The Real Story of Dracula (Documentary)

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Dracula a name that inspires horror and fear a bloodthirsty killer immortalized in fiction and film the incredible Legends of the vampire conveyed in folklore myths and Irish author Bram Stoker's best-selling novel, Dracula, had a human inspiration. A 15th century Romanian prince called Vlad the Impaler. The story of him and more as we continue to search for the story of the

real

alien Dracula was first published in 1897. Bram Stoker's Dracula has become one of the most popular and terrifying works of fiction in the world.

This best-selling horror novel has achieved enough sales to keep it in continuous print for over 100 years. Dracula has continued to fascinate readers with his indelible image of evil. the myth of the personified vampire I Am Dracula's visual perception of Dracula owes much to Baylor Lugosi's gentle, well-adapted portrayal of the character in the 1931 film version, but Stoker's Prince of Darkness is an even more terrifying figure: a demon with sharp teeth and grotesque, spiky features Dracula is a vampire, a dead man who must consume the blood of the living to survive and, in doing so, recruits them into his ranks of the undead.

A monster with the blood of hundreds of victims running through his veins. He is a

real

ly powerful character. but Dracula's greatest strength lies in the history invested in him, a history that Bram Stoker forged by combining thousands of years of old world vampire folklore superstitions and historical facts in the person of a savage 15th century Romanian tyrant known as Vlad. the Impaler and perhaps such an important stoker. he brought his own tormented life and the Victorian era he lived through into the creative mix. It may have been Bram Stoker's destiny to write Dracula. Death pursued him from the day he was born on November 8, 1847 in a town not far from Dublin.

It was the heyday. of the great Irish potato famine during the 1840s, of the 8 million inhabitants of Ireland, more than a million and a half died of hunger and disease, those who did not die wandered the streets as if the stoker from The Walking Dead I would have been born in this comfortable middle class house. In Clontarf, although he was aware of the suffering outside, it would be some time before he could see it with his own eyes. He was practically a prisoner in this house for the first seven years of his life, bedridden by a mysterious illness that left him paralyzed every day.

The day his mother told him about the troublesome outside world along with supernatural tales and horror stories from her own childhood, the stoker was a very sickly child in his early years and his mother told him scary stories part of the time about fear and others. times about this terrible plague of cholera in Sligo when people were buried alive and this must have worked on his feverish imagination at the age of seven, the stoker miraculously recovered and was finally free to play in the cemetery in the neighborhood where he lived, There was a suicide cemetery. it was a plot specifically set aside to bury people who committed suicide.

The stalker is known to have spent endless hours playing hypnotized in the graveyard, which may have been one of the reasons why he acquired this concept of the undead that these people are still wondering about. Stoker grew into adulthood, seemed to leave his preoccupation with death behind, attended university and accepted a job as a civil servant in 1878, married, moved to London and worked as a theater director for the renowned stage actor Henry Irving. Stoker loved the theater, but he had an even greater passion for writing. Stoker wrote mainly Tales of Romantic Adventures, but he was quite captivated by the fantastic.

In 1882 he published Under the Sunset, a collection of horror stories for children. One story was about a plague that took the form of a shadowy giant, another about a character called the King of Death. At that time only a handful of vampire stories had been written such as Varney the Vampire in Cereal from the British magazine 1847 but what caught Stoker's attention was a book published in 1872. He had been impressed by the work of another colleague. The Irishman Sheridan Lafinder, who wrote a novel called Carmilla about a female vampire, wanted to write a vampire story. What happened is that he started researching vampire folklore.

This was the birth of Dracula in the spring of 1890. Stoker began a meticulous process of vampire research that would take him to libraries from England to Ireland and last seven years while he began. Stoker made an important decision. While his novel would be based on folklore, it would also be contemporary. His book would employ modern inventions such as the Dracula typewriter. As a product of a society in transition in the Western world, arts and literature were beginning to free themselves from their classical roots, becoming forms of expression that appealed to more impulsive sensations. This transformation was especially true in Stoker's England.

These were Victorian times named for the rigid monarch who ruled Britain in the second half of the 19th century; it was an era in which behavior and morality were expected to be as restrained as the queen herself, but a new form of fiction was being created. becoming increasingly popular with British audiences: the gothic novel for Stoker's Horror Story style was a perfect fit, tantalizing readers with emotionally charged action and exotic supernatural settings. Sexuality could only be suggested indirectly as a bite on the neck because he could not write about sexuality as we do today, more openly than this was kind.

It is a subterfuge that the bite on the neck was just a metaphor for the sexual act and that it is much more romantic than simply writing about the sexual act, but while Dracula would have his way with women, he would be far from a womanizer. Stoker's Dracula was not a romantic character, he was a hideous old man who grew younger as he drank blood, but he never became attractive and never wasted time in seducing any of his victims. I mean his idea of ​​a social call was, you know, crashing through your bedroom window in the form. of a wolf During that time in England the origin of man had been hotly debated Charles Darwin's Descent of Man had recently been published the cornerstone of evolutionary thought Stoker wrote during the time when Darwin's theories were really disrupting Victorian consciousness and Dracula was some kind of horrible evolutionary regressing character who could crawl down the evolutionary ladder to become a bat or a wolf.

I mean, he blurred the distinctions between men and animals. Dracula was probably also inspired by men who acted like animals in the fall of 1888, just two years before he began. When investigating Dracula, the newspapers were filled with stories of Jack the Ripper, this mysterious killer savagely attacked young women in the misty streets of London's East End. He surprised me at night for the next seven years. Bram Stoker would read many more horror stories when writing Dracula. Travel through hundreds of vampire myths and legends when in search of History returns we will discover what Bram Stoker unearthed from the story of the vampire who attacked Adam the story of a 17th century woman who murdered hundreds of girls so she could bathe in their blood .

