The Curse of Vlad the Impaler is a mythological belief associated with the historical figure Vlad III, also known as Vlad the Impaler or Vlad Dracula. He was a 15th-century ruler of Wallachia, a region in present-day Romania. Vlad the Impaler is infamous for his brutal and sadistic methods of ruling, particularly his habit of impaling his enemies on long stakes. This cruel practice earned him the nickname "the Impaler" and instilled fear in those who encountered him. According to legend, Vlad the Impaler placed a curse upon those who defied or angered him. It is believed that this curse would bring misfortune, tragedy, and even death upon its recipients.
It is believed that this curse would bring misfortune, tragedy, and even death upon its recipients. The curse allegedly impacted not only the individuals who directly crossed paths with Vlad but also their families and future generations. The Curse of Vlad the Impaler is said to have contributed to the downfall of several prominent figures in history.
Curse of Dracula?
A scream echoes through the old house on the hill in Transylvania. A man in a black cape flies down the stairs. Outside a storm threatens. But even in Dracula’s hometown, evil is not what it used to be. The man in black is Hans Bruno Frolich, a Lutheran priest. The shriek comes from his young daughter, playing upstairs in the parish house.
And a few cobblestone streets away at the Club Dracula Internet Cafe, the only thing diabolical is the price of a drink.
“It’s purely commercial,” says Holom Adrian, who works in the basement cafe, explaining the decision to name the club after the town’s most famous son and tack up a few paper bats. “It’s just a business opportunity. It’s marketing.”
AdvertisementFather Frolich takes a different view.
“This Dracula legend deforms real history,” he says. “It’s not compatible with the Christian faith in any case. You might make money exploiting Dracula, but it makes a very bad image for Romania. In America and Europe, it’s Transylvania equals Dracula. That’s all anyone knows. This is a country with a great history and culture.”
Fourteen years after the collapse of communism, Romania has few growth industries. Dracula, to the chagrin of some here, is one. But as the country tries to take advantage of its notoriety as the home of Bram Stoker’s fictional vampire (who shares a name with a real 15th century Romanian prince, Vlad Dracula, who was born here around 1431), a chorus of critics worries that the country is, in essence, selling its soul to the devil.
Disneyland of the undead
Nothing has sparked more controversy than the government’s on-again-off-again proposal to build a huge Dracula theme park. “Mickey Mouse with fangs, lots of vampire kitsch, by the sound of it,” says Elizabeth Miller, an English professor in Newfoundland who is the president of the Canadian chapter of the Transylvanian Society of Dracula, a scholarly organization dedicated to the study of its namesake, both real and imagined.
In 2001, Tourism Minister Matei Agaton Dan announced the building of a $32-million Dracula theme park, sort of a Disneyland of the undead, with a castle, faux torture chamber, rides, shops and a 700-room hotel. All of which was expected to eventually draw more than a million visitors a year to Sighisoara.
The project, however, seemed cursed from the beginning. The venture had to use the name Dracula Park, since a Romanian hotel had already trademarked the preferred Dracula Land. And the tourism ministry had to sponsor a school competition to come up with a new look for Dracula when Universal Studios demanded royalties from the usage of any Bela Lugosi-like vampire imagery.
Then, like the climax of any good vampire story, the priest showed up. Frolich and a small group of locals attacked the idea of dedicating a park to the Prince of Darkness.
Advertisement“I understand that the financial situation in Romania is very bad,” Frolich says, “but I’m a priest and I can’t say this is a good way to make money.”
The Romanian Orthodox Church, the dominant denomination in the country, also objected. “We are not glad that Romania will be associated with Dracula,” declared Bishop Vincent Ploiesteanu, perhaps a bit tardily. “We are disturbed by the name Dracula.”
The tourism ministry responded with a short video called “Dracula and the Good Lord,” claiming that a theme park would be a way to educate visitors about Romania’s spiritual history.
