The San Francisco Examiner from San Francisco, California · 35

i ' V ..'. .... M 7. I 1 2 , . . s v r $W (IS - '1 Ik real Dracula -nt left Iiaimleil the I rt It rrnliiry uilli inns iniiriler. Film version, n Ia Lugo-i, i ilil, haunt I Mm Chandler in a I9.'51 picture. - V1 " ft I ,-f::. - rI Evr i H ii in m i tmmmmmmJmJLidili S. F. Sunday Examiner & Chronicle, January 9, 1 972 iittii N Section B Paga 5 Shostakovicli Ncv Triumph- Dracula: The Reality Was Worse EDITOR'S NO'l'VVampircs, mi the prince. They discov-ircre tiimlc somen lud honilic eved Draciila's iwrlrdit in heroes bit Uie fictional Count Ihvcttlu, ployed memorably hj Beta l.uuosi m the, movies. But, tiro historians saij there mis indeed a real Dracula and he would have made Bela hugosi shudder in terror. ly James F. Poiiohiie NKWTOX, (Mass.) - (AP) Two Boston College historians set out four years ago to find the origins of the Dracula vampire stories and found a flesh and blood Dracula whose real exploits of horror put the fictional vampire to shame. That's according to the historians, Dr. Radu Florescu. professor of Romanian and Balkan history and Dr. Raymond McNally, professor of Russian history, who tracked down the real Dracula, a lath Century Romanian prince. They say the real Prince Dracula killed about 100,000 people during his lifetime, most of them m 1456-1462 when he ruled the Romanian province of Wallachia and pails of Transylvania. His favorite mode of death was by impaling. He sat his victims on sharpened spikes. In 1462 he stuck 20.000 Turks and Romanian nobles on spikes in one spot to discourage the invasion of Sultan Mohammed the Great, fresh from his conquest of Constantinople. Another lime he either impaled or burned to death the 20.000 persons who lived in a village where one of his enemies found sanctuary. Madman? A madman? "Not really, although his terrorism was excessive even for his age," Florescu says. ,-I would say that he occasionally became demented and had an obsession to impale people every once in a while." The search for the real Dracula began some 15 years ago when McNally saw the 1931 Bela Lugosi movie classic about Count Dracula, the living corpse who roamed the dim, forested hills of Transylvania, sucking h uman blood by night and holing up in a casket by day. McNally next read the 1307 Bram Stoker novel "Dracu la." the basis for the movie, and found "a great deal of true historical and geographical facts in the book." "The book speaks of the towns of Cluj and Bistrila and of the Borgo Pass," McNally said. "These places actually exist. So does Transylvania itself. It's one of three provinces of Romania, even though most people think it's a mythical country dreamed up by Stoker. Poetic Version "1 said to myself, ' McNally said, "if the places are real, perhaps the person is real, too. Not, of course, as a vampire, but is an actual person who was portrayed in a jntetic way in ihe Gothic novel." McNally Ix'gan checking Romanian, German, Slavic and Russian sources but made little headway until 17 when he teamed up with Florescu. They tramped all over Romania tracking down leads Castle Ambras near Innsbruck, Austria "he's a bull-necked man with a fierce mustache and a jeweled turban'' and Castle Dracula atop a 30-fnot precipice in Wallachia, just across the border from Transylvania. Their efforts resulted in a book about Dracula. R was compiled mostly from folklore because documented, historical data about the prince are all but nonexistent. Curse of Dracula During their research, the two professors ran afoul of the "curse" of Dracula. "I don't know what to ;ay about the curse," Florescu says. "I am Romanian and naturally 1 am superstitious. 