In the pages of Dracula, the vampire hunter, Dr. Van Helsing talks about the history of the four vampires, let me tell you that it is known everywhere that men have been in ancient Greece, in ancient Rome, in France , in India and in China, this is what Bram Stoker discovered during In the seven years of research that went into creating the vampire myths and legends of Dracula from almost all times and places in history, there is no civilization that has not had some variation on the idea of ​​the vampire or the being that returns from the grave. feeding on the energy or blood of living people vampire stories date back to Creation itself According to some Hebrew scholars the world's first man was persecuted by the world's first vampire she was Adam's wife Lilith in the Talmud the book of Jewish laws Adam had a wife before Eve named Lilith Lilith challenged Adam's authority in their marriage seeing herself as his equal Adam wanted to be on top while they had sex and she said no way if we are equal then we both we are at the top and of course that was in his mind a rebellion in an Abomination and he refused to accept that and Lilith and Adam argued for a while when she realized that she was not going to get her way according again to Jewish folklore, she was banished to the shores of the Red Sea, she later returned as a demon possessing vampiric powers and attacked Adam, his new wife Eve and their children.

In Greek mythology a similar story arose of a female vampire, the lamia was a queen of Libya who had several children with Zeus, King of the Greek gods. After they were confiscated by Hera Zeus's wife, the lamia fled and was transformed into a creature that attacked other mothers' children and drank their blood in India, the vampire goddess Kali dates back to the 6th century, she was a creature with multiple arms, a necklace. of skulls and a mouth full of fangs from which blood dripped. The concept of the vampire runs through almost all Asian cultures in Malaysia.

The vampire was a being that landed near the cribs of babies and with its long snake tongue sucked their teeth. blood kappas were feared in Japan, they were blood-sucking monsters that hid in lakes and rivers waiting to feast on passing travelers and in China came the vampire shangshi shangshis were strong and ferocious capable of transforming into wolves and tearing off the heads or limbs of their prey. in the Aztec culture of Mexico a blood-drinking vampire bat god that Unfortunate Souls in the underworld the Aztecs worshiped these flying mammals although they do not weigh more than an ounce in a year a colony of 100 bats can consume an amount of blood equivalent to draining an entire herd of 25 cows it was evolutionist Charles Darwin who saw their blood drinking firsthand.

He published the first European reports on the vampire bat in 1890, the year Stoker began his research for Dracula abroad. Dracula Bram Stoker found an important source of European vampires. superstitions was a book called The Land Beyond the Forest the English translation of Transylvania now contained within the borders of present-day Romania Transylvania was an isolated country surrounded by steep mountains The stoker discovered that vampire stories had been told here for centuries before from the Middle East. Ages Gypsies and peasants told stories about the evil Nosferatu, these blood-drinking undead had human appearance, their bite could turn their victims into vampires like them.

The vampire stories that originated in Transylvania were stories to explain the inexplicable. Until Stoker's time, death and illness were viewed here with ignorance and superstition, disease hysterias were common, those considered responsible were branded vampires even after they were dead and buried, when someone suspected they were doing harm to others. the village of their villagers, they opened the coffin and in those days there was There was no embalming and the same process of decomposition of the body causes the faces to swell, so they appear full. Some of the blood returns from some of the internal organs, so it would be very natural for blood to appear around the mouth, etc.

You know, two and two equals five, oh, that person must have been out there, you know, feeding on the living to ultimately ensure that the vampire couldn't return. Legend said that the corpse could be decapitated or burned, but there was another method that the stoker found. His research would become the image most identified with keeping the undead where they belong, one of the ways to deal with the Vampire was to keep him in the tomb and one of the ways to keep him in the tomb was to pin him to the ground with Con a stake, the idea was to keep the body underground when these pagan folk tales began to spread throughout the rest of Christian Europe in the 17th century.

Christian symbols were recruited to fight vampires. Christians didn't necessarily believe in the Legends of Nosferatu, but they certainly better be ready. The stake to destroy the vampire should be made of oak. The wood from which the Cross of Christ was supposedly made. Sacred artifacts like the crucifix should render them defenseless. Christianity could not defeat them. It was the myth itself. The vampires were still blamed. In the case of plagues and epidemics, the stories became even more overwhelming when they connected with people who had a real taste for blood when analyzing vampire lore. Bram Stoker discovered that the truth was scarier than the legend, such was the case of Elizabeth Bathory, theblood countess that she was.

She was born in 1560 into one of the most powerful families in Hungary. All of her wishes were attended to by her many servants, but in 1604 the young servants of Isabel's Castle began to disappear. Some were found in the field completely bloodless. The local peasants were sure that a vampire had invaded. in her Town, the culprit was not a vampire, she was a mathematician, a blood taker of some kind, she basically seemed to have had a fetish for blood, she believed that bathing in blood would keep her young and she was a creature that feared growing old, her thirst The bloodbath continued for six years during which she tortured and murdered hundreds of young servant girls, eventually Elizabeth began to run out of servants.

Her crimes were discovered after she made the mistake of killing a young noblewoman and even some members of our own family were involved in the investigation. At the trial in 1611, a diary written in her own handwriting was presented as evidence. Isabel. In it she had recorded the names of the women she massacred. More than 650 in total convicted of her crimes. Isabel Bathory was walled up in a room in her own castle with no windows or doors and only a small opening for food and air, she remained there without a drop of blood to bathe in until her later death, when Stoker was about to discover the Elizabeth Bathory's crimes paled in comparison to the man whose appetite for blood was even more gruesome as in The Search for History Continues, we will meet Stoker's greatest inspiration, the real-life blood drinker who murdered thousands and gave Dracula his name as he continued his research to write Dracula.

