THE OLD AND NEW DRACULA CASTLE: THE POIENARI FORTRESS IN DRACULA SEQUELS AND TRAVEL MEMOIRS

MARIUS-MIRCEA CRI܇AN

The representation of Transylvania as the land of vampires has flourished especially since the 1970s. With the recent rebirth of Gothic narratives, Transylvania has become again one of the favourite locations of vampire stories. Some of these recent vampire novels have been successful in Romania too: Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt’s novel Dracula, the un-dead was translated into Romanian in 2010. If in Stoker’s novel Transylvania is a vivid complex place, characterized by contrasts, in the recent sequel Transylvania is reduced to a theatre background. One of the tendencies of Dracula sequels is to locate some Transylvanian places into Wallachia, the province lead by Vlad ܉epe܈. The Poenari fortress is represented here as the centre of the Romanian vampires, a location where magic rituals which transform common people into vampires are performed. This article discusses this and other places of Romania which have been associated with Dracula, such as Sighi܈oara, Bistri܊a and the Monastery Snagov. My aim is to explain how real locations have become fictional spaces and how the stereotypes related to a certain place have evolved since the publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Since the 1970s, the Poienari fortress has become the favourite location of Dracula’s castle in most sequels of Bram Stoker’s vampire novel. Some critics have speculated about certain connections between the novel and this citadel, but there is no evidence that Stoker had any information about it. The stronghold is not referred to in the 1897 novel, and there are no mentions of it in any of Stoker’s sources for Dracula. Without having any connection with the vampire count, the fortress is related to the historical Dracula, Vlad ܉epes, the medieval voivode of Wallachia. Contemporary literary criticism has admitted that the connections between the vampire Count Dracula and this fortress are speculative. Sir Cristopher Frayling, who in a radio 46 Marius-Mircea CriЮan broadcast narrated his visit to the ruins in the 1970s, says that Bram Stoker “can have known nothing about this fortress”.1 This article proposes a synthesis of the reflections of the Poienari fortress in some Dracula sequels and some travel memoirs which follow the Dracula trail. As this category of literature has numerous (if not endless) titles, I have selected some of the works in which the reflection of the fortress is well contoured: the novels Dracula Unborn 1977 (part of the trilogy Dracula Lives! omnibus edition 1993) by Peter Tremayne, Children of the Night by Dan Simmons (1992), The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova (2006), and the travel memoirs Digging for Dracula by John Sean Hillen (1997) and In the Footsteps of Dracula by Steven P. Unger (2010).

Vlad ܉epe܈’ fortress and the transfer of meaning As Elizabeth Miller shows, a distinction between the Wallachian voivode and the vampire count is fundamental in Dracula studies.2 Bram Stoker took the name of the voivode and gave it to his blood- sucking aristocrat. The working notes prove that his information about the historical leader was limited, and the references to him occur only in some passages of the novel. When Stoker read William Wilkinson’s An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, he observed a footnote in the text which referred to the meaning of the word “Dracula” in Romanian: “Dracula in the Wallachian language means Devil.”3 And this detail made him change the name of the aristocratic vampire from Count Vampyr to Count Dracula.4 The only items of information Stoker found in Wilkinson referred to his anti-Ottoman attitude and his attack against the Turkish troops on the opposite bank of the Danube:

This article was supported by a grant from the Romanian National Authority for Scientific Research, CNCS – UEFISCDI, project number: PN-II-RU-PD-2011-3-0194. 1 Sir Cristopher Frayling, in the BBC Radio 3 series Bram Stoker: Examining the Life and Work of Bram Stoker, 18 April 2012): http://www.bbc.co.uk/ programmes/b01g5z43 (accessed 2 December 2012). 2 Elizabeth Miller, Dracula: Sense and Nonsense, Westcliff-on-Sea: Desert Island, 2006, 149-50. 3 William Wilkinson, An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia & Moldavia. Including Various Political Observations Relating to Them, London: Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1820, 19. 4 Marius Cri܈an, “Bram Stoker’s Transylvania: Between Historical and Mythical Readings”, TRANS – Internet Journal for Cultural Studies, 17 (April 2010): http://www.inst.at/trans/17Nr/6-7/6-7_crisan17.htm.