VLAD TEPES DRACULA

Vlad III was born in the Transylvanian village of Sighisoara. The house where he was born is now a restaurant that serves a very nice steak tartare, just the way Mom used to make it!

540 years after his death not a lot remains of Vlad's palace in Bucharest, but there is enough to make a decent tour.

And here lies Vlad... or does he? While this is recorded as the burial site of Vlad Tepes and the nice young monk told me that he lies here, the tomb was dug up in the 20th century and his coffin was empty!

In the 15th century the Voivode Vlad II had two sons. The boys were raised as hostages in Turkey to assure the voivode's "good behavior." The elder son, Vlad III, was installed by the Turks to succeed his father, but Vlad turned on his Turkish masters, trying to make the the land, "Wallachia" as it was called then, an independent Christian nation. Vlad's brother, Radu, remained faithful to the Sultan and the brothers led battles against each other, with Wallachia falling to one, then to the other. Vlad ruled three separate times before his death in 1476.

When he reigned Vlad followed the example of other sovereigns who tried coalescing authority in feudal lands. He was severe in imposing order in a lawless region, and made many enemies suppressing the feudal lords. Trying to assert independence, he had to take advantage of his allies in Austria, but neither he nor the Austrians had any illusions about each other. They tried keeping him on a short leash and he did his best to go his own way without losing their much needed sponsorhip.

Brutal as he was -- and arguably, he had to be -- he made enemies all around and reports of his cruelty may have been much exaggerated. Certainly he created material for his enemies to work with. There seems little question that he actually enslaved the feudal lords of Wallachia, forcing them to build him a castle before he killed the survivors; or that he impaled criminals and captives on long stakes, earning the name of Vlad the Impaler. Once he recieved emissaries from Turkey who refused to remove their caps for him, saying that it would be against their custom. "To help them follow their customs more closely" he had their hats nailed to their heads.

As his father, Vlad II, had been a member of the "Order of the Dragon" Vlad III had been known as Drakole"the little dragon." In the local language, the same word denoted "dragon" and "devil" so the "son of the dragon" was also thought of as the "son of the devil."

Vlad remains an important figure in Romanian history. His efforts helped to coalesce a nation that has grown and survived the empires that had conquered it. A part of his legacy is that he had built up Bucharest from a small town to serve as his own capital. The remains of his palace still stand in Bucharest which, since its independence from Ottoman rule, has been the capital of modern Romania.

Buried in a small church on an island near the village of Snagov, Vlad's tomb is not easy to get to! (But that's another story!)

With the passage of time Vlad's history faded into relative obscurity, until in late Victorian England Bram Stoker did a little research and used the historic Vlad as a character in the famous novel, Dracula. The fictional vampire has about as little similarity to the historical Vlad as Santa Claus has to the original Saint Nicholas, but similarly the popular fictional image far overshadows the historical man.

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