Bram Stoker began outlining sections of his novel; some elements did not survive. His own handwritten notes indicate that he was going to call his book The Undead. his vampire was named a companion other elements would remain intact stoker had already begun to make extensive use of the transylvanian places he learned so much from, then he saw red stoker came across the tales of a true transylvanian blood drinker, a 15th century despot who was responsible for the murders of tens of thousands of innocent people Vlad the Impaler for Stoker would be an inhuman inspiration for his vampiric style would provide Stoker's character with a historical lineage and a new foreign name Dracula near the end of the Middle Ages seventeen years -The old prince Vlad, born in Transylvania, began his first reign in Wallachia, he did not last long in Wallachia, being a ruler was a short-term job within the borders of contemporary Romania and south of the Alps of Transylvania, Wallachia was a small country caught between two of history's milestones.

The most powerful forces to the east and south, the Ottoman Turkish Empire was on the rise, aggressively pushing its way into Europe, it had just defeated the Byzantine Empire. Constantinople, its capital had fallen to the Turks only three years earlier, to the west and north was Christian Europe, whose leaders. They began to fear that the Muslim Turks could also conquer their empires, the Lochian territories constantly changing hands. The Turks frequently attacked cities in the south despite alliances made with Vlach leaders, while in the north the kingdom of Hungary struggled to gain control of the country which they also made. deals with Wallachian leaders or assassinated them the governor of Hungary John Hunyadi with the support of the elite class of Wallachia the boyars ordered the murder of Vlad's father the previous ruler of Wallachia then Vlad's brother who was next in the line of succession to the throne he was blinded with red-hot iron stakes and buried alive the young Vlad took control of the country, but for only two months he could not consolidate his power in he fled from the lazy Vlad II, backed by the Hungarians, he became the naked prince Vlad desperately wanted to regain the throne, he wanted a Wallachia free of Hungarians and Turks. intervention wanted revenge for the murder of his father and brother eventually the new prince of Wallachia, to the surprise of his anti-Turkish supporters, Hungary adopted a pro-Turkish policy after seven years in exile Vlad was able to gain enough support to face the death of Radislav II him and regain the throne of Wallachia now the real terror began in the spring of 1456 Prince Vlad, now 25 years old, began the second and longest of his rules, it was time for revenge.

Vlada the Sloth II was dead and John Unnati of Hungary had just died from the plague. this left the boyars to deal with. He had a special occasion planned for them in the capital of Wallachia, tirgo ves. Prince Vlad held an opening celebration at his new palace. He invited 500 boyars along with the five bishops of the region after a day of festivities ordered by Prince Vlad. all his guests, his wives and his attendants impaled, impalement is a lost beginning, it is when someone is nailed to a stake or a post, something like crucifixion, it is a terrible way to die, it is governed by fear, is very effective, it is not very moral, but it keeps people in line, then Prince Vlad would make sure that his current rank lasted longer than the first, the innocent would be massacred along with the guilty victims would be left as examples for everyone to follow.

See, it would be known by a new name, seppich in Romanian, which means driver, but the last one. Vlad Savish's reputation would be built on even greater acts of depravity as he dined among his impaled victims. He would first gather the blood of his victims into bowls, then dip the bread into the blood and slurp it up. Basically, this was the character that fascinated Bram Stoker, a true blood drinker and then stoker, he discovered that Vlog the Impaler had another name. He never signed the name Vlad the Impaler or ever called himself. That other people may call you the Impaler, but what do you say?

Hi I am. Vlad the Impaler, please give me a break. The enemy calls you that. You don't call yourself. He called himself Vladrácula. We have two surviving documents from Cebu, which is a city in Transylvania where he clearly had his name signed by him. Vlad Dracula. Vlad the Impaler. He was the real Dracula, it was a name he inherited from his father, who was baptized into a special order to fight the Turks. His father's name was drakul vladrakul and that was from the order of the dragon that was given to his father by the Holy Roman Emperor.

King Sigismon in Nuremberg in the year 1431. In the name Dracula there is what is called an eclectic ending like Ivan Ivanovic son of Eva Ivan which means son of Draco, I mean son of the one who had the order of the Dragon, the name so impressed. Stoker changed his vampire character from more vampiric to Dracula when, in search of History, he returns, we will learn about the bloody toll that the real Dracula took in Wallachia, his shocking years in prison and the mystery that surrounded his death thanks to the invention of the movable type printing press. mid-15th century press stories about Vlad the Impaler's reign of terror circulated throughout Europe some included his real name Dracula a German pamphlet of the time provoked readers with details of the Real Horror Story to follow here begins a very cruel and terrifying about a wild and bloodthirsty man Dracula, how he impaled people, roasted them and boiled their heads in a kettle and how he skinned people and cut them into pieces like a cabbage.

European leaders also read accounts of Vlad's atrocities, some like Pope Pius II in Rome did not approve of his methods, but realized Vlad's importance in stemming the tide of Ottoman Muslim expansion in 1461. Dracula's Rule It covered Wallachia and several provinces of Transylvania. Prince Vlad continued to impale his political enemies at home while his armies with their guerrilla tactics successfully attacked the Turks. forces much larger in number before the end of the year Vlad boldly launched his largest assault against the Turks. Vlad's army, only 30,000 strong, killed more than 20,000 Turkish soldiers in a matter of months. The Ottoman Sultan Muhammad II decided to counterattack in the spring of 1462, with full powers.

