My friend. Welcome to the Carpathians.

I visited Dracula's Castle, and you can too

Hotel Castel Dracula with its statue of Bram Stoker (photos: Annette Rubery).

People are usually surprised when I mention that my husband and I have been visiting Transylvania, every year, since 2014. With the exception of the Covid years, it’s usually our main holiday, and we tend to visit at least once in the autumn. A lot of people in Britain think of Transylvania as a fictional place created by Bram Stoker in Dracula, but I’m here to confirm that it’s a real place - a region of Romania - and you can fly there very easily from Britain.

The novel, published in 1897, follows the activities of the sinister Count Dracula, a vampire who lives in a castle high in the Carpathian mountains, and a solicitor called Jonathan Harker, who keeps a diary of his supernatural experiences. Dracula is one of my favourite novels of all time, not least because of Stoker’s experimental approach to the narrative. The story is brilliantly told via - among other things - Harker’s diary, news reports, and transcriptions of early sound recordings impressed into wax cylinders. As well as feeling very modern, this multi-voice structure gives the chilling impression of a true story, backed up by hard evidence.

I won’t go into all the wonders of Transylvania as a holiday destination (there are many) but I want to mark Halloween by telling you about our stay in Hotel Castel Dracula in 2018. This place is located in Piâtra Fântânele on the ‘Borgo’ Pass - and you probably will need a car to get there. As Dracula fans will know, this is where Harker gets into the Count’s carriage on his journey into evil. As Dracula says in his letter to the young man:

My friend.--Welcome to the Carpathians. I am anxiously expecting you. Sleep well tonight. At three tomorrow the diligence will start for Bukovina; a place on it is kept for you. At the Borgo Pass my carriage will await you and will bring you to me. I trust that your journey from London has been a happy one, and that you will enjoy your stay in my beautiful land.--Your friend, Dracula.

Let’s have a look at what Stoker tells us about this region:

Beyond the green swelling hills of the Mittel Land rose mighty slopes of forest up to the lofty steeps of the Carpathians themselves. Right and left of us they towered, with the afternoon sun falling full upon them and bringing out all the glorious colours of this beautiful range, deep blue and purple in the shadows of the peaks, green and brown where grass and rock mingled, and an endless perspective of jagged rock and pointed crags, till these were themselves lost in the distance, where the snowy peaks rose grandly. Here and there seemed mighty rifts in the mountains, through which, as the sun began to sink, we saw now and again the white gleam of falling water.

The real ‘Borgo’ Pass in Transylvania.

This scene, as it was described by Stoker, is a Sublime landscape - one of terrifying, dramatic peaks. The author had never been to Transylvania, so relied on maps and his imagination to create the vampire’s world. However, the reality is quite different: the real ‘Borgo’ Pass (actually the Bârgău Pass in Hungarian and the Tihuța Pass in Romanian) is a gently rolling, Alpine landscape. It’s stunningly beautiful, but not a place of mighty slopes or lofty steeps. However, you will remember that Harker notices that by the roadside “were many crosses, and as we swept by, my companions all crossed themselves”. If you look closely at the hill in the above photo, you will see a massive cross in the top left which is lit up at night. This hill can be seen from the hotel and it’s quite disconcerting if you know Dracula, however the cross actually belongs to the Piâtra Fântânele monastery!

Our spooky room with vaguely church-like furniture.

I mentioned that a lot of people in Britain think of Transylvania as fictional. By the same token, for many years people in Transylvania had never heard of Count Dracula. The novel was not published in Romania until 1990, but tourists had been visiting the country in search of their favourite Count since the 1960s. While Western tourism was profitable for the communists under Nicolae Ceauşescu, it was embarrassing because the regime rejected superstition and the supernatural, preferring to present itself as modern and forward thinking. However, it was decided that Bran Castle, near the city of Brașov, would be turned into the tourist Dracula Castle because it could be reached easily from the capital, Bucharest (I have visited that too and will tell you about it sometime).

Dracula cares about road safety: “You humans are not immortal! Speed kills!”

This presumably gave the Romanians a bit of a break from people asking directions to the Count’s lair. Nevertheless, any Dracula fan worth their garlic-salt knows that the castle is actually located in Bistriţa in north-east Transylvania, on the ‘Borgo’ Pass. In the 1980s, the head of Bistriţa’s tourist office, Alexandru Misiuga, began considering the possibility of turning the region into a Dracula fan-base, and in 1983 opened a hotel on the exact spot of the castle in Stoker’s novel. It was not possible to call it Dracula’s Castle under Ceauşescu, so it was named Hotel Tihuţa, but after the fall of the regime in 1989, it was finally allowed to embrace its kitsch heritage and call itself Hotel Castel Dracula. Today, visitors can visit Dracula’s tomb in the basement, where a member of staff lies in a coffin (sometimes sitting up to ask “Where are you from?”) You can also sample a Dracula-themed meat feast in the restaurant and pay your respects to Stoker in statue-form on the driveway.

Dracula’s tomb (not for the faint-hearted).

Expect blood-spattered artworks.

“Welcome to my house! Enter freely and of your own will!”

Welcome message from Count Dracula in the restaurant - but who is dining?

A meat platter from the restaurant, which boasts the “heaviest menu in Transylvania”.

I’m indebted to this fantastic article from History Today by Duncan Light, which tells the whole story of Romania’s Dracula tourism, and is worth a read if you want to know more. Please also stay tuned for some extracts from my own diary entries, dealing with our visit to the ‘Borgo’ Pass, which I’ll publish on Thursday. And if you do visit Castle Dracula, remember the Count’s advice:

Let me advise you, my dear young friend—nay, let me warn you with all seriousness, that should you leave these rooms you will not by any chance go to sleep in any other part of the castle. It is old, and has many memories, and there are bad dreams for those who sleep unwisely.