VLAD THE IMPALER
The story leads us to Vlad Dracul or Vlad the third, Tepes’s father, who was conceded as the ruleship of Wallachia. He also was given with a necklace and a golden medalion with a dragon engraved on it, it was the badge of The Order of the Dragon, natural enemies of the ottomans, the old name of the Turks.
He used the name “Dracul”, which in old Romanian means the same the dragon as the devil, as Vlad the impaler was the son of the “Dracul”, he was named Dracula, the son of the dragon.
“Dracula” is remembered in his country because of organizing the state an the law, as a brave warrior and a respected ruler. He didn’t tolerate the crime against his people, and who commited it was hardly punished.
He used to impale everyone who was considered as an enemy of his country, no matter if it was a priest or a robber.
Considered one of the most feared enemies of the Ottomans, he regained the independence of Romaniams from the Turkish empire, it’s this because he was a good king for his people, and he was the king of his country for three times.
Cruel, he enjoyed to see how his victims die in the impalement, and many times he ordered a banquet table in front of his victims, to see them dying slowly.
Tepes was killed in the end of 1476, at Snagov, at the hands of one of his men. These details made Dracula’s name closer to “son of the devil” than “son of the dragon”, which is the association of Tepes with the vampirism, owed to the fact that devil and vampire mean the same in some languages.
The stories about Vlad cruelty started to circulate soon through Europe. Then, some books were published, the first was made in 1463 in Germany and after that started to appear, time by time, more and more unbelievable stories which sumed the legend of Vlad the impaler into the vast floklore. There weren’t written versions, so the story went gradually further form the reality and that was the begining of the vampirism novels.
Into this new style, Bram Stoker published his masterpiece, “Dracula”, after a long research in 1897. The rest of the story is already known by us: movies and books about the myth, and lots of fans around the world.
The reality, as Elizabeth Miller, President of the Canadian Chapter of the Transylvanian Society of Dracula found out, is that the only relationship between Vlad Tepes’s legend and Stoker’s novel is the name, “Dracula”. As E. Miller discovered from the Stoker’s working papers and notes, the author didn’t know about the impaler story and woked just based on folklore and legends.
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This is Vlad Tepes’s grave. People say
that when he was killed, his head was
cut off from his body as a prove that
he was dead.