Before long, even the U.N. was involved -- or at least UNESCO, which lists Sighisoara as a World Heritage Site and complained that the development threatened the town’s historical integrity. Greenpeace protested the plan to cut down an ancient oak forest to make room for the park. And last year, Britain’s Prince Charles, a patron of the preservation organization Mihai Eminescu Trust, took up the issue with Romania’s president after a visit to Transylvania. “The Dracula-land Park,” the trust wrote in an open letter to the government, “will turn the history of Romania into a cartoon. It will ridicule Romania.”
Early this year, the tourism ministry declared that the park would be built outside of Bucharest, in Snagov, where Vlad Dracula is said to be buried. The government floated a $5-million bond issue to raise money for construction, but most of the investors bailed out last month when the new tourism minister, Miron Mitrea, announced that the park was not one of his priorities. Days later, Prime Minister Adrian Nastase went on state television to insist that the park would still go ahead.
“I suppose it’s OK,” Dracula scholar Miller says of the theme park, “as it will bring some badly needed tourist dollars into Romania. But I am concerned that it will serve to further exacerbate the confusion between fiction and history.”
That confusion is evident in Sighisoara, where a jewel-box citadel of 16th century architecture crowns a hill overlooking a river and forest-covered mountains. Vlad Dracula’s reputed family abode has been turned into the Dracula House Restaurant, featuring such dishes as Dracula soup (tomato). A 4-foot-tall sign showing a toothy and cape-bedecked vampire points the way in case tourists get lost. Stores sell T-shirts adorned with a likeness of the real Vlad (whose long hair, cap and mustache make him look more like a biker than a vampire) and statuettes of a blood-sucking fiend devouring a naked woman.
“The fact that a restaurant has a name like Dracula is not bad but that it has a vampire sign is not good,” says Adriana Antihi, the director of the nearby Sighisoara Museum, housed in the town’s magnificent medieval clock tower. “People like big names. Dracula is a big name. But the young people don’t know the real story.”
The real Dracula
The real story is even bloodier than the fictional one. Vlad Dracula spent the first five years of his life in Sighisoara and later became the voivode, or ruler, of the neighboring Wallachia principality, where he founded Bucharest. In Romania, Vlad tends to be known by his nickname Vlad Tepes (the Impaler), after his favored form of capital punishment.
The title was well-earned. Vlad lined roads with thousands of his enemies -- men, women, even children -- impaled upon wooden stakes, dying agonizing deaths. When he saw a peasant with a torn shirt, Vlad had the man’s wife impaled for not taking better care of her husband. When several ambassadors declined to remove their turbans in his presence, Vlad had the hats nailed to their heads. One contemporary drawing depicts Vlad tucking into an alfresco dinner in front of a forest of withering impaled bodies.
His enemies wrote tracts with titles such as “The Frightening and Truly Extraordinary Story of a Wicked Blood Drinking Tyrant Called Prince Dracula.” Even when he was imprisoned, Vlad amused himself by impaling mice in his cell.
Yet in Romania, Vlad is a national hero. Romanians still talk about how he could place a gold drinking cup at a public fountain and no one dared to steal the precious vessel. Mihai Eminescu, one of the country’s great writers, penned a poem in the 19th century calling on Vlad to once again save his country.
“Vlad is a model for justice,” museum director Antihi says. “He was very, very strong but just. He fought against the Turks and for the independence of Wallachia. Capital punishment was done by all the great kings of antiquity. He didn’t invent capital punishment. He needed to scare the Turks. Ivan the Terrible was much worse than Vlad the Impaler.”
In 1897, Irish author Bram Stoker borrowed the last name of the historical Vlad for the title of his vampire novel, which he called “Dracula.” Although most of the book takes place in England, Stoker set the beginning and end of his story in Transylvania, which at the time was actually part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, not Romania. Miller, an emeritus professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland, concludes in her “Dracula Handbook” (Gerot Publishing) that Stoker knew little about the historical Vlad other than his surname. “Vlad was not the inspiration for the novel,” Miller writes, “nor was Count Dracula based on Vlad.”
Still, the two Draculas became synonymous. The popular image of Dracula was cemented by the 1931 Universal Studios version of Stoker’s book, starring Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi, whose widow’s peak, cape and thick accent became the character’s trademarks.
Except in Romania, where 44 years of communism walled off the country from Western pop culture until the 1989 revolution. Stoker’s novel didn’t even appear in translation until 1990.
