Hey Buddy, got $135 Million?

[WolfeMacleod]

I want it. I want it bad.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19563707/?GT1=10056


BUCHAREST, Romania - Romania’s former royal family put “Dracula’s Castle” in Transylvania up for sale Monday, hoping to secure a buyer who will respect “the property and its history,” a U.S.-based investment company said.

The Bran Castle, perched on a cliff near Brasov in mountainous central Romania, is a top tourist attraction because of its ties to Prince Vlad the Impaler, the warlord whose cruelty inspired Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, “Dracula.”

Legend has it that Vlad, who earned his nickname because of the way he tortured his enemies, spent one night in the 1400s at the castle.

Bran Castle was built in the 14th century to serve as a fortress to protect against the invading Ottoman Turks. The royal family moved into the castle in the 1920s, living there until the communist regime confiscated it from Princess Ileana in 1948.

After being restored in the late 1980s and following the end of communist rule in Romania, it gained popularity as a tourist attraction known as “Dracula’s Castle.”

In May 2006, the castle was returned to Princess Ileana’s son, Archduke Dominic Habsburg.

Habsburg, a 69-year-old New York architect, pledged to keep it open as a museum until 2009 and offered to sell the castle last year to local authorities for $80 million, but the offer was rejected.

$135 million price tag
On Monday, he put the castle up for sale “to the right purchaser under the right circumstances,” said Michael Gardner, chief executive of Baytree Capital, the company representing Habsburg. “The Habsburgs are not in the business of managing a museum.”

No price was announced, though Gardner predicted the castle would sell for more than $135 million. He added that Habsburg will only sell it to a buyer “who will treat the property and its history with appropriate respect.”

Habsburg said in a statement: “Aside from the castle’s connection to one of the most famous novels ever written, Bran Castle is steeped in critical events of European history dating from the 14th century to the present.”


According to a contract signed when the castle was returned, the government pays rent to Habsburg to run the castle as a museum for three years, charging admission. After 2009, Habsburg will have full control of the castle, Gardner said.

The government has priority as a buyer if it can match the best offer for the castle, he said.

Opposition lawmakers have claimed the government’s decision to return the castle to Habsburg was illegal because of procedural errors.

In recent years, the castle — complete with occasional glimpses of bats flying around its ramparts at twilight — has attracted filmmakers looking for a dramatic backdrop for films about Dracula and other horror movies.

Some 450,000 people visit the castle every year, Gardner said.

[red-beard]

If anyone needs a PPI, I'll be there in 2 weeks

[URY914]

"Prince Vlad the Impaler", not a good nick-name....

Also, how big is the garage?

[berettafan]

i've seen the documentary on ol' Vlad and i wouldn't want anything to do with that character. an incredibly evil person.

[pwd72s]

Originally posted by berettafan
i've seen the documentary on ol' Vlad and i wouldn't want anything to do with that character. an incredibly evil person.

you have to admit, he knew well how to strike terror in the hearts of enemy troops....the ones not squirming on spikes, that is.

[red-beard]

Vlad is held in very high regard in Romania. He kept the Ottoman-Turks out of Europe. He ruled by a rule of law. And he was really no more bloodthirsty than the other rulers of the time (How many wives did Henry the 8th kill?).

Baically, imagine if a Chinese Author, 200 years from now, wrote a book about vampires during the American Revolution and used the Name "Count George Washington" as the villian.

One thing to note, though, the Bela Lugosi Vampire look, is very prevelent over there!

[RANDY P]

Originally posted by URY914
"Prince Vlad the Impaler", not a good nick-name....

perhaps OK for a Russian porn star..

rjp

[pwd72s]

Randy...coffee out my nose. That's funnier than hell!

[JeremyD]

Dracula's Reign
With the help of his Turkish army, Dracula seized the Walachian throne. However, he only ruled for two months before Hunyadi forced him into exile in Moldavia. Again Vladislav II became Walachia's prince.

Three years later Prince Bogdan of Moldavia was assassinated and Dracula fled the country. By now Vladislav II had become a supporter of Turkey, and Hunyadi was sorry he had put him on the throne. Everyone switched sides - Dracula became Hunyadi's vassal, and Hunyadi now supported Dracula's attempt to regain his throne. In 1456 Hunyadi invaded Turkish Serbia while Dracula invaded Walachia. Hunyadi became sick and died, but Dracula killed Vladislav II and took back his throne.

He established his capital at Tirgoviste - you can still see the ruins of his palace there. And nearby a statue of Vlad Tepes still stands. He is considered an important figure in Romanian history because he unified Walachia and resisted the influence of foreigners.

But it's Dracula's cruelty that most non-Romanians remember. After becoming prince, Dracula supposedly invited many beggars and other old, sick and poor people to a banquet at his castle. When his guests had finished eating their meal and drinking a toast to him, Dracula asked them, "Would you like to be without cares, lacking nothing in this world?"

Yes, they said enthusiastically.

So Dracula had the castle boarded up and set it on fire. Nobody made it out alive - and that was the end of their problems, as he had promised. "I did this so that no one will be poor in my realm," he said.

According to another story, he invited 500 boyars to a banquet and asked them how many princes had ruled in their lifetimes. They said they had lived through many reigns. Shouting that this was their fault because of their plotting, Dracula had them all arrested on the spot. The older ones were impaled; the others were marched 50 miles to Poenari where they were forced to build a mountaintop fortress. They worked a long time; when their clothes fell off, they worked naked. Most of them died, of course. And of course Dracula seized the boyars' property and passed it out to his supporters. In that way he created a new nobility, loyal to him.