The full-scale invasion of Wallachia began. Prince Vlad was overwhelmed by an army of over two hundred thousand men led by Muhammad II himself as Vlad's army retreated north. He left nothing to inherit to his enemies. He burned crops. He destroyed the cattle. He poisoned Wells and set fire to the cities. The Turks. They finally made their way to Turgo Vis. Vlad had abandoned his deserted capital. Most shocking was the gruesome spectacle Vlad had made of his Turkish prisoners captured the previous year. summer half eaten by vultures in the south supposedly said and this is a document in Turkish sources, what can be done against a man who commits such acts?

Stan Muhammad II left Wallachia with most of his army, but he was already defective. The impaler's days were numbered. Vlad fled. With what remained of his army to Castle Dracula, his fortified fortress at the foot of the Transylvanian Alps, here he made a last stand against a small Turkish force before the castle was invaded. He escaped through a secret passage and made his way to Transylvania. The second reign of Wallachia ended in his six years as ruler. He tortured and murdered over forty thousand innocent men, women and children in a country whose population was only half a million.

He killed an even larger number of Turks. Vlad was eventually captured and imprisoned by the The new king of Hungary, Matthias Corvinus, son of John Hunyadi, Vlad, was held in this fortress tower on the grounds of the king's palace, but even in prison, Vlad the Impaler honored in his name while he was in prison he could not abandon his bad habits. Impalement now he couldn't get humans to impale himself while he was in prison so he would catch mice and torture and impale them and then he would have his jailers next to him, birds from the market and he would torture and impale them during Vlad's 12 years. years in prison Wallachia had once again fallen into pro-Turkish hands King Matthias was pressured by many of the leaders of Christian Europe to release him the king made a deal with Dracula in exchange for his freedom Vlad swore loyalty to Matthias and Converted to Roman Catholicism by renouncing his Orthodox faith, Vladen Dracula was released from prison in 1475.

With the support of Matthias Vlad made a third run for the throne of Wallachia and seized power a year later. This rain would last as long as his first death finally caught up with the true Dracula that he was. He was murdered in December 1476. Some accounts say that he was murdered by the remaining boyars in the country, who could not conceive of another government of Vlad the Impaler. Others say that he was killed by the Turks in battle. In any case, his head was shown to Muhammad II as evidence. that the hated Impaler was finally put to sleep.

The decapitated body of Vlad Dracula was taken to a remote monastery near the town of Snogov. He had personally chosen the church here as his final resting place during his second reign. Prince Floyd built five such monasteries in Wallachia even though he regularly murdered religious leaders whom he did not trust, he was still concerned about the salvation of his soul in us, but the evil soul of Dracula could never be cleaned. Tradition says that he was buried in a crypt right in front of the altar so that when the priest would pass over the tomb during the liturgy, it would in a way absolve him of his many sins.

The Saga of the Real Dracula Does Not Die Here In 1931, an expedition led by the Romanian government excavated Dracula's tomb, but when that tomb was opened, they grabbed the stone. taken out of the coffin and bodies were missing animal bones were found in the tomb not the bones of a human being the real Dracula survived the tomb Bram Stoker not only immortalized his name but used his life in his novel in the book Dracula spoke with pride from a Transylvanian ancestor, the description closely followed the real Dracula's fight against the Turks. Stoker's Dracula came complete with a bloodline that ran through the history he uncovered, part myth and vampire folklore from centuries past and part reality in the form of the Vlog, the Impaler.

Stoker's Dracula. was the total vampire when in search of The story continues, we will discover how Romania today venerates Dracula as a national hero and we will learn about the final fate of Bram Stoker while Bram Stoker's Dracula became one of the most enduring works of modern literature that never met. Astonishing number eight success of the 17 books Stoker wrote He never made any money in his life immediately after its publication Stoker produced a stage version of Dracula It was a resounding failure It opened and closed on the same night in 1912 An exhausted stoker died in darkness and poverty at the age of 64 years.

At his request he was cremated, not buried, ironically, it would be the scenario that resurrected Dracula in 1927, a recently adapted version premiered on Broadway. Dracula lost his grotesque physical appearance and this time he put on a tuxedo. It was a resounding successstar was Bella Lugosi Lugosi starred in the film version four years later Dracula would become the most frequently adapted literary work in film history the 1992 version directed by Francis Coppola was a box office success grossing over $192 million worldwide The image of Dracula was used to attract, not repel, it appeared on hundreds of consumer goods, from toys to snacks, the book itself would become a phenomenon published around the world, the novel has been translated into more Of 50 languages ​​in Romania today, the real Dracula is still called defective seppich in official government records.

He is not considered a cruel tyrant but a national hero for his fight against the Turks. In the National Military Museum in Bucharest, a set of his armor is displayed at the Borgo Pass of Transylvania, where Bram Stoker's novel begins and ends, now the Castle Dracula hotel is located, inside you can buy a fifth of Dracula vodka home. At its core, Dracula is more than a good horror story and more than the brutal Prince of Wallachia that Bram Stoker wrote about raw humans. impulses and desires that are shared by the majority Dracula does everything we are told we cannot do today Dracula can freely expose himself to blood Dracula can be as promiscuously sexual as he chooses Dracula as a power of wealth Eternal youth instant hypnotic control over the opposite sex or the same sex castle in Europe is a great wardrobe and it is the American dream, the price Stoker's Dracula paid for his power was great, but the allure of that power is one that will haunt humanity forever, the one that can be found in the darkest corners of our hearts.

