A Vampire Lover's Guide To Transylvania Steven P. Unger   © Copyright 2025 by Steven P. Unger

Photo of the wolf dragon  reproduced with the permission of Shane Solow, ©Lost Trails, LLC

Bistrița and the Borgo Pass: the Castle of Count Dracula

On the hour-long bus ride from Bistriţa (pronounced Bee·STREET·zah), where the novel Dracula begins, to the Borgo Pass, I imagined Bram Stoker poring over maps and photographs and manuscripts in the tiny library of Whitby, England, and in the Reading Room of London's British Museum, conjuring up a vision of Jonathan Harker's passage by coach to Count Dracula's castle over the same terrain in Transylvania.

It was a vision that would last for generations, written by a man who had never set foot in the area—but was Bram Stoker's vision accurate? Certainly I was passing through beautiful country, as my bus struggled along the narrow mountainous road past pine forests above winding rivers and green hills carpeted with grass that grew so short in the high meadows that it looked like Astroturf.

When the bus stopped at Piatra Făntănele—it was ten in the morning and very cold—the Borgo Pass looked more pastoral and less ominous than Bram Stoker had portrayed it. But then I recalled how in Chapter I of Dracula the mood and topography of the land became more menacing as the day waned and night approached.

Jonathan Harker's fateful coach ride had taken place on May 4^th–the year was 1887 according to Dracula scholars—and it was the eve of St. George's Day ". . . when the clock strikes midnight, [and] all the evil things in the world have full sway."

It was early May once again as I stepped off the bus, and more than a century later. For weeks I had traveled to so many sites, some that I'd seen before and others I had only dreamed of, systematically stripping away the layers of myth about the fictional Count Dracula and the real Prince Vlad Dracula to find the reality within. I had discovered in broken stones and parchments signed in blood why Prince Vlad's monstrous deeds in life would brand him forever with the name of Vlad Ţepeş (pronounced Tzeh·pish), Romanian for Vlad the Impaler, soon after his death.

Now I was finally at the Borgo Pass, where I could follow in the footsteps of Bram Stoker's Count Dracula to find the real Transylvania of today.

From the bus stop it was a short walk to the Hotel Castel Dracula, where I bundled up in a sweater and parka. With my camera in the right pocket of my parka and my heavily highlighted paperback of Dracula in the left, I headed out into the bitter wind and pale sun of the Borgo Pass.

"Beyond the green swelling hills of the Mittel Land rose mighty slopes of forest up to the lofty steeps of the Carpathians themselves," wrote Jonathan Harker in his journal in the first chapter of Dracula.

Reading that passage as I walked along the Borgo Pass, I realized that in my journey from the urban modernity of London to this Transylvanian land of multicolored houses lit by mottled sunlight; horse-drawn carts; and women carrying their water in buckets from a communal well, I had stepped back in time, just as Jonathan Harker had in his parallel journey from London to the Borgo Pass—until he encountered the highly sophisticated Count Dracula, who spoke English almost as well and knew more about English property law than he did.

When Bram Stoker wrote Dracula in the 1890s, the terrain of the Colorado River was still a blank spot on the American map, and Transylvania was as unknown and near-mythical a place as Avalon or Shangri-La. As Lucian Boia writes in Romania:

“When [Dracula] first appeared, Transylvania belonged to Hungary. Romania inherited the myth [of Count Dracula], along with the respective territory, in 1918. Dracula's home could not have been placed in the Alps (too close to the heart of Europe) or in Tibet (too far away). The Carpathians offered just the right setting: on the edge of Europe, where Western civilization gives way to something already different. The Romanian space represents, for the West, the first circle of otherness: sufficiently close for the curious configurations and disturbing forms of behaviour . . . to be highlighted all the more strongly.”

On a high plateau in northwestern Romania and bounded by the Carpathian Mountains, Transylvania (Latin for "Land Beyond the Forest") is home to some seven million inhabitants, 75% of them Romanians (who call it Ardeal); 20% Hungarian Romanians (who call it Erdély); a fraction of what once was a population of nearly a million Germans (who called it Siebenbürgen, or seven towns); as well as Gypsies (or Roma, as they call themselves), Armenians, Ukrainians, Poles, and Turks.

Hundreds of years before Christ, the Dacians (called "Agathyrsoi" by Herodotus in the fourth volume of his Histories) were the first recorded people to live in Transylvania. They tattooed their faces, arms, and legs according to their rank in society, and dyed their hair dark blue.

