Dracula in Istanbul

by Bram Stoker

Doctor Resuhî Bey, the man who should go down in history, said:

  “My friends, we are walking toward a danger greater than you can imagine, and in this fight we need every kind of weapon. Our enemy is not a lone, simple creature. He is at least as strong as twenty or thirty men; he is brave, cunning, and experienced. We have weapons against these things. For example, take one of these small Qurans I am holding and place it close to your heart. Doctor Afif, do not laugh at what I say; do not laugh. Even if it has no effect, the extra 25 grams will not hurt.”

  Then Doctor Resuhî turned to Doctor Afif Bey and asked, “Are the keys ready?” Afif produced a few newly-made keys. Then the doctor said, “Let us get to work!” He began walking and we all followed him. I will not go into too much detail. Some time later we were inside the great, old, dilapidated mansion in Balat, near Topkapı. Count Dracula bought this place through correspondence with “A Real Estate Center.” After passing through a garden which resembled a jungle, we opened the mansion door and entered, descending a staircase to a dirt basement below the ground floor. The place was dark, and we had to light two lanterns that we had prepared earlier. I held one of them. The deep darkness, which the light of my lantern seemed almost afraid to illuminate, showed a layer of dust over everything. However, the footprints of the carriers who delivered Count Dracula’s crates of earth were visible in the dust like tracks in the snow. Since I was the agent of the business office and the intermediary in the purchase of the mansion, I knew the layout well. In fact, when I was in Dracula’s accursed castle in Transylvania, I described its interiors to the vampire.

  Doctor Resuhî Bey said:

  “Children, what we must do now is scour this place and discover how many of the coffins the Impaler Voivode has sent here to use as shelter. This terrible, cunning monster has perhaps not put all of the coffins in the same place, as a precaution. He may have hidden them in other properties that he has bought.”

  At these words we began to search the basement. Yes, many of the coffins I saw in Count Dracula’s castle were here. We counted them; there were only twenty-nine of the fifty coffins.

  As we busied ourselves with this, dawn was quickening. Doctor Resuhî Bey said:

  “Our first night of reconnaissance has passed without danger. We have the information we needed. It is almost morning; let us get away from here now!”

  2 October.—We friends all reconvened. After a long and tiring investigation, we now have the necessary information regarding two more properties Count Dracula has purchased. We even have the interior layouts of the houses. We investigated the carriers without arousing suspicion. That means the great vampire hunt now begins.

  3 October.—This Doctor Resuhî Bey is a very calm man. I think that were it not for him, we could accomplish nothing. After we visited the vampire’s sanctuary in Eyüp, the doctor told us in the morning:

  “Of course you must have noticed that I had a purpose for not destroying the vampire’s shelter that night. Had we done anything there, Count Dracula would have guessed that we were onto him and would have taken many different measures to elude us. But now he has no idea what we know. There is a very good chance that the vampire does not know we have the tools to sterilize his soil. Since we learned about the other two properties, and it is possible to get into empty houses without difficulty, we must make the most of this opportunity. From now until this dawning sun sets, the vampire cannot change his shape. I have made a plan of attack.”

  We were around the breakfast table in the parlor of my house. After breakfast, Resuhî Bey rose and added:

  “My friends, at this moment the terrible hunt has begun; we are entering into this awful struggle. We are all armed both physically and spiritually. Our holy books and our pistols loaded with silver bullets are with us as a precaution, and I have all the necessary equipment in my large bag. Güzin Hanım, do not worry and do not lose hope. You will stay here and wait for us. I wish your heart peace.”

  However, dear Güzin was excited. Although she was greatly worried about my friends and myself, she had great courage and wished to join us. I knew very well that she wanted to do battle with the enemy of her race, the vampire Impaler Voivode. But it was impossible.

  So we departed my home, leaving her in that state. An hour later we were in the house in Eyüp Sultan where we had gone the other day. This time, we first searched the entire house at Resuhî Bey’s request. His goal was to find something like a notebook or any special papers that belonged to Count Dracula. But we found no such thing. Then we went into the basement. Here the twenty-nine coffins were just as we had seen them last. Doctor Resuhî Bey said:

  “My children, the first thing we will do is sanctify the earth inside the coffins so that the vampire cannot stay here.”