Why the story of Dracula will never die That's what Bram Stoker discovered when he went in search of History abroad. On a strange night in 1431, this Transylvanian fortress city saw the birth of one of the most terrifying figures in history. He was baptized Dracula and unleashed a reign. of Terror in the country we now call Romania his name became synonymous with cruelty hundreds of years later his exploits inspired the greatest horror story of our time, that of Count Dracula, the blood-drinking vampire, the real Dracula died in battle in 1476. the story of an American family who for generations has lived in his shadow, are related to him by marriage and are direct descendants of his bitterest enemy, Vintila Florescue, over the years, his investigations into Dracula They resulted in misfortune, fear and tragedy, sometimes they even seemed victims of some kind of curse.

Now, to confront these memories, they returned to Romania to trace their family history back to its violent beginnings and revisit those places where their ancestors met Dracula face to face. His journey gives us a unique experience. A vision of the man and the myth of Dracula. This is the elegant street of Bucharest, where each person tried to have a more ambitious house than the other and the stars varied greatly. These are the direct descendants of the family that crossed swords with Dracula. dad, isn't this your house where you were born right here this is the house where I lived as a child with my aunt I used to play tennis there the historian Radu for the rescue is the man who revealed the real Dracula to the world. in a landmark bestseller published in 1972, but the family connection to Dracula goes back much further.

His ancestor Vintila Florescu led a revolt against Dracula. More recently, his uncle George was the man who discovered Dracula's tomb and in the previous generation Dimitri Florescu spent years hunting down the missing. portrait of Dracula today Radu for Rescue and his son John want to trace their connection with Dracula back to its origins they took them to the Palace of the Patriarchs in Bucharest the matriarch of Romania is the head of the country's Orthodox Church the florescues are here to tell you about their In particular they want to find a remote and ruined monastery where they believe their first ancestors are buried the patriarch blesses their mission a great help in gaining access and cooperation and there is another place that those rescued from the flat have to visit Radu spent 15 years tracking down the real Dracula and during that time one place in particular came to dominate his investigation: the castle that Dracula built in the Transylvanian Alps at Poyanar.

It is a castle that raduflarescue refuses to enter again. It was here that his uncle George Florescu fell and later died. from his wounds and here where his son John spent the most terrifying night of his life the castle was built in 1457 by prisoners captured in battle those unfit for work were impaled on wooden stakes since then Dracula was known as Vlad tepesh Vlad the Impaler but all his proclamations used the name he had been given at birth, Dracula, signed with blood red letters which means son of the Dragon because his father had been invested in the Dragon order whose mission was to carry out crusades against Protestant heretics and mainly against the Turks.

There is little evidence of what Dracula was like that his grandfather and uncle, the princes before him, looked out from the walls of this remote monastery with their names in Greek next to them, but of Dracula we only have this portrait and this description of the papal Leggett to Hungary, who met Him face to face in 1464. He was not very tall, but very stocky and strong, with a cold and terrible appearance. Very long framed eyelashes, big green eyes wide open. The bushy black eyebrows made them look menacing. In the 15th century Romania was divided into many small ones.

Kingdoms organized along military lines and each with their own fortified churches and castles, it was a rich land with busy commercial centers such as the walled city of Brashoff and the target of Muslim Turks attempting to invade Europe from the east. Dracula quickly became the biggest block to the ambitions he represented in the 15th century. Vivid symbol of the fight against the Turkish invasion, if you prefer, a kind of crusader who defended Christianity against the Muslims and thus became a kind of modern hero in art and literature. I confess to myself that he is a hero, but this crusader had a darker side in Romania.

Dracula means not only the dragon but the devil in religious art. When Saint George killed the dragon, he was also killing the devil for his enemies. Vlad Tepesh was a Tirgovish devil one day. It was the scene of his greatest atrocity when the Turkish army advanced on the city, they were stopped by the siege of thousands of captives whom Vlad had skewered with wooden stakes, turning the valley floor into a forest of impaled people. German pamphleteers claimed that he liked to dine among festering corpses and drink their blood and immediately, when a nobleman complained about the smell, Vlad impaled him on a very long stake, telling him that you live up there, where the stench cannot reach you. , did what he had to do in this.

During his time he tried to put some order in his country, which is not his fault at all. The punishments he provided to his enemies were not very unusual for that time. Flood was a great strong and cruel monarch, it is true, but a Very good one and do not forget that he lived in a sepesh flat, he lived at the same time in the same century with the famous English king Richard III. Richard III has gone down in history as a murderer, but like Vlad, the worst stories about him were written by his rivals, these images were drawn by his enemies.

The German invaders, many believe that the legend of Dracula drinks blood probably has its origin in these images rather than in concrete facts, so his terrifying reputation spread, such as the story of how when the Genoese ambassadors refused to remove their caps , Dracula nailed them on their heads, but as a key defender of Christian lands against Muslim invaders, he had the support of the church and there were the Romantic Tales of Night Attacks and Near Escapes, the most famous of all being the story of how young Dracula His wife faced a Turkish attack on Dracula's Castle, fearing there was no escape, she ran through the castle and towards the battlements from where she threw herself into the valley below the foreigner, but Dracula had already managed to escape along of a secret passage and then left. a horse whose horseshoes were nailed upside down to deceive his pursuers, but in the winter of 1476 he finally met his end at the hands of his Turkish enemies.

They cut off his head, took him back to Constantinople, and impaled him on a stake. He was 45 years old, but The death of Dracula gave rise to a legend, a legend that would spread throughout Europe. The chilling story of his bloody rule would be reinforced by the popular beliefs of the Carpathian villagers in the buried body that did not decompose and was turned the vampire Vlad the Impaler into an undead, he would become Count Dracula, the blood-drinking demon who could not die, and over the centuries the Florescue would also become trapped in his threatening and violent history.

