On an icy winter morning in Transylvania, there are more queues than usual in Sigh-isoara's post office. This is a big day in a quiet place: in the shadow of the Unesco World Heritage Site that is Sighisoara's medieval citadel, citizens are about to buy into Romania's biggest and loudest tourist project for decades, perhaps ever. Dracula Park is coming to town, and $5m (pounds 3.5m) of shares are now officially on sale.
In one corner of the room, a huddle of well- insulated townsfolk stand on the slushy floor. Dorin Danesan, mayor of Sighisoara and a member of the management team of Dracula Park, is watching the dozen- strong queue of share-buyers intently, as are a couple of local journalists. It's difficult to tell who is here for the shares and who is just paying their gas bill (that's a much bigger queue).
I pounce on Adrian Spanu, who's filling in a form to buy 100 shares in the park; they're worth pounds 20, or a third of the average monthly wage. "I think it's great," he says. Adrian studies engineering in Bucharest but would rather come home. "Dracula Park could turn Sighisoara into somewhere I want to work. This town needs some life." Beside him, a woman in a fur coat won't give her name but says she's buying shares for her daughter's Christmas present: "I can't be 100 per cent sure that this will succeed but I hope that it will." So does much of Sighisoara's 40,000-strong population: unemployment stands at 17 per cent, since most of the heavy industry disappeared with former dictator Ceausescu's subsidies. "Everyone else makes money from Dracula," says the mayor. "Why shouldn't we?"
Dracula Park was first announced in April by Romanian tourist minister Dan Matei Agathon. Foreigners were obsessed with Dracula, he reasoned, so why not build them a theme park? In a beautiful office in Bucharest - Ceausescu was fond of marble halls - Agathon's deputy, Alin Burcea, elaborates with ebullience. Sitting beneath large glossy posters of the park's proposed layout, he says Dracula is a tourist ministry's dream. "We can't compete with Austria's ski resorts, for example - they have 800 ski lifts and we have 40. But Dracula is unique to us. We don't even have to explain what it means so we save money with advertising."
The project was launched in fifth gear and hasn't slowed down since. Within only a few months, legislation had been hurtled through parliament, confirming that the Special Programme would be run by a for-profit company, Fondul Pentru Dezvoltare Turistica Sighisoara (FPDTS), 99 per cent of which would be owned by the Sighisoara municipality. Slick television ads urged Romanians to invest in this patriotic project, and programmes were interrupted to show Prime Minister Adrian Nastase buying pounds 700 worth of shares. Glossy feasibility studies in black and blood-red colours were produced, wishing readers a "welcome forever" and listing the park's proposed attractions in apparently professional detail.
Dracula Park's blood-curdling centrepiece will be Castle Dracula. It will house a judgement chamber, vampire den and alchemy laboratory. The Institute of Vampirology, the second-biggest draw, will have conference rooms addressing "all the strange, mysterious and inexplicable cases that occur both in the country and worldwide" and a Dracula's secret library of vampire annals. There will be a mock-up of a torture room, with stakes and knives. There will be a Dracula Lake (for no apparent vampiristic reasons), folk workshops "for teeth sharpening, making armours that can protect vampires from silver bullets", tailoring from the Eccentric Vampire fashion house, with "the launch of the spring collection featuring clothes for sun block". Even the rides will have a vampire theme, featuring mechanical devices "closely following the specific architecture of the respective age" - a Dracula carousel, a rollercoaster, a house of terror.
Visitors will be able to snack on "blood pudding, dish of brains and fright-jellied meat" in the theme restaurants, and will sleep in on-site motels. Roads and infrastructure will be created and magic figures will abound. The park will create 3,000 jobs! It will bring in $21m a year! It will "propel Romania to stardom," writes Agathon in his preface. It will bring tourists and be a solution to all problems.
