Episode Details

Bran Castle is sold to the world as Dracula's castle, yet Bram Stoker never visited Romania, his fictional castle was a crumbling ruin, and Vlad the Impaler neither lived nor was imprisoned there; after his 1462 capture he was held in Budapest. The real story starts at a Carpathian pass between Transylvania and Wallachia that worked as a medieval toll booth. In 1211 King Andrew II of Hungary gave the land to the Teutonic Order, which built the wooden fort of Dietrichstein by 1212, then expelled the knights around 1225 when they tried to answer to the pope instead of the crown. On November 19, 1377, King Louis I let the Saxons of Kronstadt, modern Brasov, build a stone castle with their own labor and money.

The Saxon fortress guarded against the Ottomans, collected customs, and repelled a Wallachian attack in 1530, and Brasov repossessed it in 1533 over a king's unpaid loans. After the 1920 Treaty of Trianon moved Transylvania into Romania, Brasov gave the castle to the royal family, and Queen Marie, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, had architect Karel Liman add running water, electricity, and an elevator. Her daughter Princess Ileana ran it as a hospital during World War II before the communists seized it in 1948. A 2005 restitution law led to its return in 2006 to her son, Archduke Dominic of Austria, then working as an architect in the United States.

• How Hollywood films fused the historical Vlad III and Stoker's fictional count onto a castle that simply looked the part
• The disputed Szekely Chronicle and a possible 11th century wooden fort built against Cuman and Pecheneg raids
• Why a castle built as crowdfunded defense, not a royal vanity project, shaped its plain architecture
• The 2007 parliamentary committee that called the restitution illegal and the Constitutional Court ruling that upheld it
• The June 2009 reopening as Romania's first private museum, with Queen Marie's collections and an open-air village museum