Hunt for legendary Dracula, Republican Herald June 2011

Hunt for legendary Dracula reveals Pennsylvania-Transylvania connection
Published: June 26, 2011


This month my subject is neither Pottsville nor Paris, but it rhymes with Pennsylvania. I'm just back from Transylvania, where I paid a visit to Dracula. Well, I didn't actually meet him because the real Dracula has been dead for more than 500 years, but I traveled to the Carpathian Mountains in the heart of Transylvania. There, atop a solid rock promontory sits the mountain fortress legend has long associated with his name. Just like Jonathan Harker, the hero of Bram Stoker's 1897 novel "Dracula," the model for all vampire films and novels that have come afterward, I was on a mission to Romania.

My university sent me to a conference in Bucharest, and as fate would have it the day after the conference's end, I was crowded into a minibus traveling into the Carpathian Mountains, whose foothills, beyond which granite peaks rise, look disturbingly like the mountains of Pennsylvania. In fact, the town of Brasov, about 15 miles from the castle, reminded me a lot of Jim Thorpe, and I got to wondering if somewhere in between the banks of the Lehigh and the Susquehanna there might not be an abandoned mine or two where a relative of Dracula has taken up residence.

More than once - and this is fact, not fiction - on hot summer nights, while I lie in bed in the attic of my mother's Pottsville home, a bat has entered the room, casting the shadow of its outspread wings on the ceiling as it flies back and forth over my body, although, to my knowledge, none has ever fastened itself to my neck.

To give us courage, to offer protection, our driver paused in his upward climb at the gates of Sinaia Monastery, an Orthodox monastery founded in 1695 by Prince Mihail Cantacuzino, upon his return from a trip to St. Catherine's Monastery on Mount Sinai in the Holy Land. Nestled in a secluded hollow in a forest of tall pine trees, the walled monastery is a peaceful place, and except for the church bells, the only other sound is the wind rustling in the pines.

Yet, like its model in the Sinai desert, this monastery honors St. Catherine of Alexandria, a fourth-century martyr saint who died a violent death rather than give up her faith. She was attached to the "breaking wheel," an instrument of torture in the shape of a big wooden wagon wheel mounted on a pole, to which victims were strapped and then beaten with a club. In St. Catherine's case, the wheel did not break her, but she broke it, her touch causing it to fall to pieces, upon which the Roman emperor of the time ordered her head to be chopped off.

In other cases, throughout the Middle Ages and beyond, the breaking wheel was very successfully used in Europe to execute murderers and those accused of particularly heinous crimes. Once dead, the victims' heads were cut off and placed on a spike while their bodies remained splayed on the wheel, food for carrion birds.

Back on the minibus, climbing higher into a heavy mist, with visions of St. Catherine's martyrdom still floating in my brain, I fear we may simply be heading toward greater violence. After all, Dracula, also known as "Vlad the Impaler," lived from 1431 to 1476 and earned that title by impaling hundreds, if not thousands, of victims directly upon stakes.

No one would deny he was bloodthirsty, but his methods were in keeping with those of his times. No gas chambers, no electric chair, no lethal injections - he and his contemporaries preferred torture by the wheel, by the stake or by immersion in boiling water and they performed their executions in public, not behind closed doors.

As I reflect upon methods of torture past and present, the minibus emerges into sunlight at the crest of a forested mountain, which overlooks a delightful valley of fields and orchards, grazing sheep and cows. We begin our descent into a landscape of green valleys and low, rolling hills (Pennsylvania again!), and make our way towards a strategic mountain pass.

To the east lie the Black Sea and, in the day of Vlad the Impaler, the threat of the Ottoman Turks. To the west, Hungary, whose leaders covet Transylvania. In charge of the mountain top fortress that overlooks the pass is Vlad III the Impaler, member of the Order of the Dragon, in other words, Dracula. For a few years in the mid-15th century, he was able to keep both enemies at bay. For that reason, Romanians tend to see him more as a hero than a bloody predator.

For them, the real culprit is a woman, a "Countess Dracula," who lived in western Transylvania at the end of the 16th century. Her name was Elizabeth Bathory, she was a Hungarian noblewoman, and she was brought to trial for killing young virgins in order to bathe in their blood. So goes the legend, much as for Count Dracula.

Vlad the Impaler occupied Bran Castle, the true name of Dracula's home, for perhaps only a decade, but it is his story, his legend that draws visitors from all over the world to this remote corner of Romania.

Once inside, much to their surprise, they discover a beautiful, welcoming home. Until 1947, the royal family of Romania often resided here, and Queen Marie, the English daughter of the Duke of Edinburgh, a son of Queen Victoria, took it upon herself to remodel the fortress, in keeping with all the traditions of Romanian folk art. There are cozy corners heated by tiled stoves, terraces overlooking the mountains, reading rooms that make you want to sit down and stay.

Romania became a Communist state in 1947 and the royal family fled the country. By that time, Queen Marie had died, but Ileana, one of her daughters, settled in the United States. In 1967, in Ellwood City, Pa., not far from the Ohio border, she founded the first Romanian Orthodox monastery for women in the United States.

Traveling in the Carpathian Mountains, searching for Dracula, much to my surprise, I found instead a "Pennsylvania connection," and at this very time, the nuns of the Orthodox Monastery of the Transfiguration are offering for sale a cookbook, which may include, I suspect, some of the very dishes served in the castle once inhabited by Dracula.

(Honicker can be reached

at honicker.republican herald@gmail.com)