Everywhere
you look these days there are vampires, whether it is television, books
or movies, a few examples, True Blood, The Vampire Diaries, and the
phenomenon that was Twilight. Today I will talk with Steve Unger about
the history of vampires and why they have become so popular. He has
traveled extensively in
North and South America, Western Europe, Israel, and Romania. His book, In the Footsteps of Dracula: A Personal Journey and Travel Guide, 2nd
Ed. not only tells the story of Dracula but contains many photos from his journeys. He has been published in numerous travel and
bicycling magazines. but he can tell the story better than I can.
How did
you become so interested in Dracula? Why do you think the vampire craze has spread
so rapidly and what do you think about the new kinder, gentler vampires?
My
obsession to travel to every site related to either the fictional Count Dracula
or his real historical counterpart, Prince Vlad Dracula the Impaler, grew out
of a visit to Whitby, England, where three chapters of the
novel Dracula take place. I stood on the cemetery hill where, in
Bram Stoker's Dracula, Lucy Westenra and Mina Murray spent hour
after hour sitting on their "favourite seat" (a bench placed over a
suicide's grave near the edge of the cliff), gazing out toward the
"headland called Kettleness" and the open North Sea beyond—while
Count Dracula slept just beneath them.
In my mind's eye, I could see the
un-dead count rising at night from the flattened slab of the suicide's gravestone
to greedily drink the blood of the living.
The graveyard where Count
Dracula spent his days sleeping in the sepulcher of a suicide looks the part
that it plays, with its weathered limestone tombstones blackened by centuries
of the ever-present North Sea winds. That graveyard made
the novel more visible, more visceral, to me, and I wondered if the sites in Transylvania and in the remote mountains of
southern Romania would evoke the same feelings.
As I was to discover—they did.
At that moment I decided to visit and photograph every site in
England and Romania that is closely related to either Bram Stoker's fictional
Count Dracula or Vlad the Impaler—to literally walk in their footsteps and to
write a book about my experiences.
'All
Full of Tombstones': The Old Church
Cemetery in Whitby, England
I think that ever since Dracula was published in 1897 (it's the
2nd most widely read book in the world after the Bible and has never been out of print),
there have been vampires to fire the imagination of every generation. Bram Stoker's original vision of Count
Dracula was most closely represented in F.W. Murnau's 1922 silent film Nosferatu with Max Schreck.
By 1931 Count Dracula had already become
urbane and seductive, as played by Bela Lugosi, but still unsympathetic. Christopher Lee made him more Westernized and
imposing. But with True Blood and Twilight,
vampires have finally merged with the audience's dream of what they want to see
in their own mirrors (now that vampires cast reflections): someone attractive, powerful, desiring and
desired, and with a back-story that makes them not so much Evil incarnate as,
well, misunderstood.
The
brutality of Prince Vlad Dracula the Impaler (Vlad Ţepeş, pronounced Tzeh-pech) in your book is so intense;
why was that society so violent?
Vlad Ţepeş was a product of his times. His father was required to give him up as a
hostage to the Turkish sultan when Vlad was in his teens, and it was there that
he repeatedly witnessed the practice of execution by impaling. And although in his quest for power and
dominance he impaled more Romanians than Turks, he is still seen as a hero for
his part in later battles against the Turkish Empire.
A visit to the island tomb of Vlad Ţepeş
confirms the reverence still felt for the historical Prince Dracula as someone
who defended the cross, as opposed to the literary Count Dracula, who abhorred
it. The tomb is covered by a stone slab
surrounded by golden icons and giant candelabras. An antique lantern rests on the left side of
the slab, a silver engraving of Vlad Ţepeş is at the center, and a vase of fresh-cut
flowers graces the right.
On one of the church walls, below Vlad's
portrait, is the following inscription (recreated verbatim):
"King Vlad the Impaler Dracula
He was a great European personality in
fighting against Turkish
Empire for
Christianism. His courrage was admired
also by Turkish Army & leaders."
As I took in the medieval splendor of the
tomb of Vlad Ţepeş, Father Bănăţeanu, the latest in a line of monks who for
over 500 years have lived alone on Snagov Island to tend Vlad's grave, handed me
a leaflet that read in part:
" . . . Prince Vlad the Impaler was
known in all Europe as Prince Dracula; he was a great fighter
against the Turkish
Empire. It is a strange story isn't it?"
I
had to agree with that. It is a strange
story, even more strange than I knew at the time.
What
was the most memorable thing you experienced in your travels?
That would be Poienari, the real Castle of Dracula. I
had traveled to other remote, forbidding places before entering the almost
lightless forest of Poienari. But never before or since have I felt the
apprehension and isolation I did while climbing to Vlad Ţepeş' mountaintop
fortress at Poienari. The forest was as
quiet as a tomb; I can't recall hearing the song of even a single bird.
The ascent was exhausting. At last, I encountered a grizzled, elfin
gentleman sitting on almost the very top step, who indicated with his fingers
the amount of the small entry fee. From there the lone approach to the fortress
is by a wooden footbridge.
Of all the places I explored
that are associated with Vlad Ţepeş, only at Poienari did I feel that he was
somehow still keeping watch. Perched on
a remote peak near a glacial moraine in the Făgarăş Mountains of
southern Romania, Poienari remains pristine and almost
inaccessible. Because the terrain is too
steep and isolated to ever be cultivated or developed, there will never be a theme
park at Poienari with scary rides and Count Dracula/Vlad Ţepeş
collectibles. Nor should there be, given
the malevolent history of the fortress.
Thousands of boyars (nobles) and their families had
been force-marched there from Tărgovişte to die rebuilding the castle for
Prince Vlad; it was here that his treacherous brother Radu stormed the fortress
with cannons, reducing the once courtly residence into broken turrets and
formless rubble. And it was here that Prince
Dracula's wife cast herself from the highest window of the eastern tower,
choosing a swift death over the torture of the stake.
The Fortress of Vlad the
Impaler at Poienari
What is
the biggest misconception people have about the Dracula story?
In my research and travels I discovered two
fascinating coincidences that link the historical and the literary
Draculas. First and foremost is that
Bram Stoker chose to name his villain "Dracula," based on the
translation of the Romanian word "dracul" into "devil,"
never knowing that the historical Voivode
(Prince) Dracula he had read about was also Vlad Ţepeş (Vlad the Impaler), with
a horrific and compelling biography of his own.
The second coincidence is the uncanny
resemblance of the real Castle of
Dracula—Vlad Ţepeş' fortress at Poienari, which Stoker had no knowledge of—to
Count Dracula's fictional castle at the top of the Borgo Pass in
Transylvania. Situated atop a high
mountain and inaccessible except for a narrow footbridge on one side, Poienari,
in its time, mirrored Count Dracula's fictional castle at the top of the Borgo Pass almost stone for stone.
Steve, Where
is your favorite place to travel?
I can never spend enough time in Paris. Below is the "Vanity," taken at the Pére-LaChaise Cemetery.
.
Mr. Unger was
one of a handful of white students at a black college, Tuskegee Institute in
Alabama, and a member of the Bear Tribe, a California commune that tried
sharecropping, goat herding, and living in teepees—and failed spectacularly at
everything. These adventures and many
more are described in his novel Dancing in the Streets.
He also wrote
the accompanying text and Preface for Before the Paparazzi: Fifty Years of Extraordinary Photographs,
which includes over 250 pictures taken by Arty Pomerantz, staff photographer
and assignment editor for the New York Post from the 1960s through the
early 1990s. Dancing in the Streets and Before
the Paparazzi are available from www.amazon.com.
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