The croissant or croissant has received countless literary tributes. Few are as good as the one offered by the writer Pablo Tusset in The best thing that can happen to a croissant. The first line of this hilarious novel is a continuation of the nine words of the title: “The best thing that can happen to a croissant is to be buttered.” But the origin of this piece of puff pastry is not funny at all.
The story is well known and Comer has already explained it here. Although there are many versions and not all of them coincide, most place the origin of this bun in Vienna in 1683, during the Turkish siege. As a local victory celebration, the town’s bakers created a crescent-shaped pastry, a highly symbolic figure for the defeated army of the Ottoman Empire. It was a way of saying. “We have gobbled up the Turks.”
Two centuries earlier, there was a historical figure (now devoured by legend) who had another way of celebrating defeats against Turkish troops: with banquets. Of course, they were banquets, not acts for all stomachs: the real Dracula ordered the table to be served on an esplanade before hundreds of posts where he had impaled his enemies. His name was Vlad Tepes, that is, Vlad the Impaler.
This historical figure, a national hero in Romania since the time of Ceaucescu, treasures countless gastronomic anecdotes. During one of his lunches, he received some emissaries from the Sultan of Turkey and, as the newcomers did not reveal themselves to him, he ordered their turbans to be nailed to their heads. No one better embodied one of the maxims of Machiavelli’s The Prince: “It is better to be feared than loved.”
Vlad Tepes ruled Wallachia with an iron fist in three short periods of time in the 15th century. Tepes was the nickname. His real last name was Draculea, which means son of the Dragon or son of the Demon. This polysemy should subjugate Bram Stoker and gave him the name of the protagonist of the novel that took him to the literary Olympus: Dracula. Possibly Stoker knew little or nothing else about Vlad Tepes or Vlad Draculea.
The novel places the character in Transylvania, and not in Wallachia. It must not be forgotten that Bram Stoker was an artist, a creator, not a historian. The British Clive Leatherdale, a doctor in Arabian History and an expert in geopolitics and the sources of vampirism, is one of the greatest connoisseurs of his work. The reader in Spanish has at his disposal a recent updated version of his classic Historia de Dracula (Harp).
This essay was essential for Francis Ford Coppola to release Bram Stoker’s Dracula in 1992, with a Gary Oldman in a state of grace as the undead count and the best and most reliable film version of the novel. Professor Leatherdale’s meticulousness is reminiscent of Van Helsing, the archenemy of the prince of darkness. But, we insist, the novelist was not at all interested in the real character.
The only thing that made Bram Stoker fall in love with Vlad Draculea, who could have been born around 1428 and died around 1477, was his name. But he was a voivode or prince, not an earl. And, although it is true that he came into the world in Transylvania, which was then a Hungarian province, he lived and carried out his exploits, including gastronomic ones, in Wallachia. Vlad Draculea was the son of Vlad Dracul, so named because he joined the Order of the Dragon.
The Order of the Dragon was a semi-monastic, semi-military clan that conspired to defend Europe (or should we say to defend Christianity) from the advance of the Ottoman Empire. When the novel’s Dracula arrives in London he claims to be Count De Ville (which resembles devil, demon in English). It was a happy coincidence. The Draculea of ​​historical truth was considered a demon by his enemies and his servants.
An old engraving from 1499, barely twenty years after his death, shows him at a banquet, surrounded by mutilated and impaled bodies. This torture was already used in imperial China, but he reached an unusual sadism and made the agony last for hours, sometimes even days. He was an esthete. He also loved to create geometric figures with the gallows and the stakes of the gallows.
According to Dracula’s Story, he once cut down a forest to impale 20,000 people. His favorite victims were Turkish soldiers and mercenaries, but also peasants and nobles from his own town. No one was safe from his wrath. Some say that he killed 100,000 people, a fifth of the population of Wallachia. The data is even crueler if one remembers that he ruled for only a few months, between 1448 and his death in battle.
Anyone would have thought that his cruelties and his association with the quintessential movie vampire would condemn him to eternal disgrace. But time tempers everything. In 1976, the Socialist Republic of Nicolae Ceausecu was looking for symbols of national glory and enthroned him among the heroes of the homeland. And there it continues. He was cruel, yes, but it was because he had to live through a cruel time, which is now being repeated in Romania in the EU.
What does Vlad Draculea represent? The quintessence of horror or the defense of Europe and Christianity? Are we left with the madness of the Impaler or with that of the ruler and warrior in favor of the peace of the graveyards? Another anecdote reflects the personality of this Vaivode or Wallachian prince. It is said that at the door of his castle there was a golden jug with water for the walkers. No one ever dared to steal it.
Not even 80 years have passed since the end of the Second World War and the existence of the gas chambers and the tragedy of the Holocaust have been questioned for a long time. “The best thing that can happen to a croissant is to be spread with butterâ€, said Pablo Tusset in his novel. And the best thing that can happen to characters as terrible as Vlad Draculea is that the patina of time erases them halfway, sweetening them and eliminating their edges.
