Vampire Capitalism: Visiting Transylvania before Halloween
- yihwahanna
- May 10, 2023
- 8 min read
Updated: Feb 26
Who would have known that the late Irish author Bram Stoker - who had never even been to Eastern Europe - would wind up being one of Romania’s best tourism promoters?
For someone who grew up fascinated by vampire stories and other mythical folklore, it’s pretty shocking that the fact that my first-ever trip to Transylvania would happen around Halloween went completely over my head.
I had been browsing our local budget airline’s route offerings to satisfy a case of weekday wanderlust when my mouse hovered above Romania. Despite its formerly glittering reputation as the “Little Paris of the East”, Bucharest was then seen like a glamorous movie star that had seen better days, wilted with age and a lack of love. But Transylvania is in fact, part of Romania (since after World War I, anyway) - and when I remembered that, the visions of battered post-Soviet buildings and dimly-lit bars on side streets created through years of arguably unfairly bad press gave way to those of misty mountains, castles, dark romance, and mystery instead.
But here’s the thing about Transylvania: It’s a bit misrepresented. Beautiful, mysterious, and teeming with history, folklore would have you believe that it’s a tiny country of its own in Eastern Europe that’s filled with vampires. Yet it actually makes for a third of Romania - it’s bigger than the entire country of Austria - and if you want to see it all, you’re going to have to either give yourself a decent amount of time to explore, or pick the essentials and be very strategic in planning your way around. I only had several days, so I chose the latter.
I landed in Bucharest airport with a few hours to kill before taking a pre-booked minibus to my first destination, Sinaia. After extensive research creeping around online forums, I’d concluded that this was the most efficient and cost-effective route. Taking the train would have cost more, and I’d have had to take a taxi into town then backtrack north. The minibus, on the other hand, would cost me 60RON (15USD) and take just two hours, leaving directly from the airport. Bingo. Except although I’d Google-Translated the heck out of the website, and emailed them when I couldn’t decipher the departure point, I still couldn’t for the life of me find the “Parkink Bus P2 Arrivals”. None of the airport shopkeeps seemed to have heard of the Autogari Autocar either. Which is how I found myself accidentally stepping onto a restricted floor of the Henri Coandă International Airport with a burly 6’5” security officer demanding to know where I was going.
Alas, my story doesn’t take a dramatic, crime movie-esque turn. The officer took pity on this confused, racially ambiguous solo female traveller and spent the next 30 minutes helping me find the bus, and even wangled me onto an earlier option at no extra cost. An officer and a gentleman indeed. Two hours later, I was dropped off at a bus stop in the small mountain resort town of Sinaia, where I hopped straight into a taxi to one of the most quaint, picturesque little guest houses I’d ever seen. Once used as the Royal Guard Office, the Complex La Tunuri - Vila Economat is part of the Royal Domain just steps away from Peleș and Pelisor Castle. There was nobody at the front desk, and the area seemed deserted. It was eerily quiet, and the air was so crisp it nibbled at my nose. I felt like I’d stepped through a time warp, and my overactive imagination began turning the rustle of leaves into whispered voices.
I almost jumped out of my skin when the receptionist came back from her break. After tucking into a hot meal of tomato soup, a peppery steak with roasted potatoes, and full-bodied red wine at the restaurant next door, I snuggled up in bed with a book and the heaters on full-blast. The red hallways reminded me of the hotel in The Shining, but a much cozier version. It would have been romantic had I been with someone, but alone, it was spooky. I fell asleep to dreams of knights in shining armour and tales of unrequited love gone awry.
I’d booked a guide through Active Travel Romania. Mihai, a rosy-cheeked outdoor enthusiast with a wide, genuine smile was a proud Romanian, history buff, and keen hiker and snowboarder with a passion for wildlife, travel and photography. “People often come to Transylvania to see Bran Castle, the famous Dracula Castle, but Peleș Castle is really something special,” he said, his eyes lighting up as he spoke. It was easy to see why: Equally beautiful in every season, it resembled a picture-perfect Disney castle from the outside. But on the inside, oh, what a magical place.
This Neo-Renaissance castle boasts a stunning view of the Carpathian Mountains, and was built for King Carol I in the 1800s. It was under his reign that Romania gained its independence, and it was also the world’s first castle that was fully powered by locally produced electricity thanks to the power plant on its grounds. While the outside is spectacular, it’s the inside that truly takes your breath away. King Carol I and Queen Elisabeth of Wied, who the castle was constructed for, were true patrons of the arts and this is evident in every corner.
This isn’t the sort of drafty old castle that you wander through thinking, “If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all” - here, every single room is different. We wandered from an Ottoman-style room complete with embroidered pouffes perfect for smoking sheesha pipes on, to a pastel-coloured paradise that looked like it had come alive from the pages of a Jane Austen novel. The theatre hall boasted more than 60 gilded seats facing its Royal Box, while the Weapons Rooms housed more than 4,000 European and Asian weapons from the 14th-17th century.