1 cannot say what 1 believe. But there is something there." To play it sale, he has never spent a night in Castle Dracula. The first time Florescu tried to climb to the castle he didn't make it because his uncle, George Florescu, fell into a ravine and broke his hip. The next time, Florescu made it to the castle, but immediately he became ill. "I don't think I was ill, exactly," he says. "I think I was just very, very tired. "And nervous, too, I suppose. The people around the castle are very superstitious about it. When we asked for directions they said we must not go there, that (the devil lives there guarding a treasure." McNally, although presumably not affected by the family curse, became ill himself at one point and fainted, but not at Castle Dracula. That was later when the professors found Dracula's portrait in a place of honor in a chamber of horrors collected in 1591 by a Tyrolean prince. Next to Dracula's portrait is one of the Wolfman of the Urals, a Russian nobleman with hair all over his face and funny ears. The Wolf-man looks very much like Lon Chaney in the movie role. "Dracula was put in the chamber of horrors," McNally said, "not because any body thought he was a vam pire, but because of the aw ful things he had done." The professors say there's more to the curse than faint ing spells, illness and injurious falls. Dracula was buried in the chapel of an island monas tery near Bucharest and, say McNally-Florescu, "the mon astery suffered a series of misfortunes ever since his body was put there." Grave The monastery was turned into a prison in the 19th Century and just as a group of chained prisoners were marching across a bridge to it, the bridge collapsed and the prisoners and their guards drowned. McNally-Florescu found the grave of Dracula near the altar of the monastery chapel. The grave was emp J DAY & EVE. CLASSES VET & VISA APPROVED LIFETIME PLACEMENT ASSISTANCE E-Z MONTHLY rATMtNIi l f S W'A Choose on exciting Poromedicol Career for high pay ond nationwide demand, usuries from i to 1 1 months. DENTAL ASST. DENTAL MB TICH. MEDICAL ASST. MEDICAL LAB ASST. MEDICAL RECEPTN. EKG TECHNICIAN PRACTICAL NURSE MALI ORDERLY INHALATION THERAPY TECH nr4. (or Vitt. TraiMif DENTAL LAB TECH spprvd. for VH. Training Day I Eve. Classes Begin Feb. 7, Feb. 14 I Mar. 6 ty, except for some prehistoric animal bones. "Now, there are a couple of explanations for that," Florescu says with a firm. One is the vampire explana tion: lie's out wandering around someplace. The other is mat the monks clidn t want a man with Dracula's reputation so close to the al tar. "We accept the second ex planation. We think the monks just moved the body." McNally-Florescu believe Stoker learned about Prince Dracula from Arminium Vambery, a professor from the University of Bucharest who visited Iondon in the 1890s. They believe Vambery's tales of Dracula's exploits, coupled with the fact that the myth of vampires sprang up from Romania, led Stoker to his tale. Moscow (UPI)-Dimitrl Shostakovich, Russia's greatest living composer whose career has swung from the heights of glory to official disgrace and despair, last night enjoyed another major triumph from Moscow's musical elite. More than 2.r0 of the capital's obviously sophisticated music lovers jammed the grand hall of the Moscow Conservatory to greet the premiere of Shostakovich's 13th Symphony. Standing Ovation Several hundred others packed the aisles and stood against the walls. The premiere was the 65 year old Shostakovich's first public appearance in many months. Jt wa scheduled for last fall but had to be postponed because of the composer's second heart attack, from which he recently recovered. Lady Macbeth' The audience gave the composer a seven-minute standing ovation and increasingly thunderous applause as he walked up the stage to embrace and kiss the conductor his own son, Maxim. Unlike much of Shostakovich's music, the 15th Symphony is apolitical and, ac cording to some music crit ics, was "pure music for music' sake." In 19.T6 the young composer' "Lady Macbeth" was described by Izvestia, as the "most brilliant Soviet production in music which has conquered the love of the mass spectator." But a few days later Stalin heard the opera and it was immediately banned and condemned as "an enemy of melody and harmony in mu sic ... Inaccessible to th masses and emphasizer of ugliness." Spain Big Draw IAS PALMAS (Canary Islands) - (AP) - About 25.5 million tourists visited Spain last year, an increase of 12 percent over 1970, government officials reKirted. FREE SEMINAR IKImLsS For Delinquent Pymts. No down payments No refinancing chg. No raise in interest rates Use existing loans team HOW to tpeculaU (with other people's mony) in dit-treited properties. Unique method will enoble YOU to molt big profits on someone else's investment. 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