Recently, Romanians have been trying to make up for lost time. In addition to the park proposal, there is in Bucharest the Dracula Infernal Travel Agency, where the walls bristle with medieval arms instead of the usual landscape posters, and the Count Dracula Club, which touts such dishes as “Renfield’s Surprise” (named after the bug-eating lunatic in Stoker’s novel). And Dracula hotels have been popping up around the country like vampires at sunset.
Divining the park’s fate at this point has become the latest mystery set in Romania. The tourism ministry and the park’s designer, Dan Covali, didn’t respond to interview requests. The once effusive Dracula Park Web site has gone blank. “Closed for maintenance,” a note says. “Will be back online shortly.”
The theme park idea, however, refuses to die. At least three cities (Brasov, Poienari and Bistrita) with connections to both Draculas have announced plans for mini-Dracula parks.
And even if the theme park doesn’t come back to life, Frolich says that he has his hands full trying to keep the fictional Dracula from overwhelming the factual as it is.
“If people visit the church, we tell them the true history,” he says. “In religious class or my work with young people, I tell them exploiting Dracula is a bad thing. But I can’t fight against a bar or a club. It’s a free country.”
A scream echoes through the old house on the hill in Transylvania. A man in a black cape flies down the stairs. Outside a storm threatens. But even in Dracula’s hometown, evil is not what it used to be. The man in black is Hans Bruno Frolich, a Lutheran priest. The shriek comes from his young daughter, playing upstairs in the parish house.
One such example is Mehmed the Conqueror, the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire and one of Vlad's main adversaries. Despite his military success, Mehmed the Conqueror faced a series of failures and setbacks following his encounters with Vlad. It is believed that this was a result of the curse and the lasting impact of Vlad's wrath. Another well-known case associated with the curse is that of Matthias Corvinus, the King of Hungary. Vlad the Impaler was imprisoned by Matthias Corvinus for several years, during which he endured harsh conditions. Legend states that after Vlad's release, he placed a curse upon Matthias and his descendants. The curse allegedly led to a series of tragic events and misfortunes that plagued the Hungarian royal family. Whether or not the Curse of Vlad the Impaler is based on truth or simply a mythical tale, it is undeniable that the figure of Vlad the Impaler continues to captivate the imagination of people around the world. His brutal methods of ruling and the fear he instilled in his enemies have left a lasting legacy. The stories surrounding his curse add an air of mystery and intrigue to an already dark and gruesome history..
Reviews for "The Cursed Bloodline of Vlad the Impaler"
1. Sofia - 2/5 stars - I was really excited to read "The Curse of Vlad the Impaler" as I am a fan of horror novels, but unfortunately, this book was a huge disappointment. The plot was predictable and lacked any real suspense. The characters were one-dimensional and I found it hard to connect with any of them. The writing style was also quite mediocre and did not engage me as a reader. Overall, I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone looking for a thrilling horror read.
2. Mark - 1/5 stars - "The Curse of Vlad the Impaler" was an absolute bore. The pacing was incredibly slow, and it took forever for anything remotely interesting to happen. The author's attempts at building suspense fell flat, and the so-called "twist" at the end was predictable from the beginning. The characters were poorly developed, and I found myself not caring at all about their fates. I regret wasting my time and money on this book.
3. Rachel - 2/5 stars - I was intrigued by the concept of "The Curse of Vlad the Impaler," but unfortunately, it failed to deliver on its promising premise. The story felt disjointed and lacked cohesive storytelling. The characters were forgettable and their motivations were unclear. Additionally, I found the writing to be underwhelming and lacking in descriptive detail. Overall, this book fell short of my expectations and left me unsatisfied.
4. James - 2.5/5 stars - "The Curse of Vlad the Impaler" had potential, but it ultimately fell flat for me. The pacing was inconsistent, with long stretches of nothing happening followed by rushed and unsatisfying resolutions. The characters were shallow and lacked depth, making it difficult to invest in their struggles. While the historical elements were interesting, they were overshadowed by the underdeveloped plot. I would recommend looking elsewhere for a more engrossing horror novel.