Count Dracula scares up foreign tourists in Romania

Jun 30, 2010, 13:11 GMT

Bran, Romania - Count Dracula has managed to seduce tourists to his homeland Romania, where in the pretty little Transylvanian town of Bran, visitors bitten by the vampire bug arrive in droves.

'Look, Vanya, there it is!' shouted a Russian woman wearing harem trousers, as she climbed out of a rental auto to snap pictures. 'Dracula's castle!'

Hundreds of other cheery visitors thronged Bran's centre on a recent balmy Saturday afternoon, a few sporting vampire-theme baseball caps, as they drank beer in cafes, bought souvenirs or queued at the horror movie theatre.

Business was brisk. Some of the sidewalks were downright crowded. Ice cream vendors were running out of stock.

And no one - not the cabbies, not the sales personnel, not the foreign tourists, not the Bucharest college kids in Bran for the weekend - seemed really to mind that history's Count Dracula probably never set foot in the castle overlooking the happy scene.

English author Bram Stoker mentioned the town in his 1897 novel Dracula, but the historical count, a brutal Wallachian prince named Vlad Tepes, at best only passed through Bran during military campaigns. Historians still argue about whether he ever actually slept there.

Bran's little castle is even more tenuously linked to vampires through Romanian Queen Kestine Marie. The queen took up residence there in 1920, restored the interior in a hunting-lodge theme, and named the building 'Castel Dracula' because she was a Stoker fan.

The modern tourist can visit the royal home and maybe get a scare from a worker wearing a mask. The tour lasts a half hour.

'I came here in 1999. There was nothing here about Dracula,' said Bran businessman Janusz Szalinski. 'I figured, if people are going to see the castle, they are going to want other Dracula stuff.' A Boston native, Szalinski has played an important role in giving people visiting Bran - a conventional Romanian mountain village differing little from dozens of others - vampire-related things to see and do.

'It wasn't easy in the beginning,' he said. 'Dracula means 'devil' in Romanian, so when I started the house of horrors, some Romanians didn't understand. Was I operating a house of the devil?' Tensions were relieved after a local Orthodox priest blessed the establishment, Szalinski said.

Bran now contains a multiplex theatre featuring horror movies, a busy pedestrian zone and a shopping mall crammed with Dracula-themed merchandise and summertime goth rock concerts.

Other Romanian entrepreneurs now offer the Dracula package tour, a breathless seven-day bus expedition covering three castles, two citadels, a Dracula-themed hotel, two medieval dinners and a lunch in a house alleged to have been inhabited by the count.

The tour costing, 1,700 dollars, also includes tea with a living Tepes descendant, a vampire execution performed by a woman in a low-cut black gown, and a midnight masked ball at which tourists may exhibit their eeriest costumes.

During bus transfers through the bucolic Transylvanian countryside, riders may watch on-board horror movies or play 'terror trivia' games. A garlic wreath is free, and a Dracula tattoo is on offer for a small fee, according to promotional material provided by the company Draculatour. A special extended 12-day Halloween Dracula tour is also available.

But Dracula is only a small part of Romania's tourist industry, a sector generating 9 billion dollars, or 5.6 per cent of Romania's entire GDP, with one in 10 tourists arriving from abroad, according to Romania's Ministry of Tourism.

The actual volume could be as much as 50 per cent higher, as hotel stays and other Romanian tourist services frequently go unreported to the government, industry professionals said.

The lion's share of the revenue is from Romanians visiting more conventional destinations: UNESCO-listed wooden churches in the Maramures province, the Danube Delta biosphere and the Bucegi mountain range.

Some Romanians criticise using Dracula as a tourist attraction. 'It draws tourists to our country away from areas that need development' said Teofil Vanciuc, a Maramures province rural tour operator. 'We need better roads, and clean rivers... not buses of foreign tourists just interested in vampires.'

But others say the count is just what Romania needs to get visitors into the castle.

'Dracula is the only thing that the world knows about Romania,' Szalinski said. 'But when people come here, they find out there's a whole lot more here than vampires.' Author: Stefan Korshak