Ottawa pair wins overnight stay in Dracula's castle for Halloween

[spaminator]

Ottawa pair wins overnight stay in Dracula's castle for Halloween
By Tom Spears
First posted: Friday, October 28, 2016 03:23 PM EDT | Updated: Friday, October 28, 2016 08:47 PM EDT
On Halloween, two Ottawa residents will be the first people to sleep in Dracula’s castle in nearly 70 years.

Tami and Robin Varma won the trip to Bran Castle in Transylvania through a promotional giveaway by Airbnb.

It will be the first time since 1948 the castle has hosted overnight guests.

Dracula fans were encouraged to enter to win a chance to spend a night in the Romanian castle hosted by Dacre Stoker, great-nephew of Bram Stoker, who wrote the original Dracula novel.

As it happens, the contest winners have a connection through their family too: They’re the grandchildren of Devendra Varma, a professor at Dalhousie University who was one of the world’s authorities on Gothic literature.

The house rules are a little strict — no garlic, no holy symbols, no silver jewelry, and not a lot of mirrors in the place. But guests have been promised a spooky carriage ride through the Transylvanian forest with wolves howling and the option to sleep in red velvet-trimmed coffins.

Bran Castle dates to the 14th century.

tspears@postmedia.com
Tami Varma, along with her brother Robin, leave Saturday morning to spend Halloween night sleeping in coffins in Dracula's castle in Trannsylvania (Errol McGihon, Postmedia)

Ottawa pair wins overnight stay in Dracula's castle for Halloween | Ontario | Ne

 

[Blackleaf]

 

[Danbones]

doesn't p charles claim some sort of kinship to ole Vlad the (bill clinton)?

 

[Blackleaf]

doesn't p charles claim some sort of kinship to ole Vlad the (bill clinton)?

Our royals are descended from Vlad the Impaler.

In 2011, Prince Charles joked:

“Transylvania is in my blood. The genealogy shows I am descended from Vlad the Impaler, so I do have a bit of a stake in the country.”

Prince Charles, heir to Dracula's blood line

The Romanian tourist board is to use links between the British Royal family and Count Dracula to lure in UK tourists, it has emerged.

Vlad the Impaler, the inspiration for Bram Stoker's literary creation Dracula (Getty)

A spokesman for the Romanian National Tourist Office said the country, which incorporates the region of Transylvania, was looking to use these links with the British Royal Family to increase UK tourists over the coming years.

Maria Iordache, UK director of the organisation, said 118,000 UK tourists visited Romania in 2011.

“It will be more in 2012. We have experienced a 7 per cent increase in UK visitors in the first quarter, which is traditionally a quiet period for tourists from the UK. For the summer and the autumn the percentage increase will be even better.”

According to Royal Highness, a book published in 1982 by Sir Iain Moncreiffe, the former chairman of Debrett’s, the Prince is a great grandson 16 times removed to Vlad III.

He can trace his lineage back through his great grandmother Queen Mary, the consort of George V, to Vlad IV, the half brother of the notorious ruler.

Another link to the country originated with Princess Marie of Edinburgh, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, who went on to marry King Ferdinand I of Romania and ruled Romania after the First World War.

It has been claimed that porphyria, an iron deficiency which is thought to lie behind the vampire myth, has run in the Royal Family.

The Prince has made no secret of his love for Romania and is believed to travel there frequently.

In 2006, he purchased a farmhouse in Viscri, a village in rural Transylvania, which is available as a guest house at certain times of the year.

The Prince's farmhouse in Viscri

The prince is patron of the Mihai Eminescu Trust, which works to restore the cultural heritage, economy and nature of Transylvania’s Saxon villages and their surroundings.

In addition to restoring some 180 medieval houses and several churches, the charity has supported traditional rural technologies such as the construction of wood-fired kilns for handmade bricks and tiles, and organic farming.

Transylvanian-born Vlad the Impaler is said to have dispatched more than 100,000 Turkish warriors in battle.

The vampire legend is said to have been inspired by his predilection for eating bread dipped in his victim’s blood. Dracula means “son of the devil” in Romanian.

The country’s alleged links to British royalty, however ghoulish, could prove a welcome boost to its tourist industry.

Thousands of tourists visit the town of Castle Bran, Transylvania, where Vlad III lived, every year.

Castle Bran, Transylvania (Alamy)

Simon Press, from World Travel Market which hosted the exhibition, said: ““Romania has a great deal of tourism potential. It is a beautiful country already receiving many tourists for its nature and culture.

“The link to the British Royal Family and the clear fondness the Royal Family has for the country will only help to promote the country across the Commonwealth and particularly in the UK.”

Prince Charles, heir to Dracula's blood line - Telegraph

 

[Danbones]

Presidential Bloodlines

Did you know all 43 U.S. presidents have carried European royal bloodlines into office?

34 have been genetic descendants from just one person, Charlemagne, the brutal eighth century King of the Franks. 19 of them directly descended from King Edward III of England.

In fact, the presidential candidate with the most royal genes has won every single American election.

“This information comes from Burke's Peerage, which is the Bible of aristocratic genealogy, based in London. Every presidential election in America, since and including George Washington in 1789 to Bill Clinton, has been won by the candidate with the most British and French royal genes.

