Dracula’s castle is to be returned to its rightful owner — who is not, it should be emphasised, a vampire, but an architect whose other home is in the suburbs of New York.
At a ceremony on Friday in Transylvania, Bran Castle will be handed back to Dominic Habsburg, the grandson of Romania’s former Queen Maria, 60 years after he was forcibly removed from it as a 10-year-old by the country’s communist government.
The 13th-century Gothic fortress, situated high upon a rock, is believed to have inspired the portrayal of Dracula’s lair in Bram Stoker’s novel, which is described as ”a vast ruined castle, from whose tall black windows came no ray of light, and whose broken battlements showed a jagged line against the sky”.
Prince Vlad the Impaler, the inspiration for Dracula himself, never owned it, but is believed to have visited. Thanks to the vampire connection, it is now one of Romania’s leading tourist attractions, and peasants sell Dracula sweaters and bottles of Dracula wine at its gates.
”It was wintertime when it happened,” Habsburg said on Tuesday, recalling the moment in 1948 when his family was forced into exile. ”We were expelled from the country, and we were only allowed to take a minimal amount of our belongings.”
Restitution had been talked about since the late 1990s, said Habsburg, who does not include the ”von” in his telephone directory listing. But the law that was eventually passed by the post-communist government was full of exclusions, meaning that it took five years, starting in 2001, to win the castle back. Romania’s entry into the European Union, scheduled for next year, has acted as a catalyst, and the country recently established a fund worth about $4,5-billion to pay damages in cases where assets cannot be recovered.
Habsburg said he is ”not OK” with the fact that the castle is associated primarily with Dracula. ”It’s fiction, and not a very nice fiction,” he said. ”But what can I tell you? It’s part of the image today. For me it’s my home, and it was my grandmother’s home, and my grandmother was a fairy-tale queen in many senses of the word, so that would be a much nicer image for me.
”I always wanted to go back on my own terms, and now I can,” he said. — Guardian Unlimited Â