Dracula's impact on today's tourism in Transylvania

People in Eastern Europe are not as fond of Dracula as Westerners are. When Transylvanian writer Andrei Codrescu emigrated to the USA, he was shocked to find a Romanian national hero miraculously transformed into an anti-hero, a blood-sucking vampire:
"You would be just as surprised to find yourself in the Carpathians confronted with a thriving film and comic book industry centred around the figure of George Washington, the necrophiliac sheep go."
Bram Stoker and Hollywood have succeeded in relegating a real place, with real people and real problems into a fiction, a land for movies. For a while, even the Romanian government encouraged the confusion, to promote its tourist trade. It published tourist brochures and run advertisements - picturing a mysterious-looking castle - in the New York Times and elsewhere headlined "Yes, there is a Transylvania". A castle? How did it come to that Dracula-castle?
After President Richard Nixon came to Romania on official state visit in 1969, many American tourists followed him to Transylvania. Actually Dracula's story was far more famous in the USA than behind the Iron Curtain. Since the American tourists asked many questions and were so eager to learn some more about bats, coffins, sharp long teeth and bloodsucking vampires, the Romanian Minister for Culture decided to find a castle corresponding to the description Jonathan Harker gives of the castle in Stoker's novel:
"(...) I did a little exploring in the castle. I went out on the stairs and found a room looking towards to the south. The view was magnificent, and from where I stood there was every opportunity of seeing it. The castle is on the very edge of a terrible precipice. A stone faking from the window would fall a thousand feet without touching anything! As far as the eye can reach is a sea of green tree-tops, with occasionally a deep rift where there is a chasm. Here and there are silver threads where the rivers wind in deep gorges through the forests."
The question arose where to find a suitable castle which looked "draculistic" enough and which was, if possible, close to a big city and a ski resort. Finally the castle of Bran, 23 km southwest of Bras ov, proved to be perfect. It is situated in the surroundings of Bras ov, the second biggest city in Romania, and of Poiana Bras ov, the most famous ski resort of the country. It stands majestically, though not mysteriously, on a hill. Built in 1377, the castle housed princes, kings and queens through the centuries, and guarded a commercial route between Wallachia and Transylvania. Between 1930 and 1947 it was used as a royal residence. Opened in the earlier seventies it was overrun by tourists. Everything here is based on a myth: in 1996 Dracula tee-shirts were on sale for five US dollars, "Vampirella squeeze bottles" appeared in 1997. Though Count Dracula never went there it looks as if everything would remember of his supernatural presence. The so-called "Dracula-Tours" at Bran are animations with macabre effects, though these effects were toned down after a tourist died of a heart attack when one staff member loomed out of a coffin. During one tour 11 Englishmen paid 8000 dollars each for the right to stand on the roof of Bran castle at night and howl. In summer lots of busses stop in Bran and there a hotel was built especially to host foreign tourists.
However Count Dracula had nothing to do with this edifice. Bran castle is simply an invention. First because Stoker's description is based on the Stains Castle in Cruden Bay, a small fishers' village in Scotland, where the novelist used to spend his holiday from 1893 to 1910. Second because geographically it is impossible, since Stoker located Dracula's castle close to Bistrit a, "just on the borders of three states, Transylvania, Moldavia, and Bukovina", that means about 300 kilometres away from the Bran-castle. The historical figure Vlad Tepes never went to Bran and his real castle stands 20 kilometres away from Curtea de Arges , that is to say approximately 100 kilometres away from Bran. In the 15th century it was almost completely destroyed and now we can only see some hilltop ruins overlooking the Arges River. In Sighis oara, a medieval Transylvanian town, the house where Vlad Tepes was born is still there and was turned out into a restaurant.
For sure, though Dracula is only a myth, it keeps influencing a lot the image of Transylvania which is still full of prejudices. Dracula and generally speaking all kind of vampires, ghosts and eerie beings are of course part of the popular culture but it is important to pass beyond stereotypes: you will not meet any vampire in Transylvania!