what is now Bulgaria and defeated the Turks. The Turks responded by attacking what is now the Romanian city of Tirgoviste (Vlad’s capital – near modern day Bucharest). Here’s what the Ottoman Sultan saw when he came to inspect the siege there:
“[Sultan Mehmed] marched on for about five kilometers when he saw men impaled; the Sultan’s army came across a field of stakes, about three kilometers long and one kilometer wide. And there were large stakes upon which he could see the impaled bodies of men, women, and children, about twenty-thousand of them… And the other Turks, seeing so many people impaled, were scared out of their wits.”
Just a few years later he was killed under unclear circumstances and his head was placed on a spike outside Istanbul to prove that the Impaler was truly dead. No one knows where Vlad was buried today.
Here is what Wikipedia has to say about Vlad’s love for impalement:
Impalement was Dracula’s preferred method of torture and execution. Impalement was and is one of the most gruesome ways of dying imaginable. Dracula usually had a horse attached to each of the victim’s legs an a sharpened stake was gradually forced into the body. The end of the stake was usually oiled and care was taken that the stake not be too sharp; else the victim might die too rapidly from shock. Normally the stake was inserted into the body through the anus and was often forced through the body until it emerged from the mouth. However, there were many instances where victims were impaled through other bodily orifices or through the abdomen or chest. Infants were sometimes impaled on the stake forced through their mother’s chests. The records indicate that victims were sometimes impaled so that they hung upside down on the stake.
Death by impalement was slow and painful. Victims sometimes endured for hours or days. Dracula often had the stakes arranged in various geometric patterns. The most common pattern was a ring of concentric circles in the outskirts of a city that was his target. The height of the spear indicated the rank of the victim. The decaying corpses were often left up for months.
Thousands were often impaled at a single time. Ten thousand were impaled in the Transylvanian city of Sibiu (where Dracula had once lived) in 1460. In 1459, on St. Bartholomew’s Day, Dracula had thirty thousand of the merchants and boyars of the Transylvanian city of Brasov impaled. One of the most famous woodcuts of the period shows Dracula feasting amongst a forest of stakes and their grisly burdens outside Brasov while a nearby executioner cuts apart other victims.
What’s interesting about the book Dracula and the real Vlad is that the printing press was just coming into widespread usage at the time of Vlad’s reign. Therefore sensationalized stories about Vlad’s actions were amongst the first “best sellers” of the modern printing press, and much of the legend and myth surrounding the man is no doubt due to these “tabloid” style stories. That being said, there seems to be sufficient evidence that his preference for mass impalements was not exaggerated.
Whatever his reputation and connection to myth in the west, in Romania and Moldova (which was part of Romania until WW2) he is considered to have been a cruel but very fair ruler who defended his people against foreigners. He was also considered to be a stickler for law and order (as opposed to the corruption of the nobility at the time). One story I’ve heard about Vlad is that he placed a very expensive golden cup near the fountain in the main square and yet no one stole it because they knew they would be caught (and impaled), thereby illustrating the lack of crime under Vlad’s reign. I’ve heard many Romanians lament that Vlad isn’t around anymore to “clean up” whatever problems Romania face today.
If you visit Romania today and ask to see “Dracula’s castle”, more than likely your guide will take you to a castle in the town of Bran. While it is very lovely, it has almost no connection to the historical Vlad and, at most, was where he spent a few nights while engaged in military campaigns. Vlad’s capital during his short reign was in Tirgoviste, although very little connected to Vlad still exists. There is however a tradition concerning Vlad’s spirit haunting a castle in Hunedoara, although it seems unlikely he used this one anymore than the one in Bran.
So wherever you are, Happy Halloween and if you celebrate this holiday, raise a glass to Romania’s most famous hero, whose real actions are far bloodier and savage than the costume you might be donning tonight.
The other half of the literary (and Halloween) Dracula is the fact he was/is a vampire. There are stories about vampires or similar creatures from all over Eastern Europe, including Romania. Famous books and Hollywood movies have spread the “idea” about vampires so well that I am sure you could tell me all about them. But they are simply creatures of lore and imagination, right?
In the year 1054 there was a split between the eastern and western halves of the main Christian church, the western half known today as “Catholic” and the eastern half as “Orthodox”. Occasionally a very pious person dies but their body does not decay. In the Catholic church these are called “saints” while in the Orthodox church the word “vampire” is used to describe the same thing – without all the meaning of an undead creature rising to feast on blood, etc.
That being said, even today in Romania there are isolated villages far, far away from the hustling, modern cities who believe that vampires – the undead monsters – still exist. In Romanian they are called strigoi. They are slightly different than the Hollywood version in that the undead do not drink blood, but rise to sap the “life force” of mortals, most often family members and loved ones. The only way to kill a strigoi is to drive a wooden stake through its heart, then burn the heart and consume it.
In 2004 there was an incident in Dolj “County” in Romania wherein prosecutors, perhaps for the first time, prosecuted some locals for digging up a corpse and consuming the heart. Belief in the strigoi is nothing new – what changed was that Romania is in the process of joining the European Union and such ancient beliefs are considered embarassing to the government.
Of course you, like the Romanian government, might find these tales far-fetched and completely irrational. But then again you’ve never spent a long, cold night in the mountains of Transylvania, where modern civilization has not reached and the old ways haven’t changed in hundreds of years, where wild wolves still roam and howl. It’s quite easy to be cynical and brave behind the computer isn’t?
Happy Halloween!
