Travel with Rick Steves · Saturday, October 31, 2026
Author Jacob Mikonowski explains that the historical concept of vampires in Eastern Europe originated from village folklore concerning unquiet dead and bodies unearthed during plagues, rather than the fictionalized version inspired by Vlad Dracula.
“Dracula was actually a man. He was a Romanian ruler and a very violent and tough ruler. But there's a wider set of beliefs that kind of got fused onto him, really fused on by a Western writer, but there are ideas of spirits of the dead that come back to haunt the living.”
“when the plague would hit, even Yugoslavia, and it would be like, well, we have to find the dead body that's doing this, where they would unearth people.”