(The ruins of the Poenari fortress can still be seen. You have to climb nearly 1,500 steps and cross a little bridge to reach it. It's now called Castle Dracula, but several places are called that. Another "Castle Dracula" is Bran Castle, near the town of Brasov. Although Dracula may have stayed there occasionally, it certainly wasn't his home.)

Dracula liked to set up a banquet table and dine while he watched people die. His favorite form of execution was impalement. It was slow; people could take days to die. He liked to impale many people at once, arranging the stakes in fancy designs. Nothing was too brutal for Dracula - he enjoyed having people skinned, boiled alive, etc. He prided himself on making the punishment (supposedly) fit the crime.

By 1462, when he was deposed, he had killed between 40,000 and 100,000 people, possibly more. He always thought up some excuse for these executions. He killed merchants who cheated their customers. He killed women who had affairs. Supposedly he had one woman impaled because her husband's shirt was too short. He didn't mind impaling children, either. Afterwards he would display the corpses in public so everyone would learn a lesson. It's said that there were over 20,000 bodies hanging outside his capital city. Of course, the stories about Dracula's cruelty might have been exaggerated by his enemies.

Despite all this, Dracula's subjects respected him for fighting the Turks and being a strong ruler. He's remembered today as a patriotic hero who stood up to Turkey and Hungary. He was the last Walachian prince to remain independent from the Ottoman Empire. He was so scornful of other nations that when two foreign ambassadors refused to doff their hats to him, he had the hats nailed to their heads. He was opposed to the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches because he thought foreigners, operating through the churches, had too much power in Walachia. He tried to prevent foreign merchants from taking business away from his citizens. If merchants disobeyed his trade laws, they were, of course, impaled.

Dracula created a very severe moral code for the citizens of Walachia. You can guess what happened to anyone who broke the code. Thieves were impaled, even liars were impaled. Naturally there wasn't a lot of crime in Walachia during his reign.

To prove how well his laws worked, Dracula had a gold cup placed in a public square. Anyone who wanted to could drink from the cup, but no one was allowed to take it out of the square. No one did.

A visiting merchant once left his money outside all night, thinking that it would be safe because of Dracula's strict policies. To his surprise, some of his coins were stolen. He complained to Dracula, who promptly issued a proclamation that the money must be returned or the city would be destroyed. That night Dracula secretly had the missing money, plus one extra coin, returned to the merchant. The next morning the merchant counted the money and found it had been returned. He told Dracula about this, and mentioned the extra coin. Dracula replied that the thief had been caught and would be impaled. And if the merchant hadn't mentioned the extra coin, he would have been impaled, too.

Dracula Overthrown
In 1462 Dracula attacked the Turks to drive them out of the Danube River valley. Sultan Mehmed II retaliated by invading Walachia with an army three times larger than Dracula's. Dracula was forced to retreat to his capital, Tirgoviste. He burned his own villages and poisoned wells on the way so that the Turkish army wouldn't have any food or water.

When the sultan reached Tirgoviste, he saw a terrifying scene, remembered in history as "the Forest of the Impaled." There, outside the city, were 20,000 Turkish prisoners, all impaled. The sultan's officers were too scared to go on - Dracula had won again.

Although the sultan retreated, Dracula's little brother Radu did not. The Turks had provided him with an army in hopes that he could seize Dracula's throne. Many of Dracula's boyars abandoned him to join Radu. Radu's army pursued Dracula to his fortress at Poenari. Dracula's wife was so frightened that she threw herself from the upper battlements. The Turks seized the castle, but Dracula managed to escape through a secret tunnel. There were still some peasants around he hadn't impaled, and they helped him flee from Walachia.

He went to the new king of Hungary, Matthias Corvinus, for help. Instead the king had him imprisoned in a tower. Dracula remained in Hungary while Radu ruled Walachia as a puppet for the Turks. After the first four years he was allowed to move into a house. He became a Catholic to please the Catholic Hungarians. He ingratiated himself with the Hungarian royal family, and even married one of its members (possibly the king's cousin).

But he was still the same old Dracula. He impaled rats and birds for fun. Once a thief broke into his house and a Hungarian captain followed him to arrest him. Dracula didn't kill the thief - he killed the officer. Why? Because the officer was a gentleman, and should have known not to enter a house uninvited.

The Death of Dracula
In 1473, Dracula's brother Radu lost the Walachian throne to a member of the Danesti clan, Basarab the Old. Radu died of syphilis in January of 1475, and in 1476 Dracula invaded Walachia with the help of Moldavia and Transylvania. They drove Basarab out of the country, and Dracula again became Walachia's prince. Most of Dracula's army then went home to Transylvania.

The Turks attacked a few months later. Dracula was killed while fighting near Bucharest in December 1476. Some say he died at the hands of a Turkish assassin posing as a servant, or that he was accidentally killed on the battlefield by his own men because he had disguised himself as a Turk to confuse the enemy. The sultan displayed Dracula's head on a pike in Constantinople to prove that he was dead. His body was buried at the island monastery of Snagov, which he had patronized. But excavations in 1931 failed to turn up any sign of his coffin!