“Can you tell me what’s different about this wall?” Mihai asked me, with a knowing grin, while we were in the Royal Library. On the right-hand side, one of the rows of books was fake, expertly handcrafted to blend in with the real books to conceal a secret passageway. “Some people say it led to a bathroom,” Mihai chuckled. Apparently it took people to various rooms of the castle, while in the main hallway overlooking the foyer, a painting slid aside to reveal a hidden second entrance to the royal bedroom chambers. “What a magical house to have grown up in as a child,” I exclaimed, only to learn that the King and Queen had only ever had one child - a daughter, Maria - who died in 1874 at age three. Queen Elisabeth had never recovered from it, and they never had another child.
My favourite room in the house, by far, was The Music Room, a sun-dappled marvel where I could practically see the soirees of old as I gazed at the golden harp in the middle, paintings of fantasy and bravery adorning the walls. It was a world away from Bran Castle, about a 1.5 hour drive away.
So here's the thing about Bran Castle: Even though it's commonly known as Dracula's Castle, it actually has little to no connection on a historical basis. Vlad Tepes, the supposed real-life inspiration (or at least the closest real-life character) behind Bram Stoker's Dracula had never set foot in it, much in the way that Bram Stoker had never actually been to Transylvania. That doesn't stop the place from using it as a great selling point for tourism, however.
As we neared the outdoor market leading up to the castle - with sellers hawking everything from traditional embroidered fluffy winter boots and handmade cheeses to tatty and garish modern Halloween costumes - we passed signs for campgrounds labeled "Vampire Camping" and posters for the upcoming Halloween ball (read: fancy dress club atmosphere in a castle). Rumor has it that Stoker had seen an image of the castle while writing his spooky tale, and decided to place his titular character in an embellished version of it. Bran Castle is the closest one in Transylvania to the illustrated depiction in the first edition of Dracula, and bears a striking resemblance to the image from the outside - thus the reputation. On the inside, it wasn't anywhere near as grand or ornate as Peleș Castle, but it was beautiful in its own way, with more austere and distinctly gothic touch. Here, the secret passageways took on on a darker tone.
While the story of Dracula doesn't explicitly state that Vlad the Impaler was Dracula, this link became all the more clear after I visited his hometown of Sighișoara, my next stop. Yet it was at Bran Castle that I learned about the strigoi, the mythical undead believed in by the villages around Bran that were a clear inspiration for vampire lore. Believed to look and live like regular human beings during the day, by night their souls were said to leave their bodies and haunt the villages, tormenting people and stalking their prey.
Other legends say that they weren't human at all, and that while they looked like it on the outside, on the inside their souls had left them as they were possessed by the evil spirits of the undead. In all of the tales, the nighttime was their playground, giving them free reign to run amok and bring fear, pain, and death around until the first light of dawn. Some strigoi were said to be able to shapeshift into other animal forms, assume invisibility upon command, and wield magical powers. Their bodies did not decompose, and myths say that they claimed this vitality from their victims by draining them of and consuming their blood. They craved the taste of human flesh - particularly that of children.
If you weren't turned, there were a number of their ways to become a strigoi, such as leading a life of sin, or dying without being married, by suicide, by execution for perjury, or having been cursed by a witch. Oddly, being the seventh child of the same sex in a family would also apparently lend you this fate. Tough luck on that kid. To stop them, one had to exhume the strigoi, drive a stake through its heart (or remove the heart and cut it in two), behead it or drive a nail through its forehead, place a clove of garlic under its tongue, smear its body with the fat of a pig killed on St. Ignatius' Day, and Turn its body face-down so that it would be headed to the afterlife.
In these tales, immortality - celebrated at first as a gift of everlasting life and power above death - often wound up feeling like a curse, to be spread as they multiplied their victims across the centuries. Fable or not, the moral always seems to be that in knowing that life can end that we learn to value it more. The strigoi were often said to have unfinished business in the living world and that that was what haunted them most. It was easy to see why vampire stories resonated with so many of us: Everlasting youth and vitality, extreme power, and endless years of immortality in which to realize your life's purpose - something that many of us struggle with throughout our lifetimes.
These thoughts ran wildly through my mind as, after a quick pitstop at Râșnov Fortress, Mihai and I headed to Brasov to grab a bite, before I hopped on the train to Sighisoara, the medieval town where Vlad the Impaler - the historical Dracula - was born. It was dark and rainy, and Mihai offered to drive me there instead, shaving hours (and discomfort) off my journey and giving me more time to pick his library-like brain for more stories along the way. As we drove, the darkness fell as thick and fast as the rain, and roads gave way to the silhouette of verdant forests. Dracula's hometown awaited.
