Crossing the Ocean of Time

11/07/2007

So, it's official. For my summer holidays this year I shall be visiting Romania, the land of Dracula, as you know, on a Transylvania Carpathians tour and also the supposed resting place of Vlad the Impaler by Lake Snagov. They say it's there, but have you ever read "The Historian"? In typical Da Vinci Code-style Elisabeth Kostova, the author(ess), suggests it may be...somewhere else (I won't spoil it for you!). Well whatever she believes, I have to at least go and check it out. After all, I was born in the North only an hour or so away from the fishing town of Whitby, which Bram Stoker cherished so dearly as to make it part of the setting for his famous work.

Still, you've gotta wonder what the Romanians make of it all, even if it was their own history and folklore that started it! Maybe they're a bit fed up of all this interest for a savage and sadistic ruler who took pleasure in torturing and murdering his own people: six centuries on and he's drawing crowds - though I guess it was more a case of the opposite back then- and having people yapping on about him. Perhaps I'll see it written in the faces of Romanian's today: "Here we go with the old Dracula shit again."

Which makes me wonder if I should find something else to ask about once I'm there (just need to brush up on my Romanian first!), or spice up proceedings by waving round the Hungarian flag. But then again it's a pretty long drop from the Carpathians, and the wolves must get awful hungry! So maybe I should embrace old Vlad T, just like the rest of them.

La revedere!