Bran Castle - Tumblr Posts
look im loving dracula daily as much as the next person but i am absolutely LOOSING MY SHIT over how the castle is described in the book, especially the may 5th update.
If you didn’t know, Dracula’s castle is/based on the real place Bran’s Castle in Romania.
Guys this castle is on a fucking cliff.
Johnathan described his arrival at castle drac as having a courtyard “of considerable size”, and right as he exited the carriage, being right next to the entrance.
You want to know what the ACTUAL entrance of Bran’s castle looks like???
FUCKING. THIS.
ITS A STEAP ASS STAIRCASE
NO COURTYARD IN SITE
Honestly there’s probably an issue regarding his super fancy octagonal room next to a dining hall but I don’t care enough to analyze blueprints and photos of the castle’s interior to find out.
i stumbled across your post about bran castle and it got me thinking maybe the entrance has changed over the years?
Hi there! Thank you so much for bringing this to my attention :)
Renovations and the layout changing completely skipped my mind when i made the original post, so I did some digging for you to find out if anything has changed with Bran Castle’s entrence over the year.
For starters I look into the history of the castle itself, and found a lot of information about it going through many renovations in order to repair the castle, due to it once being used as a military stronghold.
So for the most part nothing crazy, and we know that Bram Stoker never actually visited the castle either before or during the writing of Dracula.
Moving on I decided to look less at the history of the castle itself, and more specifically at any drastic changes to the castle itself.
The main source I could find on the entrence moving was Adventure Transylvania, and yes! The entrance did move!
The only issue is that because Bran Castle was used for fighting purposes, from what we know about the old bridge, it was absolutely not suitable for say, a carriage holding fan favorite British real estate agent Johnathan Harker.
Moving on, on the post itself you mentioned that Bran Castle has a courtyard, and while this is true surprise surprise there’s an Issue™️.
This is the quote in the book where Johnathan first describes the courtyard.
“In the gloom the courtyard looked of considerable size, and as several dark ways led from it under great round arches, it perhaps seemed bigger than it really is.”
Let’s start with the accurate parts about this:
1. There’s a courtyard. Good job
2. There are arches in the courtyard
And that’s it.
The courtyard itself isn’t that big, and due to something we’ll get to later, in no way could have a carriage drive around in it.
Since there’s no records of the dimensions of Bran Castle (and trust me I’ve LOOKED), I’ve used the magic of the google earth ruler to measure the courtyard. By itself that seems large but when the average courtyard is approximately 3,000ft^2, it’s 100% on the small size.
As for the other reason…
There’s a massive step/divide in the courtyard and a well
So yeah TL;DR the castle entrance did move, but it’s never been carriage accessible and neither is the courtyard :)
Happy May 5th Dracula Daily update I would once again like to remind everyone that the courtyard described today doesn’t exist and Bram Stoker made it up