Herodotus wrote of several Dacian legends and rituals, such as the priests of Zalmoxis who kept the secret of incantations that could make human beings immortal, and the ritual practice of wrapping a young man who wished to become a warrior in the skin of a wolf (some men were said to be able to change themselves each year for several days into the form of a wolf). Modern historians have theorized that hallucinogenic mushrooms were used in the wolf-pelt ceremony, allowing the men to experience a complete psychological transformation into wolves.

Once psychologically transformed into a wolf and thereby initiated into the Brotherhood of the Wolf, the Dacian warrior would enter fearlessly and ferociously into battle under the banner of the Wolf Dragon, an animal with the head of a wolf and the body of a dragon. The Royal Order of the Dragon, into which the historical Prince Dracula's father was initiated at Nuremberg in 1431 (the year of Dracula's birth), was a branch of the Brotherhood of the Wolf, which had already survived for two thousand years. Almost five hundred years after that, a picture was taken in the early twentieth century showing a shepherd in the Pindus Mountains of northwestern Greece holding a staff with a carving of the Wolf Dragon at the top.

The photograph at the top of the story of a Wolf Dragon was carved in a stone arch as long as 2,000 years ago. The picture was taken at one of the Orăştie sanctuaries. The carving is one of the only original, intact examples of the powerful Dacian symbol remaining in the world.

The Hotel Castel Dracula

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

In keeping with the ancient tradition that agents of Evil can only do business with willing clients, Count Dracula welcomes Jonathan Harker into his castle with the above invitation. In reality, in the 1890s there was no castle at the top of the Borgo Pass, and there was no Golden Krone Hotel (Coroana de Aur in Romanian) in Bistriţa for Jonathan Harker to stay in before his fateful coach ride to the Count's abode. But today, fueled by Romania's pursuit of much-needed tourists' dollars, pounds, and euros, you can find them both.

Completed in 1983, before the overthrow of Nicolae Ceauşescu, whose brutal, cult-of-personality brand of Communist rule lasted from 1965 to 1989, the Hotel Castel Dracula is situated at the top of the Borgo Pass, exactly where the Count's castle is located in Dracula.

Although the Hotel Castel Dracula is a modern hotel with all the expected conveniences (including hot cocoa in its restaurant, which I really, really needed after my walk in the freezing altitude of the Borgo Pass), its brickwork and architecture is evocative of the medieval fortress depicted in the novel.

I was surprised to see a portrait of Countess Elizabeth Bàthory near the reception desk in a hotel that is otherwise devoted to Dracula lore. Born on August 7^th, 1560 in Transylvania, the Countess was the most prolific female serial killer of all time. Her known victims—all female, all of them children or young adults—numbered at least 650, and most were tortured or beaten to death. These are facts based on court records. Among the legends not supported by transcribed testimony is that she was a descendant of Prince Vlad Ţepeş, and that she killed not just for pleasure, but to bathe in her victims' blood in the belief that it would keep her young forever.

The Hotel Codrişor

Bistriţa—Slavic for "running brook"—is an economically depressed town on the edge of the Borgo Valley, bounded on the south by the Bistriţa River and to the east by the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains. Blessed by its proximity to the Borgo Pass and the fact that Dracula begins in Bistriţa with a journal entry written by Jonathan Harker, the town has exploited its connection to the novel in every way that its local entrepreneurs have been able to.

The best hotel in Bistriţa is the Hotel Codrişor (https://www.hotelcodrisor.ro/en/), overlooking the Bistriţa River, with a full breakfast, private bathroom, and cable TV. Dinner at the Crama Veche restaurant nearby includes cherry brandy, bean and ham soup, chicken paprikash, and pickled salad.

Sighişoara: Birthplace of Vlad the Impaler

Sighişoara became my base for exploring Transylvania, and the first item on my to-do list was to visit Casa Dracula, the house where Vlad Ţepeş was born.

From Curtea de Arges, near Prince Dracula's stronghold at Poienari, I journeyed by bus and train through foothills below staggering mountain ranges, their jagged crests covered with snow. By the time I reached the train station in Sighişoara, the snow had disappeared, and the glaciers of the Făgarăş mountains had receded until they were far off in the southern horizon.

I walked from the station, across the bridge above the Tarnava Mare River, and then along the narrow passageway that led through the city gate. I was enchanted the moment I entered Sighişoara's Upper Town.