The ransoms are part of the era of wealthy nobles known as boyars. Tila Florescue arranged a marriage between her sister Maria and Dracula's half-brother, Vlad the Monk, supported her attempt to overthrow Dracula and become Prince, but the uprising failed and both Vlad the Monk and Florescue were forced to flee from the Florescue and Dracula were now bitter enemies, they are as old as the country itself and us. I think, and I think most of the genealogy degree, it's the oldest family in Romania. Wisely, both Vlad the Monk and Maria Florescu retired to a monastic life. His bloodline finally became extinct in the 19th century, surpassing Dracula by a hundred years, but Ventila's bloodline lasted 500 years to the present day and Radu, his son John and his grandson Vlad, the history of the Floresco family is intimately mixed with Romanian history, it is part of it and, in five centuries, you find that each era is really one or several members of the family but the people of those times did not leave writings and few portraits Finding physical evidence of these first ancestors would not be easy but through the church John has managed to find the monastery, one of the oldest in Romania, where the first floor is rescued.

They are said to be buried. He visited it with the historian Stefan Andrescu. The monastery was undergoing extensive renovation, but behind the scaffolding things looked promising. Could these faded frescoes be the faces of his medieval family? And this is basically where the stones were inside our church. Yes, but the priest tells them that although the rescued are buried here, their tombstones have been removed and their tombs covered with boards. What she was saying is that this dates back approximately to the time of Dracula. Due to the renovations, the stones have been moved to another part of the ground and they are stored under a nearby hut and it will take a lot of muscle power to get them out of the foreigner, okay, put it there, okay, here is a description in right alphabetic Cyrillic and in Slavic language it means at the beginning.

There is a cross and then here lies Japan Dragic El Floresco as a slave of God lived at the end of the 15th century and the beginning of the 16th century so it is at the same time as Dracula and the Dragic was one of the highest officials as the right of the court by Presley dragic was vintila's son to the rescue

dracula

's bitter rival this is the oldest florescue tombstone found to date there is a monastery right there yes the three towers is how old is it is about all of them when

dracula

was killed , it is believed that his head was taken to Constantinople and his body buried in the Snagoff Island Monastery during his lifetime, he turned it into a fortress and imprisoned and murdered some of his rivals here.

Legend has it that he hid his treasure here by dropping it to the bottom of the lake and it is here that the fate of the Thorescue family once again met that of Dracula 70 years ago Radu Florescues Uncle George made this same boat trip across from the lake Romanian history was George's passion. My uncle was an extraordinary man, he was the only gentleman in Bucharest who dressed like a 19th century aristocrat. I imagine his dress was fashionable in Victorian England. He had a small medal as an oil monocle. He was the director of the Bucharest history museum and was not a professional historian. but he wrote much better books than almost any professional historian according to folklore Dracula was buried in the monastery but no one knew where George Florescue decided to be the first to find the tomb open it and see the remains of Dracula the summer of 1931 was a great search in snagoff This is one of the most important moments in Uncle George's life.

He was waiting for this to discover the two you see right in front of us where according to tradition the miracle was supposed to take a turn when the tomb was opened. To his surprise, no. They found no coffin, only bones of oxen and other animals. George then searched the rest of the church and found a similar tomb in a strange location just inside the entrance that we suspected when this monastery arrived.at the hands of Greek monks who did not do so. He was not like Dracula and he did not want him sitting so close to God and that is why the Greek custom of the time said: let him rest there when the people and the peasants can tremble before his unworthy remains with the help of a colleague George managed to leave it open.

The heavy stone of the tomb illuminated and I only had a few seconds to look inside before the air and strong sunlight rushed in and destroyed the contents. George told me that when he opened the cafe he saw the entire body intact in the light of a late summer day and he could see it disintegrating under his eyes but he saw that he was dressed in purple he had all kinds of jewelry in those few seconds George also saw that The corpse's face was covered by a scarf, something that Comrade Kazaku asked him about. Afterwards, I asked him if the body had a head and he said well, I think because he had this scarf on his face that means he was in front and then I said well, but historically It is known that Dracula was decapitated and his head sent to Istanbul and George was quite baffled because this body was not Dracula if it had the head, but after years I discovered that the Turks used to scalp the heads, they had a brilliant technique for removing the skin from the entire head with the hair and face and then preserving it with all kinds of spices so that Dracula could be buried with a skull without skin and that explains the need for a handkerchief because without the skin on the face It must have been something like Terrible shortly after Dracula's burial a terrible storm destroyed the adjoining Chapel which fell into the lake, locals still claim they can hear the bells ringing beneath the waves, but the large oak doors of the comfortable Chapel floated in the water to a nearby town that survived today, one of the great artistic wonders of the era of Dracula.

He had a dream and saw Dracula's corpse, but this simply stimulated him to continue investigating, above all he wanted to locate and visit Vlad. The forgotten Impaler Mountain Fortress. His quest would lead him to Dracula's castle and terrifying events that some would claim a Dracula curse. All that remains of Dracula's castle are these ruined battlements on the top of a mountain, but when George Florescue had the opportunity to visit it in 1969 along with Radu, his son John and some friends, he saw it as the culmination of a life's work he decided he would like. to go to the castle, I think he liked the idea of ​​this detective hunt, at that time Dracula's castle was not yet recognized by anyone, it was an old abandoned thing that no one knew much about and we went up the winding road from which he fled .

