JodockWorldTravel

June 1, 2024

Although it is much smaller and considerably less grand than the Peles Castle we saw earlier this week, Bran Castle (aka Dracula’s Castle) is easily the most popular tourist attraction in all of Romania.

On the day we were there it was teeming with visitors, not just those looking to tour the castle, but also a number of people attending a festival being held on the grounds. Because of the crowd, we were rushed through the castle with very little time for pictures or a clear understanding of what the guide was trying to tell us, but we did our best to get photos and learn the story of the castle and its inhabitants.

First, there’s that little thing about Dracula…who knows where the rumors started, but the tourist industry has been all too happy to keep it going (and it’s clearly working well for them). One rumor is that Bran is referred to as Dracula’s Castle because it so closely resembles the castle described in the novel. Apparently, anyone who’s read the book knows that this is completely untrue. There are no similarities between the two. Another rumor is that Vlad the Impaler lived or stayed in the castle. This, too, has been debunked. In fact, it’s questionable he was ever here at all. Speculation is that if Vlad had been here, he would have simply been passing through when the castle operated as a customs post. Most people don’t know this until they arrive, if they ever find out at all, and I’m guessing they don’t really care. As long as we’re here, lets check it out.

The castle was built in 1377 almost exclusively for fortification and protection of the colonists in Transylvania. It was used for a short time in the 1400s as a customs post, and somewhere along the way became the property of the Hungarian monarchy. In 1533 one of the kings defaulted on some loans and the city of Brasov gained possession of the castle. With the 1920 Treaty of Trianon at the end of WWI the castle became a royal residence, and the favorite home of Queen Marie of Romania who had it extensively renovated. During the renovations she found a secret stairway!

Queen Marie was quite the lady. She was the first woman to be named Commander of a Romanian military calvary regiment and participated in several battles. She used her own money to care for wounded soldiers and asked family members to procure medical supplies from other countries. She played a decisive role in Romania’s entry into WWI, and it was she who convinced the Allied Nations to recognize a unified Romania when she crashed the Paris Peace Conference to plead their case. In 1917 the French press said, “There is only one man in Romania, and that’s the Queen!” She was also an accomplished painter and author of children’s books and her own memoirs. As if that weren’t enough, she also did a Pond’s hand cream commercial and was a friend of Sam Hill, founder of the Maryhill Museum of Art along the Washington side of the Columbia River Gorge.

I think the pictures above are of the music room and summer dining room.

Queen Marie was married to King Ferdinand and they each had their own living quarters within the castle. Queen Marie’s apartment was the third picture in this post. Here are pictures of the King’s “apartment.”

When the Queen died in 1938 her daughter, Ileana, inherited the castle. A woman after her mother’s heart, Ileana was the first Romanian woman to earn her Masters in Navigation and was an accomplished sculptor and author. She had earlier married the Archduke of Austria (a Habsburg, a name you might remember from our posts about Vienna) and was living near Vienna, where she had founded a hospital. She and her children moved into the castle, and during WWII she established a hospital there, too, as well as a camp for refugees and the politically persecuted.

The communist regime seized the residence in 1948 and Ileana and her family fled to the U.S., settling in Youngstown, PA, where she is buried. The property was returned to her son in 2005. It was opened to the public as Romania’s first private museum in 2009.

This is our last post for this amazing European Sojourn. We’ll be leaving the hotel at 3 a.m. tomorrow for our flight home. We hope you have enjoyed the journey as much as we have enjoyed sharing it with you. Until next time…