  Then he took off his jacket. He began to remove the lids of the coffins one by one with a small lever, chisel, and adz. We assisted him. Then the doctor opened his bag again, removed some large sheets of paper with verses from the Quran typewritten on them, and carefully placed these inside the coffins and on the soil. Afterward he also mixed in garlic flowers. Then he ordered us to close the lids of the coffins that had been treated. When we had finally repeated the process for all twenty-nine coffins, they were all boarded up just as they had been before. A few moments later we were out on the street, leaving the house and the garden.

  Doctor Resuhî Bey said in a full and cheerful voice:

  “It is done. Now there is no way for the vampire to take shelter here. If we are successful in the other two nests, we shall save Turkey and the world from a secret catastrophe. The ghoul is not here today; now, on to the house in (.…)!”

  4 October.—I must complete the missing parts of my account and close the final chapter of my journal and this horrible disaster once and for all. I believe that no matter how hard I try, I will not be able to write the last chapter in such a way as to reproduce all of its thrill and terror. These lines will be only a faint memory of the final scenes of this tragedy.

  As I have mentioned earlier, after making the coffins in the house in Eyüp Sultan useless to Dracula, we got into an automobile. We went straight to the second house in (.…). The key we had made let us, without raising any suspicion, into a garden full of trees; after shutting the door slowly from the inside, we moved toward the decaying mansion ahead. This was a single story building with three or four marble steps standing on a wide, marble foundation. With a great thrill we climbed the weathered stairs to the outer door. There was now a strong possibility of encountering the vampire Impaler Voivode lying in one of those coffins, for there was only one other place in which he could take shelter, and we knew where that was. After Özdemir Bey put his wide, strong shoulders to the door, both wings opened completely with a rotten cracking noise. We entered. Ah, yes… There they were; the crates with which we were very familiar lay on a marble surface. The doctor, walking in front of us, stopped. He raised his finger and quickly counted the crates. My God! The other twenty-one crates were before us!

  A moment later, with a noticeable crack in his voice, Resuhî Bey said hoarsely:

  “Look!” We all turned our eyes in the direction he pointed. There, one of the coffins sat with the lid barely open.

  At that moment we saw Turan Bey leap in that direction like a tiger. Özdemir Bey ran after him. We also began running instinctively to protect our friend who was rushing toward this terrible danger. The moment he reached the coffin, Turan Bey lifted his foot and with a kick knocked the lid to the marble floor of the hall.

  Count Dracula, the Impaler Voivode of history, this monster from hell, lay on soil that gave off a disgusting odor! His face was as pale as a wax statue but those crimson eyes which I knew too well seemed to burn with a ghastly light.

  Even Doctor Resuhî Bey seemed to be caught up in a sudden rush of thrill and horror. However, at that moment something very unexpected happened. With the speed of lightning Turan Bey suddenly produced from under his coat a huge broadaxe. I saw the axe land on
the Impaler Voivode’s neck with a merciless blow and sever that vile head from its torso. Then another streak of lightning flashed before my eyes; Özdemir Bey drove his long Dagestan knife into the vampire’s heart, all the way to the hilt.

  I heard Turan Bey utter these words in a faint voice:

  “This is revenge for my impaled brethren along the Danube River, and my Şadan!”

  And then we witnessed another miracle. Yes, without believing our own eyes, but with absolute certainty, we saw this happen:

  As we watched the scene before us with our eyes wide open, the body and head slowly crumbled to dust, mixed with the dirt, and disappeared!

  THE END

  AFTERWORD

  by Iain Robert Smith

  Jonathan Harker’s journal famously begins with an account of his journey from London to Transylvania as he describes his experiences crossing the river Danube and entering “the traditions of Turkish rule.” This fleeting reference to Turkey within Stoker’s original novel is transformed in Kazıklı Voyvoda/The Impaling Voivode into an equivalent passage in Azmi’s journal celebrating the babbling of the river as “a living testament to the glorious past of the Turkish nation, my great and famous race.” These words are the first hint that Stoker’s novel was adapted and transformed by Ali Rıza Seyfi in a manner much more radical than Kazıklı Voyvoda’s reputation as a Turkish translation of Dracula might imply. Indeed, I must admit that for many years I had assumed that Seyfi’s novel was a relatively straightforward translation of Stoker’s novel into Turkish that had altered some locations and character names but made few substantive changes. When I first heard from Ed Glaser that he intended to have the novel translated back into English, I found it quite a curious idea. What would be the merit of having a version of Dracula that had been translated into Turkish and then back into English? How foolish I was.

