Dracula, strigoi and Halloween in Transylvania: what is real

Every October the same question reaches us dozens of times: where do we go in Transylvania for Halloween? The truth is that Halloween is not a Romanian holiday, Dracula is an Irish novelist's invention, and Bran Castle has almost nothing to do with either. The less truthful answer still sells better. And the real story, the one we tell on the road between Brașov and Bran, is stranger than the invented version, and it has the advantage of being true.

Two Draculas, and only one of them existed

Bram Stoker published Dracula in 1897. He never travelled to Transylvania. He built his count from library books, travel writing and a name he found in a history of Wallachia, and he placed the castle in the Bârgău pass in the far north-east of Transylvania, a long way from anything we show you.

The name belonged to a real man. Vlad III, prince of Wallachia in the fifteenth century, was the son of Vlad Dracul, so called after the Order of the Dragon his father had joined. Dracula simply means the son of Dracul. Romanians remember him as Vlad Țepeș, Vlad the Impaler, and the name tells you how he dealt with enemies, rivals and anyone he decided was disloyal.

Tradition holds that he was born in the citadel of Sighișoara, in a house below the clock tower that now has a restaurant on the ground floor. Whether or not he was born in that particular house, you can stand in the square he would have known, which is more than any castle can offer. It is the first stop on our Sighișoara day.

Why Brașov remembers him badly

Brașov was a Saxon merchant town, rich, walled and largely self-governing, and its merchants and Vlad wanted different things from the trade that passed between Transylvania and Wallachia. In the years around 1460 the quarrel turned violent: raids on the villages around the town, merchants seized, and the punishments that gave him his name.

The Saxons had something Vlad did not: printers among their German-speaking neighbours. Pamphlets about the cruel prince of Wallachia circulated in German towns for decades after his death, and the most famous woodcut, printed in Nuremberg in 1499, shows him eating at a table among the impaled. Much of Vlad's European reputation was written by the people he had raided. That does not, however, make him innocent.

Bran: a customs house with a good publicist

Bran Castle was built at the end of the fourteenth century by the people of Brașov, with a royal charter, to guard the pass into Wallachia and collect the toll on everything that crossed it. It was a border post and a customs house first and a fortress second. In the twentieth century it became a home of Queen Marie of Romania, and much of what you see inside is hers.

Vlad may have passed through the pass, as everyone did. There is no good evidence that he lived in the castle, held it, or was imprisoned there. Bran is "Dracula's Castle" because it looks the part from the road and because, for a visitor in the late twentieth century, it was the gothic castle nearest the airport. We wrote more about it, and about the quieter fortress of Râșnov ten kilometres away, in Bran or Râșnov: the castles near Brașov without the crowds.

The strigoi: what people here actually feared

Romanian villages did have their undead, and they were not counts in capes. A strigoi was a restless dead person, or a living one whose soul wandered at night, who came back to trouble family and neighbours: drying up the cows' milk, bringing sickness, knocking at the window. The remedies were domestic: garlic at the doors and windows, care with the rituals of burial, and in the worst cases, steps taken at the grave.

The nights to be careful were not 31 October. The one most people still know is the eve of Saint Andrew, the night of 29 to 30 November, when the strigoi were said to be abroad and garlic was rubbed on the door frames and window sills. In some villages it is still done, half in earnest.

So what happens on 31 October?

Halloween arrived in Romania with films and bars, and it is now a night out in the cities rather than a tradition. Bran Castle has hosted a Halloween party in recent years, with costumes and an evening programme, and it is the one place that leans into the date.

Closer to the old calendar is the remembrance of the dead. In late October, around the Saturday before Saint Demetrius, many families observe the autumn Moșii, giving food and drink to neighbours in memory of their dead and visiting the graves. It is quieter than anything with pumpkins, and it is the closest Romania comes to a festival of the dead.

Seeing it without the costume

If you come at the end of October for the Dracula story, see it in the order it actually happened: the square in Sighișoara, the walls of Brașov the pamphlets were written about, then Bran and Râșnov, the border they were built to hold. That is the day we run as Castles and the border, told from the documents rather than the gift shop. It is a good day in any season, and the autumn light on the pass is a reason of its own. Brașov itself is the obvious base for it, and the Brașov destination page has the rest of what to see in town.