All the way to the flowers they were accompanied by Dracula's fellow Romanian investigator, Kazaku. I said it as a joke, but when Vlad built this castle it was like a kind of curse against his enemies to never go up to it and never get back to the habit maybe. You, as a descendant of this noble family, were under a curse and he was very afraid because he was a very religious man. George Floresco, the youngest members of the family led the climb up the mountain and then, within sight of the summit, George slipped and fell. Mountainside was taken to a local hospital but died a few months later, so we all said, "Well, this must be Dracula's curse." There were several things that everyone will tell you.

Each of us had our accidents, our incidents, our moments of pain or fear. Radu was deeply disturbed. Due to these events and convinced that not everything was as it seemed in the castle, he returned a few months later, in the winter of 1969, to carry out a proper investigation in the company of the young filmmaker Myron Yora. In fact, he was cold in the Russian car. which was handed over to the camera crew there was no heating and instead we had Furs in the back seat. My impression at the time was that we were in the presence of a great deal of power, not necessarily good or bad, but that this was an extraordinary place in the town below, the birds were chirping and there was a great deal of ambient noise coming through.

In the vicinity of the castle, as can be heard at this moment, there is total silence, it is not the sound of a bird, nor the sound of a dog. I didn't bark at all during filming on that first trip. Myron doubled over with stomach pains. He was rushed to a hospital and then flown to his home in Boston, where he was diagnosed with internal bleeding. I was taken to Mass General Hospital and had internal bleeding that eventually went away. There was no clear diagnosis. As soon as he was released, he took his film to be developed, but within hours the lab called to say that the film was damaged.

Some of the images were okay. The rest of the images, mostly the images of the Transylvanian castle, were gone. a milky quality something had interfered with the film and we never had a definitive answer now Radu has returned to Castle Dracula but has no desire to revisit the walls that grew on the castle it was perhaps the scariest thing I experienced there was something creepy about that place I have headaches and I don't put garlic or dishes in my pocket but I have a certain reluctance to go there and I can't explain it to you Ashley back in 1972 the death of her great uncle George and her own father Misfortunes convinced John Florescue to that there was a malevolent Force at work in the castle along with his school friend Steve Keith.

He decided to spend a night in the castle. Now, thirty years later, he and Steve have returned to rediscover old memories. You know they were around. Here, where my father called his Uncle George, he had fallen, he's falling there and he yelled at me to come and uh, I fell, so Uncle George never made it even though he was four-fifths away. Here we chose the date of July 14, 1972 because we wanted to have a full moon so we could see what was happening. We equipped the castle with lights, a recorder, a camera and a flash, and thought we might see something paranormal that could support that there was something unusual about this castle.

He laid out our sleeping bags and we decided to alternate one on top, one sleeping, one on top, one sleeping. We were actually sleeping in that Tower right there and we are looking towards the planes, but shortly after midnight we saw a beam from a fixed source of Light as if it was being dragged by a cable here strange at first we thought it was local people maybe carrying a flashlight to keep an eye on us but as it got closer and closer we realized that it was a reddish color and we started to turn around a little. a little more scared I shouted to him in Romanian do you know who you are what are you and just when the light entered the clearing it went out he came with the expectation that something might happen but when something happened we felt quite overwhelmed with fear and this is what We really weren't expecting it to the point where when we left in the morning, we were glad to leave and felt like we had witnessed something of a paranormal experience, they believe there is a sense of evil in Lingus around Castro Dracula. too many dramas unfold there are too many crimes too many dark scenes who plays there so I sensed something evil over the years the history of Dracula's rule was reinforced by local superstition Transylvania was the home of those who believed in vampires in 1897 a Irishman named Bram Stoker would immortalize the memory of Dracula and the myth of the vampire with spectacular effect.

Much of the evil we associate with the name Dracula as a blood-sucking vampire is due to the character created by Bram Stoker in his 19th century bestseller for young people. People today, eh, Pam Stoker, Stracula is the most important than Vlad Sepesh, it is a shame that history is not preferred to such a legend, but Stoker's creation was in fact an amalgamation of the popular memory of Dracula and the very real beliefs of farmers and mountains. The people of Romania believed in the existence of what they called The Undead. They were people who had been buried but whose bodies did not decompose.

According to this belief, those people became vampires and rose from their graves at night to attack the living, sometimes only a thin line separated these beliefs from the church ritual. The father was an Orthodox priest in the Romanian Orthodox Church. There is a custom of disinterring the dead after three years at most after seven years and this is a very old custom that has been known since the Middle Ages and the idea. It was seen to confirm that the corpse was totally rotten. This is in the mentality of the church and the people that the soul and the body were separated.

People believed by doing this they could help the dead for the final judgment. The soul was in heaven. or in purgatory or some other place and the body could return to Earth, the people asked the people to do this ceremony, so they went to the cemetery, they took out the coffin and then they took out the bones, they washed them with a special oil put on a clean linen sheet and buried again there is a definite parallel between this belief and the beliefs of vampires that the dead are Undead even today Traditions related to the burial of the Dead Echo these beliefs a dead man will risk becoming a vampire if he leaves the house feet first for those who catch his eye while carrying him, we will follow him to the grave or if a cat or dog crosses his path on the way to the cemetery , then you can join the ranks of the undead in Rural people generally avoid talking about vampires because they mean evil and that generates fear, but there have been other cases in which an entire town has talked about vampires with such conviction that the researchers themselves were convinced and scared and at night they hung garlic on the ground. windows and doors for protection also in some remote mountainous areas funerary beliefs are present with some supernatural beings and some ancient customs survived but they are not vampires, they are connected with ceremonies, burials, marriages, births, etc., one of these ancient.

