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6 April 2006

Cancellation of Dracula Park hailed as victory by Romanian church

Jonathan Luxmoore
Warsaw (ENI). Romania's Orthodox church has welcomed a government decision to cancel a "Dracula Park" entertainment complex near Bucharest, five years after the project was initiated to take advantage of the country's legendary vampire.

"Our church was against this project from the beginning - we regard the fact that it has now been dropped as something normal," said Constantin Stoica, the church's spokesperson. "Although the churches weren't consulted, they made clear the Dracula myth had nothing to do with Romanian history, and this view was shared by many historians."

Prime Minister Calin Popescu-Tariceanu had in March announced the cancellation of the contract with Dracula Inc, the company assigned to build the 460-hectare theme park at Snagov, near Bucharest.

The decision had been taken after "irregularities and delays" were discovered in plans for the attraction, the government said in a statement. "It wouldn't be proper for us to assess the economic arguments, but it's obvious this project was deeply misconceived, and that the location at Snagov was particularly inappropriate," Constantin Stoica told Ecumenical News International.

Snagov is said to be the burial place of Vlad Tepes, or Vlad the Impaler, the 15th century ruler of Wallachia, who has been described as the inspiration for the character of Dracula, created by Irish novelist Bram Stoker in 1897. As ruler of Wallachia, in the south of present-day Romania, Vlad became notorious for impaling captured Turks and rebellious nobles on wooden stakes.

Plans for the Dracula Park, which was expected to attract a million tourists yearly and provide 3000 jobs, had been unveiled in 2001 by the government of the then prime minister Adrian Nastase. It was originally to have been situated near Vlad's birthplace in the Transylvanian town of Sighisoara, but was from there "mainly under civil pressure", the government statement said.

In the Stoker novel, Dracula is killed by a knife through the heart though it is popularly believed that the weapon was a wooden stake.

© 1994 - 2006 Ecumenical News International.

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