  Obviously, there are many passages here that reproduce Stoker’s novel with only minor variations in phrasing. A close textual comparison shows that much of the novel was translated directly into Turkish and therefore the back translation into English produces quite an uncanny effect as we recognize anew these classic passages with only minimal differences. Nevertheless, it is the more substantial additions that Seyfi made to the text that are the most fascinating and invaluable for our understanding of the transnational legacy of Dracula and processes of cross-cultural adaptation more broadly. Collaborating with Necip Ateş to translate the novel back into English, Glaser has done us a significant service by bringing this adaptation to an English-language readership. Part of the reason that this is so important is that the few times that Seyfi’s book has been discussed in English-language criticism have been in relation to its film adaptation Drakula İstanbul’da (1953) and these mentions tend to show little knowledge of this source text. David J. Skal, for example, explains in Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage and Screen that “the only straight-faced adaptation of Dracula made anywhere in the world after 1931 was a 1953 Turkish oddity called Drakula Istanbul’da”[14] but he makes no reference to Ali Rıza Seyfi’s novel. Meanwhile, Lyndon W. Joslin in Count Dracula Goes to the Movies: Stoker’s Novel Adapted, 1922-2003 discusses the various ways in which Drakula İstanbul’da is faithful to Stoker’s novel, yet makes only a fleeting mention of “a Turkish novel titled Kazıklı Voyvoda” referred to in the film’s credits.[15] Of course, these absences are perfectly understandable given that it is only now that Seyfi’s novel is available in an English-language translation, but it is equally clear that scholarship is going to greatly benefit from its increased accessibility.

  When we compare the novel to its film adaptation Drakula İstanbul’da, this value to scholarship is even more pronounced. Directed by Mehmet Muhtar and produced by Turgut Demirağ, who had previously collaborated on İstanbul Geceleri (Nights of Istanbul, 1950) and Tanri Sahidimdir (God Is My Witness, 1951), the film was made well before the heyday of Yeşilçam adaptations in the 1970s when Turkish filmmakers such as Hulki Saner and Kunt Tulgar would produce numerous reworkings of globally popular texts including Star Trek (Turist Ömer Uzay Yolu’nda/Ömer the Tourist in Star Trek, 1973), The Exorcist (Şeytan/Satan, 1974) and Superman (Süpermen Dönüyor/Superman Returns, 1979). However, it was nonetheless part of a brief earlier cycle of films in the mid-1950s in which popular film characters were transplanted to Istanbul, with Tarzan appearing in Orhan Atadeniz’s Tarzan İstanbul’da (Tarzan in Istanbul, 1952) and the Invisible Man appearing in Lütfi Akad’s Görünmeyen adam İstanbul’da (The Invisible Man in Istanbul, 1955). With a script from Ümit Deniz who would subsequently establish a successful career as a crime novelist and with prolific actor Atif Kaptan in the title role of Dracula, Muhtar’s film sticks relatively close to the plot of the original Stoker novel and contains some elements which did not appear in earlier screen Draculas such as a sequence in which the Count walks down the outer wall of the castle, and a scene where Şadan (the Turkish equivalent to Lucy) carries a baby into her tomb, only to drop it when confronted by Doctor Resuhî (Van Helsing) and his team. Of course, these moments are less a marker of fidelity to Stoker’s novel than to Ali Rıza Seyfi’s adaptation, especially given that the film retains all the character names from Seyfi’s version. As Kim Newman noted in the foreword, though, it is important to remember that the film does not follow Seyfi’s novel in all respects. The shift in setting from the 1920s to the 1950s means that the film reflects the substantial changes in Turkish society between the 1928 novel and its 1953 adaptation, and Güzin (Mina) is transformed from the relatively demure character of the novel into a cabaret dancer—allowing the film to include numerous opportunities for actress Annie Ball to dance for the audience, including a sequence towards the end of the film where she performs a private dance for Dracula while under his influence. Meanwhile, a hunchbacked servant seemingly modeled on the Fritz/Ygor character in the Universal Frankenstein films is added, and the eventual killing of Dracula is undertaken by Azmi alone in the Kasımpaşa graveyard rather than by Turan (Şadan’s lover) who beheads Dracula with an axe in Seyfi’s novel. Muhtar’s film also adds a comedic epilogue scene in which Azmi is frantically disposing of bulbs of garlic, explaining that now Dracula has been defeated he no longer wants them anywhere in his home, obliging Güzin to ask sadly if that means they can no longer eat “garlic in stuffed aubergine.”