The customs provide an eerie parallel to the lore of the blood-drinking vampire. Abroad, there is a long list of ways to protect yourself against the vampire, but these things are extremely rare today, you may still come across such things in some secluded places. In remote villages, the dead person would be dug up, the vampire's heart would be removed and then boiled and dissolved in wine and the people believed to have been infected by the vampire would have to drink it. There used to be people in certain villages who would be specially paid to carry out this operation.

People in Romania believe in vampires. My grandfather died in 1947 and in 1983, when my own father died, he was buried in the same grave and I was not present. My brother, who lives in Bucharest, was there and he. He told me that he had a terrible shock when he saw his grandfather, whom he had seen in 1947 when he was a buried child, appear perfectly preserved, you know him, and then he rotted, he rotted in a few minutes, but in the 17th century he would have been considered a vampire Bram Stoker fused the memory of Vlad the Impaler with Romanian folk traditions.

Such was his success, but for much of the 20th century the real Dracula was lost among the myths of vampires and the undead; It would not be until the 1960s that he would find an unlikely savior Nikolai Chaucescu The Romanian president and head of one of the most repressive regimes in Eastern Europe would make him a national hero Most of Raduflorescu's early investigations were carried out under The look of Nikolai Charcesku's ruthless regime Romania was now a police state and Chachesco was determined that his legacy would be that of Romania's heroic leader in the mold of Vlad the Impaler.

Jachescu's new interest in Dracula meant that the investigation was a risky business with strong political overtones. Radu and his colleagues were making quiet and steady progress until his work was revealed. to The Wider World during a visit by the president of the United States, Richard Nixon, our embassy was kind of a thing, so the ambassador gave me the task of being a kind of intermediary for the press corps that was involved. I don't know, 200 American journalists in That time a journalist asked me what Professor Flores is doing here when I told him that I was investigating Dracula and that was the explosion suddenly in the headlines all over Europe and all over the United States we were very scared, I mean, we hadn't even started writing a single line. and you know, scholars don't write as fast, travel can get the job done much faster, with one slip, the Dracula hunters found themselves The Hunted, the culturalt ashay came to us and told us that our apartment was bugged and that we would like to have it.

He purged himself, said it was inconceivable that a scholar would be observed in that way, and I rejected the help he offered me. I said that would make them even more suspicious. He wasn't doing anything. He wasn't spying for the CIA. I was just a scholar doing. We investigated at that time about Dracula so he didn't come and the bug stayed inside we knew that the lady at the door of the apartmentI would make a report to the secretary and at the end of my stay I said María, are you a member? security and she said "put sin," which means a little. 1976 was the 500th anniversary of Dracula's death and Ciao Chesku decided to use the occasion as a way to bond with his national hero and demanded that Vlad's face appear in a special edition of the mail. stamps and in a surprising move he even commissioned fellow political dissident Kazaku to write a popular history of his hero.

I was lucky because he was interested in history, he started to be interested in Romanian history and I needed strong heroes for me. It was beneficial for me that the Romanian authorities thought that Dracula's Blood Impaler could be a National Asset for tourism and they were for the image of Romania, so Dracula protected me, so to speak, but I Strangest of all was the way Dracula's life was reflected in Chachescu's Finale. hours throughout Eastern Europe in 1989 popular revolutions overthrew communist regimes only in Romania did things end in bloodshed when in the end Drew, near Chaucesku's heavily loaded helicopter, staggered from the roof of his presidential palace, He could have made a bid for freedom in either direction, but instead he flew to his lakeside residence at Schneidov, where Dracula was buried, and then took off again only to land at Tregovistay, Dracula's capital, where so many had been. been impaled to die slowly in agony.

His death by firing squad was swift when it was over. Dracula likes the hero in him, so I think there's some Eternal Justice in there. He was the first to appreciate Dracula's potential power as a national icon today. The legend is central to Romania's tourism industry. The emblem of the order of the Dragon hangs outside the house where he. lived as a child and the town where he was born, the picture-perfect medieval village of Sigiswara, is one of Romania's top tourist destinations and a huge Dracula theme park will be built near the top of the hill, the Rajnash Fortress, but the Dracula's Castle is too inaccessible to be in. off the tourist route and lacks the charm of a medieval town, but the Florescues finally hope to make peace with it.

The castle has long been a place of fear for local villagers and the source of supernatural stories, now in response to the family's request. The priests from the nearby monastery have come to bless the place where they tried to climb the castle the day before, but a strong storm made them turn back. Now, instead, they perform their ceremony a thousand feet below the walls of the castle where Dracula's wife plunged to her death. More than 500 years ago, right there, that's what the priest told us, yes, yes, but revisiting the places where his family's destiny has been intertwined with that of Dracula allowed John Florescu to place the past events ​​in a clearer perspective when I saw those tombstones.

I watched as the children cleaned the dust with those rags. Here he lies as a slave of God. I thought of these ancestors as individuals who lived in Dracula's time and who had the courage to fight him at that time due to the fact that a Florescue married into Dracula's family. one of my ancestors tried to take power from Dracula or we, my father, my great uncle or I, have been too curious, we have had misfortunes, this place has something, there is darkness in the place, so I suspect a little it. yes, I would go back and visit him yes, I would spend another night or a lot to play with him.

I don't think it's worth it in life. Dracula was a champion against Muslim invaders in Legend, he captured the imagination of a dictator in short story fiction, he became a blood-drinking vampire and his chilling memory inspired a family to search for their origins and their own, meanwhile, the Today's Romanians have come to terms with Vlad Tepesh Vlad the Impaler Dracula, the ruthless tyrant, has become Romania's favorite son.