13 March 2007

Bran Castle on Italian Television Rai 1

This morning the Italian television RAI 1 aired a 5 minutes documentary about Bran Castle. They mentioned it has been built “in 1300” (although the “official” year is 1377), that it belonged to Dracula in the 15th century (still we'll see later on this blog if it really belonged or not to Vlad III), than to Queen Mary of Romania at the beginning of the 20th century (they “forgot” to mention that the local council of Brasov offered it to Queen Mary “for her contribution to realizing the union of 1918” – is still unclear to me what her contribution was, but let’s skip this “detail”). Then they mentioned the castle has been transformed into museum by the communists and that Dominic of Hapsburg managed to have the castle given to him as he inherits the royal family (respectively Queen Mary). Images in the short documentary where from the castle, from the movie Dracula (1931) - a few seconds with Bela Lugosi and from the moment when dominic

The future of the Castle is still unclear; Dominic of Hapsburg wants to sell it for an amount of 60 to 100 m. USD but the Romanian state considered the sum exaggerated and refuses to pay.

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