Читать книгу Real Vampires, Night Stalkers and Creatures from the Darkside - Brad Steiger - Страница 18

At the meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences held in Denver, Colorado, in March 2009, Matteo Borrini of the University of Florence in Italy said that he may have forensically examined the first skeletal remains of a vampire.

While excavating the mass graves of victims of the Venetian plague of 1576 on the island of Lazzaretto Nuovo, Borrini found the skull of a woman with a brick in her mouth. According to Borrini, grave-diggers placed small bricks in the mouths of vampires, those men and women who were suspected of spreading the plague, as well as drinking people’s blood.

Undoubtedly, during the demon-haunted Middle Ages, there were many corpses buried with bricks in their mouths for there were numerous recently deceased individuals under suspicion of being vampires. In the popular mind, Vlad Tepes, Dracul (1431–1476), might well have been responsible for creating a good number of blood-drinking night stalkers.

Vlad Tepes, King of Wallaschia, present-day Romania, may have been one of the inspirations for Bram Stoker’s classic work Dracula, and his very name may be synonymous worldwide with vampires, but he will not be included in our Gallery for the very good reason that he was not a vampire. His bloody sobriquet, Vlad the Impaler, did not come from fangs that impaled the throats of his victims, but from the stakes that were driven though the warriors who had yielded to him in battle. History records that Vlad might have tortured, roasted, boiled, and impaled as many as 100,000 enemy soldiers, but he was never seen drinking a single drop of their blood.

In 1410, King Sigismund of Hungary had founded a secret fraternal order called the “Order of the Dragon” to defend Christian Europe from the onslaught of the Ottoman Turks. The emblem of the order was a dragon, wings spread, defending a cross. Vlad Tepes’s father was known as “Vlad the Dragon” in honor of his courage in warfare against the Turks. Therefore Vlad Tepes (Vlad III) became at his birth Vlad Dracul or “Son of the Dragon.”

In present day Romania, Vlad Dracul is regarded as a national hero for his success in resisting the invading Ottoman Turks and for establishing at least a brief period of peace, independence, and sovereignty. To call Vlad Dracul a shape-shifting creature of darkness while a tourist in Romania would be comparable to visitors to the United States naming our Colonial hero and leader George Washington a vampire.

However, there does exist a historical connection between Dracul and the first true vampire in our Gallery. In 1476, Steven Bathóry of Transylvania, whose family crest also bears the image of a dragon, helped Vlad Tepes regain his throne. In 1560, Erzsebet (Elizabeth) Bathóry was born.