For horror fans, the name sits in the throat and is urged out with an unholy drawl, but -- aside from the sheer Gothic drama of medieval towns and hilltop citadels -- there's very little to evoke Transylvania's ominous association. Yes, Vlad Tepes was born in the fortress city of Sighisoara, and wolves do roam the Carpathians (in fact, they're considered a protective force in Romanian culture), but Transylvania's reality is more one of fairy-tale forests surrounding charming Saxon towns and fortified church steeples poking through the treetops.
A possession of the Hungarian king from the 10th century, Transylvania has been the source of a power struggle for 1,000 years. Hungary only gave up its territorial claims in 1996. Legend tells how the lost children of Hamelin emerged from a cave here; of course, that's a fanciful account of the arrival of Transylvania's Aryan German-speaking population, the Saxons. Settlers from the Lower Rhine, Flanders, and the Moselle region, these blue-eyed blondes were lured here in the 12th century by the Hungarian monarchy who promised them land and other liberties in return for protection against the Ottoman and Tartar threat. The Saxons established seven fortified cities, the Siebenbürgen, with outlying villages centered on fortified churches, serving as both spiritual and military protection. Today the major settlements of Brasov, Sighisoara, and Sibiu remain popular destinations, but there are dozens more Saxon villages throughout Transylvania that are remarkably untouched by modern life. The Saxon community has dwindled over the centuries, but Transylvania still includes a sizeable Hungarian minority tracing its ancestry to the Széklers, a clan of warriors accorded noble privileges for defending Hungary's eastern frontier.
Separating Transylvania from Wallachia in the south and Moldavia to the east are the Carpathian Mountains, where Anthony Minghella filmed Cold Mountain, a movie shot through with images of a sublime, beautiful wilderness. While you won't encounter any wolves, were or otherwise, you will -- as many trekkers discover -- come across the odd shepherd or remote mountain village where smiles and frowns are your only tools of communication.
Near Brasov is Bran Castle, touted by the ill-informed as "Dracula's Castle." With a gorgeous medieval Saxon center Brasov is also home to the ominously pretty Black Church, the biggest Gothic cathedral between Istanbul and Vienna. And if you are pining to rub shoulders with a real count, Transylvania may have the answer: Count Tudor Kalnoky offers some of the best lodgings in the country in the Hungarian farming community of Miclosoara.
Vlad & the Epic Mythology of Count Dracula
Etched into popular consciousness by countless horror films, Count Dracula is best described as a mythical figure loosely based on blood-drinking rituals known to have occurred in certain Balkanic regions. However, Bram Stoker's anemic somnambulist is most fittingly linked with a Wallachian warlord nicknamed Vlad Tepes -- Vlad the Impaler -- in honor of his penchant for bloodletting and cruel tortures. In fact, his real-life atrocities were far more terrifying than anything conjured up by Bela Lugosi or Gary Oldman. As young boys, Vlad and his brother, Radu the Handsome, were sent to the Turks as hostages by their own father, who was nicknamed Dracul, or "Devil," because of a knightly order to which he belonged.
Undoubtedly witnessing all sorts of terrible tortures and abuses, and living in fear of his young life, Vlad remained in Adrianople until he was 17, when his father was assassinated by the Hungarians, and the Turks gave him an army in order to reclaim the Wallachian throne. It took him almost 10 years to finally capture the Wallachian throne convincingly and establish his court in Târgoviste. There he earned his reputation for dire cruelty; in one popular story, he set fire to a sealed castle filled with sick, poor, and destitute people, "to rid them of their troubles," as he callously put it. He ruthlessly did away with any perceived threat and enjoyed watching his victims die, often setting up banquets from which to observe the spectacle of suffering. Impalement was favored because the torment could go on for days, and he took great pleasure in mass executions; some estimates place the number of men, women, and children who died at his hands at 500,000. Eventually, it was his brother, Radu the Handsome, who caused Vlad to flee to Hungary where he was first imprisoned but then converted to Catholicism. After Radu's death, he once again took control of Wallachia, but was killed in 1476 in a battle with the Turks who displayed his head in Constantinople to prove to the world that he was indeed dead, while his body was supposedly buried at a monastery on the island of Snagov near Bucharest. Apparently, excavations there in 1931 found no sign of his coffin.
