Bram Stoker's novel Dracula, which was first published back in 1897, unexpectedly and inadvertently became a blessing to Romania. He attracted a lot of tourists, but the legend diverged from communist ideals and turned a real national hero into a literary villain.
Vampire house
Transylvania - a large region that includes most of central Romania - today for many it is almost a synonym for the word "Dracula". Bram Stoker's novel tells the story of a predatory vampire who lives in a ruined castle high in the Carpathians.
Most of the action takes place in Victorian London, but the most memorable achievement of the novel is precisely the description of Transylvania - a dark, wild, untouched science and modernity. Since Stoker had never been there, his description of the region was largely a figment of his imagination. Nonetheless, his portrayal of the frightening region on the edge of Europe spawned a whole vampire subculture still alive today, with Transylvania at its center - the home for the supernatural.
Independent communist country
Romania has benefited from this novel and its film adaptation. The number of tourists increased from 5, 000 in 1956 to 103, 000 in 1960. By 1970, they reached 2, 300, 000. Since the 1960s, Dracula's worshipers have made pilgrimages to the region, looking for traces of the count among wild landscapes. Romania, then a communist state, allied with the Soviet Union since the Warsaw Pact of 1955, sought to attract Western tourists who imported into the country the currency used to import Western technology. There were also political motives: tourism allowed Romania to demonstrate its ideological achievements and contributed to the development of friendly relations abroad.
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In the 1960s, the Romanian communist leader Nicolae Ceausescu distanced Romania from the Soviet Union. In 1968, he publicly condemned the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Romania sought to present itself to the West as an independent communist country, and tourism had a role to play. The state even simplified entry into the country: border formalities were minimal, and visas were inexpensive, with slight restrictions within the country.
Romanians are baffled
However, those Dracula fans who visited Transylvania in search of a vampire aristocrat were disappointed. Dracula's castle never existed outside of Bram Stoker's imagination. Tourists often found that Romanians did not know anything about the graph.
The fact is that the novel was not published in Romania until 1990 (although parts were published in the popular journal Realitatea ilustrata in the 1930s). Romanians were baffled when they were asked how to get to Dracula's castle or about vampires in Romania.
In 1972, the New York-based travel company General Tours launched the first thematic tour dedicated to Dracula. Romanian Tourism Minister Ioann Cosma, unprepared for a tour in which visitors were asked to stock up on garlic to ward off evil, set up a group to study how Romania should respond to growing interest in Dracula.
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Conceptual mismatch
This was a dilemma. Dracula provided the country with unique sales opportunities. However, tourism based on the supernatural was fundamentally at odds with scientific communism; superstitions were part of a discredited past that communism intended to wipe off the face of the earth.
Thematic "vampire" tourism relied on the concept of Transylvania as an ominous, backward place, contrary to the image of Romania as a modern, developing and industrialized country.
Historical mismatch
There was another problem. Romania had its own historical Dracula, the ruler of the 15th century, Vlad III Tepes, a prince known for his cruelty, who planted his enemies on wooden stakes. Born in Transylvania, Vlad sometimes signed as Dracula, which means “son of a dragon, ” because his father, Vlad II Dracula, was ordained to the Order of the Dragon for his courage in the battle with the Ottomans.
Despite Vlad’s reputation, nationalist historians of the 19th and 20th centuries extolled him as a strong leader who defended his country from external threats in turbulent times. As Ceausescu became more interested in nationalism, the medieval rulers of Romania presented themselves as the forerunners of his independent foreign policy.
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Then, in 1972, Radu Florescu and Raymond T. McNelly published the book “Finding Dracula”, which claimed that Stoker used Vlad as a prototype for the count, creating a new excuse for fans to travel to places associated with the “real” Dracula.
This is where the problem lies. No country will be glad to see its national hero in the image of a bloodthirsty vampire. In 1973, the Romanian Ministry of Tourism developed its own tour, Dracula: Legend and Truth, dedicated to Vlad’s life. He was frankly propagandistic and aimed to firmly draw the line between historical Dracula and the fictional vampire. The ministry decided that Dracula could not be part of Romania’s tourism offerings, reluctantly enduring such tourism, but not encouraging it. This remained the official position until the collapse of the communist regime in December 1989.
