Articles > Are you myth-informed?

Maybe it was the clove of garlic above the door. Or the creaking sound of the floorboards as an unknown guest walked above our heads. Or maybe it was just the fact that one of the staff let slip that the previous owner of the house had hung himself in the room where we were about to bed down for the night. Either way, as I pulled the blankets up around my neck and settled down to the sound of dogs howling outside the moonlight-grazed window, I had the feeling that a night at Count Kalnoky’s Transylvanian liar wouldn’t be like any other night of my Romanian sojourn.

Then again, the man locals doff their caps to and address as, “Mr Count” isn’t your average hotelier either. With a 750-year family history that takes in witchcraft and a mammoth legal battle with the Romanian state, via the fall of Eastern Block Communism, Tibor Kalnoky is a bone fide Transylvanian count without the traditional line in black capes, fangs and facial pallor. Indeed, when staff announce, “The Count will see you now,” the man stood before you in the sitting room is urbane, sophisticated and charm personified. There’s not a protruding incisor in sight.

Now I love a good vampire yarn. I’ve seen all the Hammer Horror films and do genuinely watch Buffy for the storylines. No, really. So, as a fan of vampire mythology, the idea of spending a night in deepest, darkest Transylvania as the house guest of a local count has just the right frisson of horror shtick to appeal to the darker reaches of my sense of humour.

But, contrary to the popular mythology generated by Bram Stoker’s bastardised take on the legend of the Romanian overlord Vlad Tepes, aka Dracul (meaning ‘evil’ in Romanian), there’s not a vampire in sight around these parts. In fact, if you’re after horror, then stay in Bucharest and spend the night at the Count Dracula Club restaurant, where Euro Goths lap up the Deeper Kiss cocktails and the Dracula kitsch floorshow with genuine neck biting.

A night with the Kalnoky clan, however, taps into a deeper and far more disturbing facet of the Transylvania psyche: a glimpse of the deep-rooted superstitions that power rural Romania’s taste for the truly macabre.

Ghost stories are a mainstay of daily life out amongst the villages of outback Romania. Death rites are still performed, witches consulted in preference to doctors and bodies exhumed from graves to banish the 'strigoi', undead souls whose troubled spirits stalk rustic communities at the witching hour. While the modern Romania of GSM technology and market economics counts down to 1 January 2007 – the day it hopes to be welcomed into the bosom of the European Union – rural Romanians still exists on a steady diet of folklore, mysticism and the unyielding enforcement of community justice.

“Superstition is a huge part of life here and the people have a much closer relationship to nature. Illness and death are omnipresent, hence mainstream religion cannot satisfy all their needs,” explains our new host, Tibor, as we sip plum brandy from an antique decanter and glasses set in the guest’s drawing room.

“I’ve even been to see the local white witch myself and have come to see no conflict between these beliefs and my own Catholicism,” he adds. “I’ve simply come to understand and respect the local set of beliefs – even though some aspects do still, at times, shock me.”

To the average holidaymaker in search of rural tranquillity and some quality, organic home cooking, a night with the Count offers little by way of things that go bump in the night. Consult his staff and start casting a critical eye around the village, however, and you soon will find symbols of local beliefs – from the red braid on the horses’ manes to ward off the evil eye, through to roofs adorned with one of three symbols, namely a cross, the head of a barking dog or a ceramic ball, all designed to scare away the bogie man. And woe betide anyone who removes a stork’s nest from their chimney pot. The last person to do that was found with his belt around his neck and his eyes bulging from their sockets in the very room where the maid is currently making up our beds.

From Bucharest it’s a three-hour train ride through the Romanian countryside to Brasov, where a driver is waiting to whisk you through villages unconcerned with the modern age. En route you will pass horses and carts laden both with market produce and people, while slack-jawed locals in headscarves gaze out from wooden doorframes as the spluttering engine passes by.

The Kalnoky guesthouse is located in the tiny village of Miclosoara (population 512), 45km northeast of Brasov in the Szekely region of Transylvania, where Romania’s multi-ethnic mosaic lives together peacefully and the dominant language a dialect of Hungarian. As the roads change from smooth concrete to pot-holed tracks and fresh air of Transylvania fills your nostrils, you soon realise you are entering a land that time forgot. But don’t go shouting about it. Kalnoky’s guests like to keep their hideaway a well-guarded secret and, besides, out here nobody can her you scream anyway.

The next few days drift by in a haze of country fare, country air and ghost stories. Each night, guests gather around a candlelit dining table for dinner as if hell bent on recreating an Agatha Christie murder mystery before the weekend is out. By day the more active go hiking in the forest or arrange rides out to the Unesco heritage-listed town of Sighisoara.

And, if you’re really lucky, the Count himself will take you on a guided tour of the ancestral home he moved back to reclaim in 1995 after 50 years of persecution of the Kalnoky name under both Nazi and Communism regimes.

“I felt a responsibility towards the old family and the future generations,” he explains, brown loafers squeaking gently across the polished wood floorboards. “I wanted to establish the bonds between our family and the people of the village once more. And to preserve our identity at a time of huge change for Romania.”

With no European budget airline connection (as yet) and a certain charming innocence about the lure of tourism’s filthy lucre, Romania remains one of the last unexploited territories of Europe, Transylvania the jewel in its crown and the Kalnoky guesthouse an attempt to bring fresh blood to the business of Romanian ecotourism.

If you’re planning a night with the Count, then leave the Holy Water at home. But do pack an open mind as you’ll find village life, based on generations of deeply-venerated superstition, far more sinister than anything the scriptwriters of Buffy could dream up.

And that really is something to sink your teeth into.

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