King Charles III

The first thing to say is that no, King Charles is not secretly a vampire.

He does, however, have a bloodline that takes a curious detour through one of Europe's most notorious rulers. Follow the royal family tree back far enough and you land in 15th‑century Wallachia, at the feet of Vlad III — Vlad Țepeș, Vlad the Impaler — the man whose brutality helped give Bram Stoker's Dracula its fanged mythology.

And in a twist almost too on the nose for a gothic novel, the cancer‑stricken monarch now owns a cluster of properties in the very region once ruled by his alleged ancestor.

King Charles And The Dracula Bloodline

The genealogical claim sounds like pub trivia, but it is taken seriously enough by royal historians. Charles is often described as Vlad's great‑grandson 16 times removed, with the line traced through Queen Mary — Mary of Teck — the wife of George V and great‑great‑grandmother of Queen Elizabeth II.

Royal author Robert Hardman laid it out on the Queens, Kings and Dastardly Things podcast, sketching a dynastic route that winds from a 'minor princely house from Germany' to the House of Windsor. Mary of Teck was originally destined to marry the Duke of Clarence, son and heir of Edward VII. When he died, she married his brother instead — the future George V. From there, the succession runs: George V, then George VI, then Elizabeth II, and finally Charles.

The link to Vlad, preserved across multiple noble branches, is one of those strange quirks of European aristocracy: centuries of intermarriage mean that half the continent's royal houses end up related, at least distantly, to half the other tyrants.

Historian David Hughes set the claim out in his multi‑volume The British Chronicles, tracing Charles's ancestry back to Vlad III. The Wallachian ruler held power intermittently between 1448 and 1476, and became infamous for ordering enemies impaled on wooden stakes. Contemporary accounts describe forests of bodies; it is not subtle stuff.

Stoker, writing Dracula in 1897, borrowed the name and the legend of cruelty, but not much else. His count is a supernatural predator in a Transylvanian castle; Vlad was a brutal, very human warlord in what is now Romania. Still, the pop‑culture shorthand has stuck. Once you have 'Dracula' and 'royal bloodline' in the same sentence, it barely matters that the vampire is fictional.

What makes this more than a genealogical party trick, though, is that Charles has not left the connection on paper.

From Vlad's Realm To The King's Transylvania Estates

Over the past quarter‑century, the King has built a very real foothold in Transylvania. What began as a visit in 1998, when he was still Prince of Wales, has deepened into something almost proprietorial.

Today, Charles owns several properties in the region: homes in the village of Viscri, in the Zalán Valley, in Malancrav, and in Breb. Viscri, with its pastel‑fronted Saxon houses and UNESCO‑listed fortified church, has become the most famous — a postcard version of rural Romania where the British monarch quietly slips in for walking holidays.

The Zalán Valley estate is perhaps the most symbolically loaded. Formerly linked to one of his ancestors, it now comprises restored village buildings set among forest, meadow and mineral springs. It is about as far from Buckingham Palace as one can get while still, technically, being on one's own land.

Local officials are blunt about the impact. 'The King's presence here has been nothing short of catalytic,' one regional tourism figure told us. Before his involvement, many of these villages were pretty but economically fragile, haemorrhaging young people to cities and abroad. Charles's decision to buy traditional Saxon farmhouses and restore them sensitively — rather than flatten them in favour of shiny new resorts — signalled that this fading heritage had serious value.

The guesthouses he has helped create are deliberately low‑key. Visitors sleep in authentic buildings, eat locally sourced food, and are nudged towards traditional crafts rather than garish attractions. It is tourism as conservation, not strip‑mining.

'By transforming historic properties into guesthouses rather than modern developments, he has helped create a model of tourism rooted in conservation rather than exploitation,' the official said. That approach, they argue, has generated jobs, encouraged small‑scale entrepreneurship and, crucially, restored a measure of pride. Villages that were once 'almost forgotten' now sit firmly on the global travel map.

Beyond The Dracula Joke: Why Transylvania Matters To Charles

It would be easy — and lazy — to treat all this as a quirky Dracula sidenote: the King who jokes about his ancestor, then slips off to his Transylvanian bolt‑holes to commune with the bats.

The reality is more interesting. Through the Prince's Foundation, Charles has used his profile to support sustainable farming, heritage conservation and rural crafts in Romania. His interventions dovetail with long‑held obsessions: traditional architecture, organic agriculture, and the idea that modern life has been too quick to discard old ways of living with the land.

There is also a deeper historical thread. Hungarian Countess Klaudia Rhedey, a 19th‑century ancestor of Queen Elizabeth II, was born in Transylvania, adding another line of continuity between the British royals and this patch of central Europe. One Romanian mayor has even floated awarding Charles the honorary title of 'Prince of Transylvania' in recognition of his advocacy — a move that would delight headline writers and, one suspects, mildly horrify constitutional lawyers in London.

What cannot be ignored is that Charles has helped nudge Transylvania's image away from gothic caricature and towards something more grounded. The region will probably never escape Dracula completely; tourism boards would be foolish to try. But his involvement has reframed it, at least in part, as a place of cultural preservation and ecological responsibility rather than just a gothic punchline.

So, is King Charles a Dracula? Only in the most tenuous, genealogical sense. Yet in an era obsessed with bloodlines, branding and soft power, the fact that a British monarch can trace his roots to Vlad the Impaler — and has quietly become a Transylvanian property tycoon — says a great deal about how history is recycled, repackaged and, occasionally, used for something unexpectedly constructive.

Originally published on IBTimes UK