Desperately Seeking Castle Dracula

For Stoker, although widely travelled, never visited Romania, let alone Transylvania, site of many of the most memorable happenings in his book. In that, he was like another iconic author whom he knew, Arthur Conan Doyle, who never saw the Roraima region where Brazil, Venezuela and Guyana meet, site of his famous Lost World.

So Stoker relied on people who knew the area and its lore for his ‘Heart of Starkness’ depictions.

In the book Jonathan Harker, the British lawyer arranging to buy real estate in England for Dracula’s coming immigration – perhaps that’s why Brexit won in last year’s referendum; too many Romanians – arrived in the town of Bistritz, now called Bistrița, by train from Klausenburg (now Cluj) to the south, and stayed at the Golden Crown hotel on his way to Castle Dracula.

Now, Bistrița possesses a magnificent old town dominated by a gothic church with a lofty tower, originally built in the 14th century by Transylvanian Saxons and given a renaissance make-over round about 1560. But nowhere was there a Golden Crown hotel in 1897, when Stoker published Dracula.