Of the 42 presidents to Clinton, 33 have been related to two people: Alfred the Great, King of England, and Charlemagne, the most famous monarch of France.
The Atlantean Conspiracy - 01

(don't know about EVERY president...but...)
well that explains boot Hillary renting out the spare bedroom at the whitehouse
the coffin' there was because bill didn't inhale

 

[Curious Cdn]

That was the first prize?


That sucks.

 

[Blackleaf]

All native Europeans are descended from Charlemagne (he's my great-great-great-great-whatever-grandfather), so any US president or, indeed, any American or Canadian who is descended from Europeans - which is most of them - are descended from Charlemagne, too.

Even Obama will be descended from him, as he has Irish and British ancestry - and his relatives still live in Britain today (Obama is the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson of Deacon Thomas Blossom, who was born in the village of Great Shelford, Cambridgeshire, around 1580.

 

[Danbones]

how could that be that everyone European is descended from Charlemagne?
some odd math there

 

[Ludlow]

That was the first prize?


That sucks.

hehe,,,ha,,hoho,,,,,HEEEHAAWWWWW HEEEEHAAAWWWWW!

 

[Curious Cdn]

hehe,,,ha,,hoho,,,,,HEEEHAAWWWWW HEEEEHAAAWWWWW!

...stupid Yank tricks ...

 

[Blackleaf]

how could that be that everyone European is descended from Charlemagne?
some odd math there

It isn't odd maths.

And EVERYBODY on Earth today is descended from Nefertiti...

Sometimes I get asked if I’m related to the great physicist Ernest Rutherford. His discoveries about the atomic nucleus gave birth to physics in the 20th century. He is the father of nuclear physics, with labs and atoms named after him.

I’m not related to him. I can reveal however that I am a direct descendent of someone of similar greatness: Charlemagne, Carolingian King of the Franks, Holy Roman Emperor, the great European conciliator. Quelle surprise!

But we are all special, which means none of us are. If you’re vaguely of European extraction, you are also the fruits of Charlemagne’s prodigious loins. A fecund ruler, he sired at least 18 children by motley wives and concubines, including Charles the Younger, Pippin the Hunchback, Drogo of Metz, Hruodrud, Ruodhaid, and not forgetting Hugh.

This is merely a numbers game. You have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and so on. But this ancestral expansion is not borne back ceaselessly into the past. If it were, your family tree when Charlemagne was Le Grand Fromage would harbour more than a billion ancestors – more people than were alive then. What this means is that pedigrees begin to fold in on themselves a few generations back, and become less arboreal, and more web-like. In 2013, geneticists Peter Ralph and Graham Coop showed that all Europeans are descended from exactly the same people. Basically, everyone alive in the ninth century who left descendants is the ancestor of every living European today, including Charlemagne, Drogo, Pippin and Hugh. Quel dommage.

https://www.theguardian.com/science...-genetic-ancestry-charlemagne-adam-rutherford

When you draw your genealogy, you make two lines from yourself back to each of your parents. Then you have to draw two lines for each of them, back to your four grandparents. And then eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents, and so on. But not so on for very long. If you go back to the time of Charlemagne, forty generations or so, you should get to a generation of a trillion ancestors. That’s about two thousand times more people than existed on Earth when Charlemagne was alive. The only way out of this paradox is to assume that our ancestors are not independent of one another. That is, if you trace their ancestry back, you loop back to a common ancestor. We’re not talking about first-cousin stuff here–more like twentieth-cousin. This means that instead of drawing a tree that fans out exponentially, we need to draw a web-like tapestry.

In a paper he published in 1999 [pdf], Chang analyzed this tapestry mathematically. If you look at the ancestry of a living population of people, he concluded, you’ll eventually find a common ancestor of all of them. That’s not to say that a single mythical woman somehow produced every European by magically laying a clutch of eggs. All this means is that as you move back through time, sooner or later some of the lines in the genealogy will cross, meeting at a single person.

As you go back further in time, more of those lines cross as you encounter more common ancestors of the living population. And then something really interesting happens. There comes a point at which, Chang wrote, “all individuals who have any descendants among the present-day individuals are actually ancestors of all present-day individuals.”

In 2002, the journalist Steven Olson wrote an article in the Atlantic about Chang’s work. To put some empirical meat on the abstract bones of Chang’s research, Olson considered a group of real people–living Europeans.

The most recent common ancestor of every European today (except for recent immigrants to the Continent) was someone who lived in Europe in the surprisingly recent past—only about 600 years ago. In other words, all Europeans alive today have among their ancestors the same man or woman who lived around 1400. Before that date, according to Chang’s model, the number of ancestors common to all Europeans today increased, until, about a thousand years ago, a peculiar situation prevailed: 20 percent of the adult Europeans alive in 1000 would turn out to be the ancestors of no one living today (that is, they had no children or all their descendants eventually died childless); each of the remaining 80 percent would turn out to be a direct ancestor of every European living today.
​

Suddenly, my pedigree looked classier: I am a descendant of Charlemagne. Of course, so is every other European. By the way, I’m also a descendant of Nefertiti. And so are you, and everyone else on Earth today.

Charlemagne’s DNA and Our Universal Royalty – Phenomena

Of course, the more recently to us someone lived, the less chance you are of being related to them, so whereas all Europeans are descended directly from Charlemagne very few are descended from Vlad the Impaler.

 

[Danbones]

well, whoudathunkit?

i wonder where her hubby is
www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3IkZBCHxJ0
intrepid sleuths want to know: why take yer brother?
unless he won and can't get a date