For Sale: Dracula’s Transylvanian castle – 7 Jun 08

Al Jazeera English aired this three-minute report on June 7, 2008, when Bran Castle had recently been handed back to the heirs of Romania’s royal family and was being offered for sale. The correspondent Stephen Cole opens with the castle as the “legendary home” of Dracula, calls the Dracula name a multi-million-dollar brand and notes that it makes Bran the country’s biggest tourist draw.

The middle of the piece retells the castle story the way Romanian guides were telling it then: Vlad the Impaler, Queen Marie’s summer parties, a “prisoner’s room” where Vlad was supposedly held, and villagers who say they hear his victims crying on stormy nights. It then turns to the news. A representative of the owners says the castle and its grounds should fetch at least 100 million euros, a Romanian voice objects that the country has more important things to spend money on, and Cole closes on the idea that a buyer would be acquiring a legend as well as a building.

This is a useful report precisely because it repeats the legend uncritically, so it is worth knowing what the record says. Bran was built as a fortress and customs post by the Saxon townspeople of Brașov after King Louis I of Hungary granted them the right in 1377; Vlad III, the fifteenth-century prince of Wallachia, did not build it with forced labour, and historians have dropped the old claim that he was imprisoned there. Bram Stoker never visited Romania and does not mention Bran in Dracula. The castle’s link to the count was largely a creation of tourism promoters in the communist era.

Queen Marie did not inherit the castle; the city of Brașov gave it to her in 1920. It passed to her daughter Princess Ileana, was seized by the communist state in 1948 and returned in 2006 to Ileana’s son, Archduke Dominic of Habsburg, and his sisters. The sale reported here never happened: the family kept Bran and has run it as a museum since 2009.