Romanian county wants to buy back "Dracula's Castle"

09/01/2007

Romania's Brasov county is ready to pay the former royal family 60m euros for a 14th century fortress, nicknamed "Dracula's Castle", in hopes of boosting tourism revenue.

(Telegraph, The Scotsman, The New York Times, Nine o'Clock - 09/01/07; Reuters, Bloomberg, HotNews.ro - 08/01/07; The Scotsman - 07/01/07; The Journal News - 28/12/06)

The Habsburg family wants 60m euros for Bran Castle. [Getty Images]

Romania's Brasov county council is seeking a ten-year loan from an Austrian bank to buy back a medieval Transylvanian fortress, known as "Dracula's Castle", from the descendants of the country's former royal family of Habsburg.

The current owners -- Dominic von Habsburg, an industrial designer who lives in New York, and his sisters Elisabeth Sandhofer and Maria-Magdalena Holzhausen, who both reside in Austria -- have demanded 60m euros for the real estate, officially called Bran Castle.

"We want to get involved in getting back the castle and running it because it would be a very good opportunity to further develop tourism,'' the president of the Brasov County Council, Aristotel Cancescu, said on Monday (January 8th). "The costs are minor compared to what we might obtain. In order to buy the castle, the County Council will pay in the first two years 2.7m euros, and the rest up to 60m euros will be paid through a loan."

Any purchase would require approval by all council members. Cancescu said he expects this to happen at the next meeting.

Perched at the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, the castle belonged to Romania's Queen Marie, a grandchild of British Queen Victoria, until 1948, when it was seized by Romania's communist regime and turned into a museum. It was returned to the queen's grandchildren last spring under the country's restitution law. In December, von Habsburg decided to offer it for sale and approached the Brasov council.

According to Romanian Culture and Religious Affairs Minister Adrian Iorgulescu, this was not in line with the legally envisioned procedure, as the government had the first right to buy the castle.

"The purchase offer is illegal as we have the first refusal," a report in Britain's daily Telegraph on Tuesday quoted the minister as saying. "Brasov County Council can think about buying the castle only after the culture ministry says it is not interested, and we have not yet even made our offer."

Romania's English-language daily Nine o'Clock also quoted Iorgulescu as saying there can be no formal discussion on the castle's sale until his ministry receives a written request from its current owners. "I am not against the possibility that the castle might be bought by the Brasov County Council at a later phase, but the legal procedures are not being respected right now," the minister added.

According to him, the price demanded by von Habsburg was "indecently high" and far exceeds the castle's real value.

Located about 200km north of Bucharest and first documented in November 1377, Dracula's castle is one of Romania's greatest tourist attractions.

Vlad Tepes, or Vlad the Impaler, who was born in 1431 and ruled in Wallachia three times between 1448 and 1476, is believed to have spent time there. The count, who gained world fame through Bram Stoker's 1897 novel "Dracula," earned his nickname due to his habit of executing captured Turks and other opponents by impaling them on wooden spikes.

Lia Trandafir, a partner at the Bucharest-based law firm Rubin, Meyer, Doru & Trandafir, which represents the owners, told Bloomberg news agency Monday that, regardless of who buys the castle, it will have to remain a museum for three years after the purchase.

"This castle cannot be bad business, regardless of who buys it because of the symbols associated with it,'' Trandafir said. "Right now it's the only museum in Romania that finances itself entirely and also produces a profit."