A Brief Account of Why Vampires Are Romanian (or Rather A Not-At-All Brief Account of How They Actually Aren’t)

So, in the 1720s-30s, some villagers in Vojvodina (which is now a part of  Serbia but was then a part of the Hapsburg Empire’s Kingdom of Hungary) had what they perceived to be some vampire-related problems and some Austrian military doctors came by and documented their decisions to solve these vampire-related problems by digging up dead bodies and attempting to violently de-vampirize them via beheadings and stakings and other sundry forms of mutilation. Some of this documentation came to be published in newspapers and periodicals across the rest of Europe, and suddenly the rest of Europe was all like “Whoa! Vampires are a thing!” and they found said vampires terribly interesting and promptly wrote political satire about the parasitic upper classes metaphorically sucking the blood of their underlings. As one does.

Eventually, in 1746, a French priest named Augustin Calmet wrote a big treatise on demons and ghosts and all manner of other spooky stuff, in which he included a lengthy discussion of vampires. He called it Treatise on the Apparitions of Spirits and on Vampires or Revenants of Hungary, Moravia, et al., which you will probably observe as not containing any reference to Vojvodina or Serbia at all. Like pretty much everyone else writing about these events, Calmet just categorized the experiences of the Serbian villagers as being a thing that happened in Hungary because technically they did happen in what was Hungary at the time even if they didn’t involve any Hungarian folk beliefs.

And so for the next century and a half, vampires were Hungarian. While Lord Ruthven (”The Vampyre,” 1819) is something of a fluke, given that he’s just Lord Byron if he were an immortal hemophage, a very sizable chunk of the vampires that you actually see throughout the nineteenth century’s literary vampire tradition are debauched Hungarian nobles. You might not recognize names like Alinska (La Vampire ou la Vierge de Hongrie, 1825), Marfa Sergeyevna (“The Vampire,” 1841), Marian Gregoryi (La Vampire, 1875), or Count Vardalek (“The True Story of a Vampire,” 1894), but they are all Hungarian vampires, and they probably all irritated the actual Hungarians of the day who tried very hard to explain that -no- they didn’t actually have any vampire myths (apparently Arnold Ipolyi was cheesed off about this as early as 1854).

Now, while you might not have read any of those obscure vampire texts I rattled off, you probably do recognize names like “Carmilla” and “Dracula.” But wait, what’s that you say? Dracula!? Isn’t Dracula supposed to be Romanian? Isn’t he Vlad the Impaler, vovoide of Wallachia (AKA old school Romania)? Doesn’t he live in Transylvania, which is in Romania?

Well, here’s where things get interesting.1 First off, back in 1897, when Dracula was published, Transylvania was -you guessed it- in the Hungarian part of Austria-Hungary, and like Vojvodina, people just tended to round Transylvania up to being “some part of Hungary” even if the vast majority of people living there were Romanian. Romania existed, but at the time Dracula was published, it had only been an independent state for fifteen years and Transylvania most decidedly was not in it. Bram Stoker, who never went to Transylvania in the first place and did most of his research via really condescending/racist travelogues, constructed the fictional Transylvania within Dracula by copy-pasting in bits and pieces of books that were not only about Transylvania, but about Hungary and the area near the Carpathians in general, nabbing whatever he could find that sounded cool so long as it was nebulously in the region he was describing.

And one cool thing he found? From one book, titled An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, we know that he took notes about a historical Wallachian voivode whose name was given as “Dracula.” This book doesn’t, however, mention much else; it certainly doesn’t mention any of those completely metal stories about a guy impaling people or nailing turbans to emissaries’ heads; it doesn’t even use the words “Vlad” or “Impale” anywhere near this Dracula’s name; and the whole story of this Dracula (and his father, also a Dracula) takes up all of three pages. Don’t believe me? Go check. Right here. Through the miracle of GoogleBooks, you can experience the entirety of Bram Stoker’s known sources on Vlad III in the next minute or so.

So yeah… there’s not much there. It is seriously not outside the realm of possibility that Dracula is called “Dracula” because Bram thought it was a pretty cool name that he erroneously thought to mean “devil.” As for the tiny snippet of historical context that got shoved into the book (that part where the Count mentions somebody who “crossed the Danube and beat the Turk on his own ground” and had an “unworthy brother”) this definitely does refer to the itsy bitsy, super small blurb on Vlad III that’s in Wilkinson, but it’s not in any way clear that Dracula is actually meant to be identified with this personage. I could go into more as to why this is so murky, but it’s something that has already been hashed out in sort of awkwardly excruciating detail here by Hans de Roos.2 The short version is that there’s a historical “Dracula” mentioned in the text who clearly isn’t Vlad, who doesn’t seem to have a real world equivalent, and who makes an awful lot of sense to read as being the Count.

In any event, we have a bunch of stuff that points to the Count being yet another Hungarian or Hungarian-coded evil vampire nobleman, and some of this stuff isn’t all that subtle… like Dracula literally telling Jonathan Harker that he is a member of a Hungarian ethnic group. The Count also makes a point of mentioning his use of Hungarian linguistic conventions and, if you look in the novel’s original typescript, you can see that the woman with the stolen child was supposed to have referred to her persecutor as “Hungarian” rather than “monster” at one point in the drafting process. Even with all this rather blatant evidence that Stoker was working within the “Hungary=vampires” paradigm, however, Drac’s Hungarianess still isn’t 100% neat and tidy. It can’t be. Stoker’s culturally insensitive collage of whatever spiffy-sounding factoids he could find about an ethnically diverse region with incredibly complex, intertwining Romanian and Hungarian histories just does not result in a well wrought Hungarian character, and we’re left with a confused hodgepodge of Romanian and Hungarian elements. The thing is, though, that said hodgepodge just so happened to become the most famous vampire of all time.

