Bram Stoker’s Dracula begins with an unsettling journey. As Jonathan Harker crosses the Danube River, he remarks ominously, “The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East; the most western of splendid bridges over the Danube, which is here of noble width and depth, took us among the traditions of Turkish rule.” Harker continues onward to Castle Dracula in Transylvania, “one of the wildest and least known portions of Europe.” Stoker, who never actually visited Eastern Europe, was surely thinking of Metternich’s famous aphorism: “East of Vienna, the Orient begins.”
Dracula’s portentous hints are positively restrained compared to the techniques of filmmaker David Eggers, whose recent adaptation of Nosferatu opens with an even stranger journey. When Thomas Hutter, the movie’s Harker stand-in, arrives in Transylvania in search of the mysterious Count Orlok, he spends his first night in a gypsy village. There he is greeted by exotically costumed locals, child beggars, and a suspicious innkeeper. At night, he witnesses a ceremonial vampire killing that recalls ancient pagan rites.
For centuries, Eastern Europe has been an irresistible tableau for travel writers and novelists, a putatively European setting touched by the influence of Turks, Russians, Tatars, and other mysterious interlopers. When Stoker wrote Dracula, an Englishman traveling in Eastern Europe would have been a stranger in a strange land. Today, the gypsies of Transylvania make TikTok videos showing off the turreted towers and gleaming roofs of their newly built mansions. You can visit Corvin Castle in Romania, where parts of Nosferatu were filmed, and buy a Dracula T-shirt. So much for terra incognita.
It’s unclear when Western Europeans first developed a fascination with their own backyard. Perhaps it starts with Voltaire, who wrote of a Europe that “knows” — the enlightened, rational West — and a Europe that “waits to be known” in the East. Lord Byron is famous for his love of all things Greek, but before he reached Athens, he visited Albania, playacting as a Turkish pasha on the shores of the Adriatic.
A few years before Dracula was published, The Prisoner of Zenda invented an entire subgenre of stories set in Central and Eastern Europe. Anthony Hope’s adventure story doesn’t have the same hold on popular culture as Dracula, but the kingdom he created, Ruritania, inspired a succession of imaginary countries. From Tintin’s Syldavia to Marvel’s Sokovia, the idea of an exotic Eastern European somewhere has long fascinated Western readers and moviegoers.
Westerners, according to Edward Said, see the distant Orient as “an image of otherness.” In truth, we spend far more time exoticizing our closest neighbors. The appeal of Ruritanian fiction is not hard to grasp. Eastern Europe blends certain familiar elements — Christianity, castles, and counts — with the extraordinary and the unfamiliar. The region’s history as a meeting point between East and West was thus a heady source of inspiration for Stoker, Hope, and their successors.
The funny thing about Ruritania is that its borders keep shifting. Hope’s setting has a distinctly Teutonic cast, probably because Germany had been a confusing patchwork of kingdoms and principalities within living memory. When Harker reaches Transylvania, which, in Stoker’s telling, may as well be a fictional place, German is still the lingua franca. But it is the Hungarians, Romanians, and elaborately costumed Slovaks that draw the reader’s attention. Later Ruritanian stories often take place somewhere in the Balkans.
For much of the 20th century, this mystique endured because Eastern Europe was trapped in a kind of cultural stasis behind the Iron Curtain. Soviet Communism was its own kind of threatening other, but travel restrictions and economic exigencies kept older ideas of Eastern Europe alive in the Western imagination. Desperate for foreign currency, communist regimes hosted affluent Westerners on carefully chaperoned visits that invariably featured music, folk dancing, and other picturesque local customs. The very inaccessibility of the region helped sustain its allure.
Sometime after the fall of the Berlin Wall, however, Eastern Europe became thoroughly known to the West. Maybe Ruritania disappeared for good when Prague became the destination of choice for every would-be Generation X poet and philosopher. Maybe it was the advent of budget airlines, which made it cheaper for British stag parties to carouse in Tallinn or Budapest than in Edinburgh. Maybe it’s Hollywood’s fault for seizing on the heavily accented, vaguely Slavic Eastern European gangster as a racially inoffensive villainous archetype.
Since the end of communism, economic, cultural, and political forces have opened Eastern Europe to the world. It is telling that Eggers chose Prague as his stand-in for the fictional German town of Wisborg, the civilized, Western counterpoint to Orlok’s Transylvania. A generation ago, such a choice would have been unthinkable for an American filmmaker.
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Behind the glitzy atmosphere of newly built prosperity lurks an uncomfortable truth: Many of the peoples that once imbued Eastern Europe with a kind of rough-and-ready cosmopolitanism are long gone. Although Stoker gets a few of the details wrong, his account of Harker’s journey into 19th-century Transylvania captures the region’s strangely alluring blend of cultures and languages. Today, all that’s left is a small enclave of Hungarian speakers in a sea of Romanians. The brutal tumult of the 20th century turned a region that was once a melting pot into a bloc of relatively homogeneous nation-states.
This is not to say that Eastern Europe is suddenly boring. If you know where to look, hints of its “exotic” history are easy to find, from the Turkish baths in Budapest to German cathedrals in Transylvania. In some ways, the region is no longer behind the West, but ahead of the curve. A canny observer of Eastern Europe in the early 2010s would have noticed certain harbingers of the political chaos that was about to envelop Western politicians. Though it has been shorn of some of its mystique, Eastern Europe is still worth knowing. Ruritania, alas, is gone forever.
Will Collins is a lecturer at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, Hungary.