Carmilla is an 1872 Gothic novella written by the Irish author, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, and is heralded as one of the earlier works of vampire lore. It is the tale of a lesbian vampire and it predates Bram Stoker’s famed novel, Dracula, by twenty-five years. Stoker, too, was an Irishman who worked in the London theater and he sets his story high in the Carpathian mountains of eastern Europe in what is now Romania, but famously known as Transylvania. In that novel, the Count resides with three female vampires, of whom the reader learns very little, if anything, and he is served by “gypsies “ both there and at his later destination in London at Carfax Estate, the history of which property Stoker leaves untold.
It is from those threads that Bran Castle was woven, harkening to a time some fifty years before Stoker’s story, on the eve of revolution when the Roma were still slaves and academics and intellectuals schooled in Paris, espousing the principles of freedom as defined in the Age of Enlightenment, challenged the hierarchy of church and state and the noble boyars to free their Roma slaves who had been brought there as captives of war and whose people had remained in bondage since the 14th century when Vlad the Impaler fought against and defeated the Turks, who had been beforehand the Roma’s masters.
It is in that mysterious part of Eastern Europe, where pagan beliefs of long ago melded with religious beliefs and traditions of converging cultures; where empires clashed and Russians invaded; where crystal balls and castles coexisted and violins serenaded; where the lore of the UnDead grew into legend and the notions of dark gods survived so as to be offered sacrifices come the Winter Solstice; it is there that fabric of Bran Castle was first stitched and then sewn over the years of its development into the cloak it is today, underneath which pulses the human element of want and choice and their consequences, which remains the heart the story.
And if it is true that where there is heart there is soul, then as if through the eye of the needle, the journey of Bran Castle was destined to narrow its focus on not only the plight, but also the mystical and spiritual cloth of the Roma culture, certainly not in text book fashion, but more so in an impressionist fashion, in an epic setting, onstage and through the interpretations of the artists who gather to bring to life all which otherwise only exists on paper…the tale of a Roma slave girl, Mirela, and Vladidmir, the Count of Bran Castle.
Simply stated, the soul of the Roma is freedom. Its elusive quest over the centuries and the lingering effects to this day of its denial create their unique bond with the heavens. And while their struggle is real and tragic, on a grander scale it is symbolic as well, for we are all threatened by the demise of freedom and we all need to be reminded what the jingle jangle of the tambourine held high in the air really means.