After his assassination, an event which is itself shrouded in lots of mystery, where was the body of Vlad Dracula taken for interment? Tradition says that it was without a head at the time, as the Prince’s murderers had taken it with them to present, eventually, to the Sultan, to prove that the dreaded Impaler was really dead. Tradition also says that Dracula was buried at the island monastery of Snagov, the site which is still believed to be his not-so-final resting place to this day. At least it is the most popular contender.
There are those who counter, however, that the church currently standing at Snagov dates to the 16th Century and is thus too “young” to have been Drac’s burial site. (There was an edifice on the site before the construction of the current one, and it is within this edifice that the burial supposedly took place. But would any of the graves from that period have survived? That’s the question put forward by the naysayers. There *was* a skeleton lacking its skull unearthed in the 1930s, according to documentation, but no one seems to know what happened to that skeleton, and it cannot be conclusively proven that it was the remains of Vlad Dracula.)
The “new” church at Snagov was built by boyars (not literally; rather they had it built) who would have hated Dracula. Is it conceivable that, during the reconstruction of the church, Vlad’s bones were disinterred and these boyar bastards had them destroyed? Possibly. Or they might have overlooked them. Or the bones might never have been at Snagov at all.
Honestly, I’m glad there is no known gravesite for Dracula. Isn’t it more appropriate that way? Bram Stoker provided a far grander memorial for him than any stone marker (even if Bram didn’t intend to do it, which seems to be the case, as it was others who drew the connection between the character Count Dracula and the historical Dracula *after* Stoker had written his novel). It’s better that there’s no grave for this man who is forevermore linked with a tradition of rising from the dead, don’t you think?
