Elisabeth Kostova - The Historian

The “Chronicle” has Stefan asserting that Vlad visited the monastery in 1476, the last year of his life, perhaps a few months before his death. In 1476, Vlad III’s throne was under tremendous pressure from the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II, with whom Vlad had been at war intermittently since around 1460. At the same time, his hold on the Wallachian throne was threatened by a contingent of his boyars that was prepared to side with Mehmed should he stage a new invasion of Wallachia.

If Zacharias’s “Chronicle” is accurate, Vlad III paid a visit to Snagov that is otherwise unrecorded and must have been extremely dangerous to him personally. The “Chronicle” reports Vlad’s bringing treasure to the monastery; that he did so at great personal risk indicates the importance to him of his tie with Snagov. He must have been well aware of the constant threats to his life, both from the Ottomans and from his primary Wallachian rival during that period, Basarab Laiota, who held the Wallachian throne briefly after Vlad’s death. Since little political gain could come from his visiting Snagov, it seems reasonable to speculate that Snagov was important to Vlad III for spiritual or personal reasons, perhaps because he planned to make it his last resting place. In any case, Zacharias’s “Chronicle” confirms that he gave Snagov particular attention near the end of his life.

The circumstances of Vlad III’s death are very unclear, and have been further clouded by conflicting folk legends and shoddy scholarship. In late December 1476 or early January 1477, he was ambushed, probably by part of the Turkish army in Wallachia, and killed in the skirmish that followed. Some traditions have held that he was actually killed by his own men, who mistook him for a Turkish officer when he climbed a hill to get a better view of an ongoing battle. A variant of this legend asserts that some of his men had been looking for a chance to assassinate him, in punishment for his infamous cruelty. Most sources that discuss his death agree that Vlad’s corpse was decapitated and his head taken to Sultan Mehmed in Constantinople as proof that a great enemy had fallen.

In either case, according to Stefan’s tale, some of Vlad III’s men must still have been loyal to him, since they risked bringing his corpse to Snagov. The headless corpse was long believed to have been buried in the Snagov church, in front of the altar.

If the tale of Stefan the Wanderer is to be trusted, Vlad III’s corpse was secretly transported from Snagov to Constantinople, and from there to a monastery called Sveti Georgi, in Bulgaria. The purpose of this deportation, and what the “treasure” was that the monks were seeking first in Constantinople and then in Bulgaria, is unclear. Stefan’s tale asserts that the treasure would “hasten the salvation of the soul of this prince,” which indicates that the abbot must have thought this theologically necessary. Possibly they sought some holy Constantinopolitan relic spared by both the Latin and Ottoman conquests. He might also not have wanted to take on the responsibility for destroying the corpse at Snagov, or mutilating it in accordance with beliefs about vampire prevention, or to take the risk that this might be carried out by local villagers. This would have been a natural reluctance, given Vlad’s status and the fact that members of the Orthodox clergy were discouraged from participating in corpse mutilation.

Unfortunately, no likely burial site for Vlad III’s remains has ever been found in Bulgaria, and even the location of the foundation called Sveti Georgi, like that of the Bulgarian monastery Paroria, is unknown; it was probably abandoned or destroyed during the Ottoman era, and the “Chronicle” is the only document that sheds light on even a general location. The “Chronicle” claims that they traveled only a short distance-“not much farther”-from the monastery at Bachkovo, located about thirty-five kilometers south of Asenovgrad on the Chepelarska River. Clearly, Sveti Georgi was situated somewhere in south central Bulgaria. This area, which includes much of the Rhodope Mountains, was among the last Bulgarian regions to be conquered by the Ottomans; some particularly rugged terrain in the area was never brought under full Ottoman domination. If Sveti Georgi was located in the mountains, this might have accounted in part for its selection as a relatively safe resting place for the remains of Vlad III.

Despite the claim of the “Chronicle” that it became a pilgrimage site after the Snagov monks settled there, Sveti Georgi does not appear in other primary sources of the period, or in any later sources, which could indicate that it vanished or was deserted relatively soon after Stefan’s departure from it. We do know something of the founding of Sveti Georgi, however, from a single copy of itstypikon preserved in the library at Bachkovo Monastery. According to this document, Sveti Georgi was founded by Georgios Komnenos, a distant cousin of the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos, in 1101. Zacharias’s “Chronicle” asserts that the monks there were “old and few” when the group from Snagov arrived; presumably those few monks had preserved the regime outlined by thetypikon and were joined in it by the Wallachian monks.

It is worth noting that the “Chronicle” emphasizes the journey of the Wallachians through Bulgaria in two different ways: by describing the martyrdom of two of them at the hands of Ottoman officials in some detail and by recording the attention given by the Bulgarian population to their progress through the country. There is no way to know what provoked the Ottomans in Bulgaria, with their general toleration of Christian religious activities, to see the Wallachian monks as a threat. Stefan reports through Zacharias that his friends were “interrogated” in the town of Haskovo before being tortured and killed, which suggests that Ottoman authorities believed they possessed politically sensitive information of some sort. Haskovo is located in southeast Bulgaria, a region that was securely under Ottoman command by the fifteenth century. Strangely, the martyred monks were given the traditional Ottoman punishments for stealing (amputation of the hands) and for running away (amputation of the feet). Most neomartyrs under the Ottomans were tortured and killed through other methods. These forms of punishment, as well as the search of the monks’ wagon described by Stefan in his tale, make clear the Haskovo officials’ accusation of thievery, although they were apparently unable to prove the charge.

Stefan reports widespread attention from the Bulgarian people along the route, which could have accounted for Ottoman curiosity. However, only eight years earlier, in 1469, the relics of Sveti Ivan Rilski, the hermit founder of Rila Monastery, had been translated from Veliko Trnovo to a chapel at Rila, a procession witnessed and described by Vladislav Gramatik in his “Narrative of the Transportation of the Remains of Sveti Ivan.” During this translation, Ottoman officials tolerated the attention given by local Bulgarians to the relics, and the journey served as an important unifying event and symbol for Bulgarian Christians. Both Zacharias and Stefan would probably have been aware of the famous journey of Ivan Rilski’s bones, and some written account of it may have been available to Zacharias at Zographou by 1479.

This earlier-and very recent-toleration of a similar religious procession through Bulgaria makes Ottoman concern about the journey of the Wallachian monks particularly significant. The search of their wagon-probably carried out by officers of the guard of a local pasha-indicates that some knowledge of the purpose of their journey had perhaps reached Ottoman officials in Bulgaria. Certainly the Ottoman authorities would not have been eager to house in Bulgaria the remains of one of their greatest political enemies, or to tolerate the veneration of those remains. More puzzling, however, is the fact that on searching the wagon they must have found nothing, since Stefan’s tale later mentions the interment of the body at Sveti Georgi. We can only speculate on how they would have hidden an entire (if headless) corpse, if they were indeed carrying one.