  The most notable differences between Muhtar’s film and Seyfi’s novel, however, are not these elements that Muhtar added but instead what he neglected to include. Stoker’s original novel contained two brief references to the “Voivode” Dracula and Muhtar’s film makes this link to the historical Vlad III (Vlad the Impaler) somewhat more explicit, but it is remarkable just how much further Seyfi’s novel goes in developing that link between the historical Vlad Dracula and Stoker’s fictional creation. From the very first pages of his journal, Azmi is making a connection between Count Dracula and the “bloody, horrible, bloodcurdling acts that Voivode Dracula committed during the reign of Mehmed II in the history of the Turkish Empire” while Güzin’s diary later describes how she “read our nation’s glorious history with tearful eyes, and saw the cruelties and murders committed by this unprecedented monster who had many names, like Dracula, Black Devil, and Impaler Voivode.” Count Dracula is positioned as a foreigner speaking in accented Turkish resembling “that of some of the Greek doctors in Istanbul” and displaying a pronounced fascination with Turkish culture and history. As the novel progresses, Azmi and Güzin start to realize that he is more than a mere distant relative of his namesake Vlad Dracula but is in fact the very same man. When we come to the section of the Dracula story where Doctor Resuhî (Van Helsing) explains his research on Dracula’s history to the rest of the group, Seyfi extends this section to incorporate lengthy descriptions of historical battles between Vlad III and Mehmed II that are filled with patriotic, brave Turkish warriors battling against Vlad’s cruel armies. Indeed, the notorious story of Turkish envoys having their turb
ans nailed directly to their heads by Vlad III after refusing to remove them is recounted as a symbol of national resistance designed to make the eventual defeat of Dracula even more emotionally resonant for the Turkish readership. Going well beyond a simple translation of Dracula into the Turkish language, Seyfi’s novel remodels the text as a vehicle for expressing a distinctly nationalist take on the Dracula mythos. As Şehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar notes in her introduction to this book, Kazıklı Voyvoda was written soon after the Turkish War of Independence and Seyfi’s adaptation can only be properly appreciated in light of that historical context. Muhtar’s film, on the other hand, was produced nearly thirty years later in the early period of the Menderes government and removes many of the more overtly nationalistic elements of the adaptation and strips the story back to the core plotline—in the process often hewing closer to the Stoker novel than Seyfi’s adaptation. Remarkably, unlike later adaptations such as Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 Dracula or Gary Shore’s Dracula Untold (2014), the film contains no dramatizations of Vlad III’s 15th century life and it wouldn’t be until 1972 that Turkish cinema audiences would get to see Mehmed II face up to Vlad III in Natuk Baytan’s largely fictionalized historical action film Kara Murat: Fatih’in fedaisi (Kara Murat: Fatih’s Fedaration). It is therefore primarily in Seyfi’s novel that we see this attempt to develop and strengthen the connection between the historical figure of Vlad III and Stoker’s Dracula character as a way of localising the story for Turkish audiences.

  While there are some question marks over whether the differences in Valdimar Ásmundsson’s recently rediscovered Icelandic translation of Dracula are solely down to his imagination or are evidence of him working from an earlier Stoker draft, there are no such question marks over Seyfi’s Turkish adaptation. Going beyond the usual parameters of translation, Seyfi profoundly transformed the text for his own purposes and its patriotic content is clearly consistent with his subsequent historical novels. This book should therefore be recognized as a significant moment in the history of unauthorized transnational adaptations of Stoker’s novel. Within film criticism, there is an increasing attention being paid to the numerous ways in which iconic characters such as Dracula have been adapted around the world within different national and cultural contexts. Beyond the canonical adaptations produced in America and Europe, Dracula has appeared on screen amongst Mexican haciendas in El Vampiro (The Vampire, 1957), as a symbol of the creeping threat of Westernization in Pakistan in Zinda Laash (The Living Corpse, 1967), fighting DC’s Batman in the Filipino film Batman Fights Dracula (1967), and even battling against a resurrected Bruce Lee in the Hong Kong Brucesploitation film The Dragon Lives Again (1977). The character has proven to be exceptionally adaptable, appearing in numerous different forms and being utilized for a diverse range of ideological purposes. I hope that the recent translation into English of these Icelandic and Turkish literary adaptations of Dracula will similarly draw more attention to the various ways in which fiction authors around the world have reworked and remodeled Bram Stoker’s tale. Given that Stoker’s original novel was clearly rooted within the context of Victorian Britain and the prevalent anxieties at the turn of the century, it is important that we trace what subsequently happened when that character was displaced from that original context and adapted to other cultural and historical situations, for Dracula did not merely travel to Iceland and Istanbul but infected the entire world.