Bran Castle, a national monument and landmark in Romania commonly known as “Dracula’s Castle,” is not formally on the market for a disclosed sum, but the present owner says the property is up for grabs if the price and buyer are right.
Mark Meyer of the firm Herzfeld & Rubin helped the current owners, Archduke Dominic and his sisters Maria-Magdalena Holzhausen and Elisabet Sandhoferregain, regain possession of the castle in 2009, after a legal battle with the Romanian Parliament over the property. According to Meyer, the Archduke would consider a buyer “if it were an interesting offer and they were the right people – It doesn’t have to do with class, it has to do with who will preserve the castle.” Archduke Dominic has previously offered to sell the castle to the Romanian government for $80 million.
Once a prison of Vlad the Impaler (the historical figure who very loosely inspired Bram Stoker’s iconic Dracula character), Bran Castle presently hosts roughly 560,000 tourists per year. The fortress was built in 1388, features 57 rooms, has zero bathrooms and is situated on 22 acres, in a fairly remote location.
Here is a photo montage Bran Castle:
Interestingly, Bram Stoker never visited Romania, and Vlad the Impaler’s actual castle is sitting in ruins in the Principality of Wallachia (Vlad III merely spent two months in Bran as a prisoner.)
Here is the trailer for Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula of 1992, the definitive horror-fantasy erotic-drama adaptation of Stoker’s text:
Which somehow lead to this:
“If someone comes in with a reasonable offer, we will look at who they are, what they are proposing, and will seriously entertain the idea,” Meyer commented, adding, “What you have to remember is that this castle is the real thing. We don’t need men going around dressed up in old-fashioned costumes; the place speaks for itself.”
Bran Castle currently functions as a museum displaying a collection of art and antique furniture from its previous owner Queen Marie of Romania
Image via Wikimedia Commons