All at once I was in the middle of a perfect storybook medieval village enclosed by thick fortress walls, with cobblestone streets and Easter-egg-colored houses leaning every which way. Guarding the town square was a spire-roofed and turreted fourteenth-century clock tower replete with carved wooden figures that circle a track to mark the passage of time. In one window, a drummer plays to signal the hours; below the drummer, the angel of the night replaces the angel of the day at the final stroke of midnight. In another window, gods and goddesses appear, changing for each day of the week.

Known as the "Pearl of Transylvania," Sighişoara is the supreme example of a Saxon city and the best-preserved medieval walled town, or citadel, in Europe. But its history began long before the Middle Ages: its natural defensive position, surrounded by forests on a hilltop above the Tarnava Mare River, has attracted settlers since prehistoric times.

Archaeological findings reveal that the region of the present town of Sighişoara was inhabited by Scythians as early as the sixth century BCE. The Dacians built a fortress settlement there, called Sandava, in the third century BCE.

Around 106 CE, when the Roman Empire began to colonize Dacian territory, the Romans built Castrum Sex (Fortress Six) on the hilltop above the river. Built in the shape of an irregular hexagon, Castrum Sex was one of a series of castri (fortresses) erected to defend the roads between what is now Alba Iulia to the west and Odorhei and the Oituz Strait to the east.

A thousand years later, at the end of the tenth century CE, Hungarians settled in the Pannonian Plain and Transylvania. By the twelfth century, the King of Hungary encouraged Germanic colonists from Flanders, Saxony, and the towns along the Rhine and the Moselle Rivers to emigrate to Transylvania. The role of these so-called "Saxons," who spoke a now-extinct dialect of Low German, was to strengthen the borders of the Hungarian Kingdom against the Turkish Empire. Saxon craftsmen, farmers, and tradesmen built their citadel upon the ruins of the former Roman fortress.

In 1298, the town was referred to as Schespurch; in 1367 it was called Civitas de Seguswar. The name of Sighişoara was first cited in a written document issued by Vlad Dracul, the father of Vlad Ţepeş, in 1431, the year of Vlad Ţepeş' birth.

In Vlad Dracul's time the citadel, today a UNESCO World Heritage Site, was protected by a thirty-foot-high wall with fourteen defensive towers (of which nine are still preserved); cannons were pointed north, south, east, and west. Each tower was named for the craft guild, e.g., the shoemakers, butchers, rope makers, tanners, blacksmiths, etc., that built, maintained, and safeguarded the tower. A census in 1488 counted six hundred inhabitants, mostly merchants, artisans, magistrates, clergy, and other citizens, in 140 houses, as well as nine "poor men" and four shepherds.

The little town square, the Piaţa Cetăţii (pronounced Piazza Ceta·TZEE), in the heart of the citadel, is still the site for markets and craft fairs. In medieval times it also served as the location for public executions, witch trials, and impalings, though nowadays only the witch trials are—if somewhat cheesily—reenacted for tourists.

Rarely a day went by in Sighişoara that I didn't treat myself to a slice of peach pie and a cappuccino at the International House (not of Pancakes) restaurant, run by a group of Nazarenes from Massachusetts. The International House faces the Piaţa Cetăţii.

For dinner, in the Lower Town east of the main gate to the citadel and the Passage of the Old Ladies, is the Rustic Restaurant, with regional specialties including their surprisingly good sarmalute, which is vine or cabbage leaves stuffed with meat, usually pork. Bear in mind that once you leave the high walls of the citadel, Sighişoara loses its magic: it becomes an ordinary, though by no means unpleasant, Transylvanian town.

Back within the citadel walls of the Upper Town, the restaurant on the ground floor of the Stag's Head Building, just off the Piaţa Cetăţii, serves tasty traditional German food, including gulasch; pork with dumplings in sauce; and salad with cucumbers, tomatoes, and cabbage. The restaurant is easy to find, with an actual stag's head complete with antlers on the building's corner and the rest of the stag's body painted on an adjacent wall.

The author published three books in three years: the first of three editions of "In the Footsteps of Dracula: A Personal Journey and Travel Guide" in 2010 (the latest and 3rd Edition was published March 23, 2014, World Audience Publishers); "Before the Paparazzi, 50 Years of Extraordinary Photographs" in 2011 (World Audience, Inc.); and "Dancing in the Streets" in 2012 (Anaphora Literary Press).