So what happens post-Dracula? Once the stage play and film take off, people start to take elements introduced in Dracula, even ones that didn’t have any precursors in literature or folklore, and decide that these are 100% ironclad things that real vampires™ do. Suddenly vampires all lack reflections; they cringe at crosses; they need to be invited into your home; and they all suddenly live in Transylvania. Also, TWO WORLD WARS HAPPEN, and at the end of them, Transylvania is actually in Romania, and as Dracula increasingly becomes a topic that nerds and academics and academic nerds like to nerd out about, some people examine the sad little dribblings of history Stoker dropped in the text and get the impression that maybe Dracula is supposed to be Vlad III.3 This was a pretty understandable thing to do, given that most people in those days didn’t have access to all the neato primary sources relating to Dracula that I mentioned somewhere above in describing how dinky the Vlad III evidence actually is.4 It makes sense to seize onto tantalizing historical hints within the text and assume that they might be a part of something grander, and eventually Harry Ludham’s completely bibliography- and source-free biography of Stoker lent the claim some additional credence by giving it out as a completely source-free fact. 

What really got things going, however, was Raymond McNally and Radu Florescu’s 1972 In Search of Dracula, which really really really really tried to sell the Dracula is Vlad III angle and succeeded tremendously, all while describing the authors’ investigation into Vlad as it played out in their own visits to historical sites in Romania. The book, in addition to telling everyone very firmly and enthusiastically that Vlad III was totally Dracula, went to the trouble of explaining that its readers could and should totally go to Romania and see all sorts of rad Dracula things there, all while giving some cringey advice on how not to alert the locals as to the fact that they were weird vampire novel enthusiasts who wanted to gawk at historical sites’ relating to one of the country’s cultural heroes because some Irishman ostensibly wrote a book about him biting people. While I’ve come to regard as unnecessarily mean-spirited some of the later scholarship pointing out how crap McNally and Florescu’s scholarship was, their scholarship really hasn’t held up well, and by the time other scholars started noticing, the notion that Dracula=Vlad and Romania=vampires had become pretty firmly entrenched. By the late 90s, there were several books, movies, and even very legitimate and influential scholarly articles working from the premise that Stoker had had Vlad III in mind as the Count and wanted him to be a uniquely Romanian character, and owing to Bram’s strange, patchwork fiction of Transylvania, there were -in fact- a lot of Romanian elements within the text to support this idea. Vampires, which used to be Hungarian before Dracula, and who are even Hungarian in Dracula, eventually became Romanian because Dracula became such a landmark vampire text that people began to take Stoker’s weird blend of cultural elements as evidence of both Dracula’s and vampires’ Romanianess.

So even if all that has since been debunked on paper, this nevertheless sort of brings us to where we are now. Obviously, there’s a lot of changes in the depiction, perception, and reception of vampires that have occurred in the past twenty years, but we’re still at this weird place where most westerners generally think of vampires as belonging to a country that doesn’t actually have a folkloric vampire tradition… and the reason that we think that is directly related to the fact that for the better part of two centuries most westerners thought that they belonged to another country that doesn’t actually have a folkloric vampire tradition.5 It’s honestly all pretty zany, and while I sort of thought that I’d have a wise, profound, or otherwise satisfying end to this stupid long ramble about how weird vampires’ shifting geographic location is, I don’t really… other than -as always- nobody should really be a tool about vampires. This is not only because one shouldn’t be a tool in general but because there’s a non-zero chance that whatever deep-held truths you hold regarding them have been wrong since before you were born, and it is not impossible that you will live to see the day when somebody totally insists that a supernatural entity you’ve never heard of just lives in your place now and your fave historical figure always was one.

1. Or where they get interesting if you haven’t heard me give this spiel before. It’s that time of year, kids. | 2. Hans is a really nice/chill guy even if I don’t agree with all of his analyses in that document. You might recognize him as the individual who recently brought us the majestic pinnacle of high weirdness that is the recent translation of Powers of Darkness. | 3. Interestingly enough, it might be that the first person to do much with this was Dracula’s first Turkish adapter, who re-imagined Dracula in 1928 as a story about a marauding occidental foreigner from the West coming to get the decent, upstanding citizens of Istanbul… but that’s another story. | 4. They also didn’t have GoogleBooks and thinking of that reality makes me very very sad. :( | 5. Romanian folklore has strigoi, which sometimes are dead and sometimes drink blood, but are really more akin to evil ghost-wizards than vampires from what I’ve heard. Hungarian folklore has the lidérc, which also goes blood-drinking sometimes, but is apparently sort of more like a succubus that is also a chicken… I think. I do know that pretty much every article I’ve read (Florescu excepted) and account I’ve heard from Romanians and Hungarians on the topic of what people typically conceive of as vampires has been roughly “No, we don’t actually have those. Plz stop.” I’m of neither Romanian, Hungarian, nor Slavic extraction, however, so I’m more than willing to be corrected.