Dracula's legends  

Tales need their halo, just like they were born. Does anybody want to change Snow-White's destiny? Do we need other variants for Little Girl with Matches, Hansel and Gretl and Sleeping Beauty? Today people have enough resources to make up their own tales, as their imagination will never be exhausted.
As for the old tales, they have the magic power to become younger with every generation. It is obvious that nobody will get rid of the extraordinary Dracula, this romantic vampire, sometimes bloody, sometimes lonely and pining for love, who's haunting the world since his father, the Irish Bram Stocker, put him in a novel. The strange creature had the power to get out of these pages, to cross over the threshold of movies, videotapes and especially of trips.
His fate began and ended here, in a pass of the Carpathians- Bargau Pass - in Romania and it worth, of course, to come from the other part of the world to see these places with your own eyes, just like you go and contemplate Romeo and Juliet's house or the inn in which it is said that the wizard Faust's shadow still haunts…

It will always be fascinating to search, to walk on the places of the creature that became irresistibly famous. The one who reigned when Henry VI and the English fought in the war of two roses, when in Hungary reigned the Romanian king Matei Corvin, when the sultan Mohammed II frightened the Christian Europe with his armies. He wandered through the historical Romanian provinces like no other prince. You can meet him, and this is not a figure of speech, where you do not expect to. These Middle Ages, with the shadow of the prince whom chronicles recommended as a prototype for a book character to Stoker, have their ghosts in many places: the town-burgh Sighisoara, where there is the house in which was born Vlad Tepes; Bucharest, capital of Romania, which keeps as birth certificate a document from 1459, issued by the prince who had his residence there, with the ruins which can be still seen in a mysterious corner of the town, the citadel Poienari, on the peak of a mountain, rebuilt as in important strategic place, the town Targoviste, where he massacred the unfaithful boyards, Sibiu, another burgh of Transylvania, or the Bran castle, around Brasov, where his impetuous incursions could be felt. It is said that his tomb is at Snagov where a church situated on an island in the middle of a big lake keeps the mystery of some underground shelters. May such details change in the mind of the traveler who comes in these regions his image of the "ideal" Dracula? We can not risk and give a firm answer.

Everyone is the unique and sovereign owner of its phantasms. The majority of "draculists" who followed such itineraries in Romania, looking for the vampire, declared that they finally discovered a country with beautiful landscapes, with interesting people, with peasant customs and legends which deserve lots of suspense novels. We haven't spoken yet about Pasul Bargau, on the purpose. In a grandiose landscape where there is the passage between Bistrita region (do you remember the famous inn "Coroana de Aur" - Golden Crown?!) and Moldova, a hotel calls up the shadow of the castle in which the vampire was killed and the spell disappeared - at least for the end of a book.



In winter, the snow shines with long violet reflexes, suggesting the passing of the tragic creature to new adventures. In summer, the multitude of wild flowers makes you wonder how large is the pass which separates the dream and mystery country from the reality country. Sometimes it seems that it can reduce itself to a simple closure of the eyes…