The Burial of Dracula

Me posing at Dracula's grave in Kitzingen. April 2008

A bottle of the famous Franken wine, from my perosnal collection.

Kitzingen is a small town of fewer than 20,000 in the German state of Bavaria.  It’s the county seat of the largest wine producing county in Germany.  I love that town.  It’s my favorite place in the world.  When people think of Kitzingen they probably think of wine (The distinctive wine bottles Franken wine is known for).  Or they may think of the leaning tower. Do a google image search of Kitzingen and you will likely see the leaning tower called the Falterturm, the Main River, or the old bridge.  The Alte Mainbrücke in Kitzingen is over 700 years old and until about a dozen years ago, cars drove on it.

Anyway, anytime we drove across the river my Opa would shout to me, “Look! The Main River! Such a river doesn’t exist in the States!”  It was silly, but it was sort of our thing. He’d also point and say, “Falterturm” anytime we were driving and that tower was in sight.

The Falterturm, 2008.  You can only kind of tell, but that tower is leaning baby.

Kitzingen is not a tourist attraction.  There are several others nearby like Rothenberg, Dinkelsbuhl, Geiselwind, and Bamberg.  But it’s beautiful and I love it. 

You can never have too many pictures of the Falterturm. 2008

The main point of interest advertised was always the Falterturm.  I grew up hearing about why it was leaning.  According to legend during construction in the late 1400’s there was a drought.  Instead of using water to mix the mortar, the builders had to use wine.  Apparently, wine isn’t as good as water and it was less stable.  And so that was a cute story and I genuinely believed it.  Just added more lore to the town, the country I loved to visit.

I never knew what Falterturm meant.  If you google that word it only refers to the crooked tower in Kitzingen.  Breaking up the word into two words is promising.  Falter mean butterfly.  Turm means tower.  Butterfly Tower? Or entering it as one word you get Falter Tower.  To falter means to grow weak.  I believe this makes more sense.

Anyway, in 2008 I took my then fiancée with me to Germany tosee my family.  I had proposed the previous Christmas and wanted to show her off.  So of course, we saw the Falterturm and the old bridge.  I mean, if we are staying in my mom’s hometown with my Oma and Opa that’s something we just had to see.

One day Opa took us to the old cemetery (Alter friedhof) just west of downtown (der Stadt).  We walked around.  It’s nice, peaceful, pretty. But there was something strange. 

Kharla examining this mystery grave. 2008

There was one grave site that stuck out.  It had a gate around it with a plaque.  And there was overhead on the roof of the thing some crazy artwork.  It was beautiful but very dark in nature.  Angels spitting out lightning, skeletons in the Heavens.  There were skulls on the outside of this cage-like structure.  IT was old, maybe 150 or 200 years old.  It was so bizarre.  We took pictures.  I know that sounds morbid, but this was such a macabre thing, such weird ambiance that it just begged to be archived.  I had to capture it.

After our vacation I showed my mom in Texas all our photos.  She saw the cemetery pics and said, “Oh good!  You saw Dracula’s grave.”  What?!  I laughed and she said, “It’s true.  Rumors have it Dracula was buried there.”  Yeah right!

Later on, I googled it and I was excited and annoyed at the same time.  First off  I wrote a research paper on Dracula in high school and she never thought to bring this up?  And second, that town was so important to me growing up, it would have made it even cooler to me to know this information.  Hell, I could have bragged about it to my friends.  Third, turns out Dracula’s grave had ties to the Falterturm!  The very tower that was the identity of the city, part of what defined my relationship with my Opa. I wasn’t mad, just imagine how much more awesome that info would have made things.

Dracula's heart is in the spire ball!

But the “other” legend of the Falterturm is that Dracula was buried in that ornate grave, but his heart was not.  It’s located in the ball on the top of the spire on top of the Falterturm.  And the heart wants to reunite with the body and so some force is pulling it.  The tower is crooked because the heart is pulling it.

Wow.  That is so much better of a story than the wine in the mortar legend.  Don’t you think?

My German is terrible, and the text on the plaque is in all caps and in a horribly hard to read font.  Best I can figure out what it’s saying is something like this:

When the heavens call forth and His voice is heard, He will reverberate, and He will come to us, and we will follow Him in the solemnity of the last supper.

That is some end of days stuff right there.  Very similar to Revelation 19:17:

And I saw an angel standing in the sun, who cried in a loud voice to all the birds flying in midair “Come gather together for the great supper of God.” NIV

I just couldn't get a good angle to capture the
entire painting.

Look at these pics after reading the Revelation
commentary. Wow.

John the Apostle wrote that.  That section of Revelation talks about a great battle.  Many would be  killed. This battle would decide what would remain in the World. Godliness or the anti-Christ.  The King of Kings himself would ride on a white horse, the Word would prevail.  Christ would prevail. 

And the flesh of the wicked would be eaten.

This, at least in American culture, is not typically the type of stuff put on graves.  It lent itself to the Dracula mythos.  On second thought, maybe I should be glad I didn’t know that story growing up.  

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Video of a couple of knuckle heads visiting the grave after dark.  They show much more than what I was able to capture.  You can see much more in scope and context.