We leave Bucharest on a gloomy October morning, heading north. It seems fitting, given our journey. I might be on a two-day Transylvanian tour but in my head I’m following Jonathan Harker’s fateful trip to Count Dracula’s castle, high in the Carpathian Mountains, a place where, he writes, “every known superstition in the world is gathered”.
Bram Stoker used these superstitions to fuel Dracula. Spending the first 30 years of his life in Dublin before moving to London, he never actually visited Transylvania, though he did spend years researching it, using its folklore to create a character who, according to the Guinness Book of Records, is the most portrayed literary character in the world. He’s believed to have been based on the 15th century Transylvanian ruler Vlad Tepes, also known as Vlad Draculea, notorious for impaling his enemies on stakes. But despite the stake-skewered corpses and prolific blood sucking, the opening pages of Dracula paint a pretty picture of the region.
“All day long we seemed to dawdle through a country which was full of beauty of every kind. Sometimes we saw little towns or castles on top of steep hills ...
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