And the choice of location will bring the tourists rolling in. Transylvania, land beyond the forests, is the most enigmatic and resonant of regions - so mysterious that most Americans don't believe it exists - and made globally famous by an Irish novelist. Dracula Park would be set in its heartland, near the glorious medieval citadel of Sighisoara.
No matter that Bram Stoker never set foot there. Dracula was originally titled The Undead. It featured Count Wampyr and was based in Austria. But the book was too close to Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla, an Austrian vampire tale. Stoker switched to Transylvania, and the 15th-century Romanian prince Vlad Dracula. His father, Vlad Dracul, got the name from his membership of the Order of the Dragon (drachen in German). "In Romanian," wrote British consul William Wilkinson, "Dracul means devil"; from this sentence, Count Dracula was born. That Dracula was better known as Vlad Tepes (the Impaler) for his favourite method of dispatching Ottoman invaders, and was King of neighbouring Wallachia, not Transylvania, was of no importance.
In the 1960s, US tourists began arriving in Transylvania looking for Dracula castles that didn't actually exist. The bemused Romanians knew only of Vlad Tepes. Though his cruelty was renowned - he once impaled 1,000 Turks at once - he didn't drink blood, or sleep in coffins, or have sharp teeth. In 1973, the government offered a "Dracula: Truth and Legend" tour. But when tourists turned up for fangs and capes, they got a week trailing the footsteps of a medieval king they couldn't care less about. Only in 1985, when the Romanians built Hotel Castle Dracula in the Borgo Pass (the access road to Count Dracula's castle in the novel) did vampire tourism officially begin.
Even so, Ceausescu forbade any association of vampires with Prince Vlad - especially in his final years, when Western papers took to comparing the dictator to Dracula. Dracula films weren't legal until the 1989 revolution (sadly, most Romanians I asked had only seen the Coppola version). Stoker's book wasn't translated into Romanian until 1992. But three years is quick for Romania, a country whose pace of change towards capitalist democracy has often been as slow as its revolution was swift. In the capital city, Bucharest, street after street yields a skeleton of a building begun under Ceausescu and never finished. Bucharest's sky is scarred with static construction cranes that haven't moved since the subsidies disappeared with the dictator.
Dracula Park is different. Backed by government might, its fame has spread worldwide. On my first evening in Bucharest, a young Romanian architect asks why I am here, before answering for himself: "The new acceptable story for the West, right? Abandoned babies, Ceausescu and gypsies, and now Dracula Park."
Opposite the post office, steep steps lead up to Sighisoara's medieval citadel. It is one of only two inhabited citadels in Europe, and is a stunning sight. No noise, not much traffic, pastel-coloured buildings that have been standing gracefully and quietly for 500 years - all behind old wooden gates that could still repel a Turk or two. It seems perfectly preserved: there is a fairytale clocktower Disney would kill for. The most garish thing in sight is perhaps the hand-painted sign to Casa Dracul, the house where Vlad Tepes was supposedly born in 1431.
There are only 200 people living here, so orientation is easy. In the main square, two buildings gleam in the snow, both restored by foreign NGOs because the government couldn't afford to.
One of Dracula Park's selling points is the money it will raise for restoration. The figures vary - it's pounds 1.4m one week, pounds 7m the next - but either would be welcomed. Romania's ministry of culture has said Sighisoara will be in a state of severe degradation within 50 years. Ceausescu preferred to knock down, not restore. He didn't send the bulldozers to Sighisoara, but he didn't fix the cracks either.
Still, the square looks pristine. More so than it did last autumn, says local resident Ben Mehedin, when Miramax descended to film Dracula Resurrection (Parts II and III) in the citadel. The latest addition to the vampire film oeuvre - a noble line leading from Bela to Buffy via Tom Cruise and Gary Oldman - installed a circus set in the square, supposedly the site of a vampire attack. "In the morning," says Mehedin, "there were dummies lying around with blood dripping from their necks, and our children passing on the way to school. My daughter was terrified."
