Dracula at my Door. Not in my Culture.

Welcome to the new followers of this blog. Keep up with the comments and feel free to jump in. This is a post about my main irritant, Dracula. Not the person, but the myth.

Dracula is fast becoming the bane of my existence in my home. For some reason the myth that there was a really figure that did all these things is present in the cultural fabric in my area, North America. Most from Transylvania will dismiss this as legend and say that the person was not much more than a minor warlord, who by virtue of his birth in Transylvania and his regular return there isn't really all that important.

Still I receive at least one email per day asking me if I'm going to write about Dracula. I have done so on a number of occasions, but I'm doing so again for many a person's benefit. Vlad Tepes was born in Transylvania, and was by birth a prince of Wallachia.

He fought against the Turks, the Hungarians, the Germans or anyone who he thought might change the course of his power. He earned the nickname of impaler based on the method of killing his victims.

Yes, he died. In fact legend has it that his head was sent back to the Sultan of the Ottoman empire in a jar of honey.

It was Bram Stoker who gave rise to the legend of Dracula and the Romantic notion of fangs, blood sucking and the rest. What I find most interesting is that Stoker never once visited the place he wrote about. It is a good book, but it doesn't have the facts right, but since it seems to have this real person in it, many people take the work of fiction, and say that certain parts are fact.

This book Dracula is a work of fiction. This book Dracula is a work of Fiction. This book Dracula is a work of Fiction.

No matter how many people are interested in Dracula they never ask about my culture. By the way for many they hadn't heard about Dracula until they came to North America. So I can say Dracula isn't a part of my culture.

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