Romania: Painted Monasteries, Dracula's Real History and Dacian Pride
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Vlad III Dracula — the Wallachian prince whose name Bram Stoker borrowed for his 1897 novel — was a real person, a 15th-century ruler whose methods of executing his enemies were genuinely extreme and deliberately theatrical. He was also a defender of his people against Ottoman expansion, and in Romania he is not a villain. He is a national hero. The disconnection between the Romanian historical figure and the international vampire mythology is so total that Romanians navigate visitors' questions about Dracula with a mixture of bemusement and pragmatic calculation about tourism.
The Bucovina painted monasteries of northeastern Romania — built in the 15th and 16th centuries — are among the most extraordinary examples of religious art in Eastern Europe. The exterior walls are covered in frescoes, floor to ceiling, painted in vivid colours that have survived five centuries of Moldavian weather. The paintings were not merely decorative. In a largely illiterate society, the exterior frescoes served as biblical narratives readable by the population who could not enter the inner sanctum. The entire Bible and the lives of the saints were on the walls, in weather and in colour.
Romania's Dacian roots — the pre-Roman people who inhabited the Carpathians before Rome's conquest — are a source of growing national pride. The Dacian fortress of Sarmizegetusa Regia, in the Orăștie Mountains, was the spiritual and military capital of the Dacian kingdom and contains impressive stone structures. Romanians trace their identity to the Daco-Roman synthesis that followed the conquest, producing both the Latin language that became Romanian and a distinctive Carpathian culture.
