The real 'Dracula': At this Austrian castle, visitors get to relive the story of Vlad The Impaler
Dracula.
«He was a Romanian prince, not a vampire,» said the schoolboy, as he tripped by torchlight through the nocturnal gloom of Forchtenstein Castle.
The group being guided through the Austrian fortress are eager to sink their teeth into the gripping life of Vlad Tepes, the notorious «Vlad the Impaler», whose descendants once held the schloss.
The castle is home to one of the few paintings of the cruel 15th-century prince, and this Halloween its curators are trying to bring the real historical figure out from the chilling shadow of the monster invented by the Irish writer Bram Stoker.
Rather than being a ghoulish fiend, the real Vlad Tepes had for a «long time gone down in history as a positive figure» who courageously fought the Ottoman Turks, said the director of its collections, Florian Bayer.
«More and more people are able to distinguish between the bloodsucking vampire and the historical figure,» he said.
Voivode Vlad III — also known by his patronymic name Dracula derived from the Slavonic word for dragon — once ruled over Wallachia, a Romanian-speaking vassal state of the Kingdom of Hungary.
— 'Forest' Of The Impaled -
Held as a child hostage of the sultan at the Ottoman court, he later turned against his former captors.
In several hard-fought campaigns against the Turks, he struck fear into his enemies by impaling thousands of Turkish prisoners.
This gruesomely slow death was also used against his internal rivals, like «the German merchants from neighbouring Transylvanian towns,» historian Dan Ioan Muresan told AFP.
Tepes was often depicted amidst a «forest» of impaled bodies.
Yet despite his gory reputation, Vlad was a handsome devil and something of a ladykiller, according to Muresan.
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