What?
On my way to visit the Fisherman's Bastion and St. Matthias Church in Budapest, Hungary, I walked past a sign that advertised the labyrinth caves of "Dracula's Chambers." I was skeptical (it looked like just another tourist trap), but I've always loved Dracula and gothic literature so I decided I had to check it out, heading down into a cellar. And down. And down some more.
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| The sign outside that explains the history of the caves and supposed Dracula ties. |
I decided once I got down there to go into the exhibition, partially because it sounded cool and partially because it was actually cool temperature-wise in the underground caves - I needed a break from the sun.
The whole exhibit was delightfully tacky and scary at the same time. It featured wax sculptures dressed in old theater costumes and posed to depict scenes from an opera with the music of said opera playing through the caves. Other areas, featuring examples of stonework carved in Budapest, had unsettling chants playing in the background.
The Dracula part of the exhibition played up Dracula's, or Vlad the Impaler's, ties to Budapest. Dracula was sentenced to 10 years of prison down in the labyrinth, during which time his wife comitted suicide when his castle was taken over. His grief and anger over these events are what caused him to kill many people in a variety of bloody ways when he got out of prison.
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| Some fine examples of creepy wax statuary. |
Now I know this is all sounds very cheesy and goofy, but it was actually pretty nerve-wracking to walk through alone. There was only one person working at the entrance, and I only saw five other people total (not counting the wax ones, of course) while I was down in the caves. The cave ceilings were low with limited light to show the way. When I got to the Dracula portion, an optional dead-end leg of cave that you walked down and then back up, I considered skipping it.
I'll go through the occassional haunted house around Halloween and I can sometimes be persuaded to watch horror movies, but I don't really like to be scared and don't go out of my way looking to be so. Walking to Dracula's tomb was fun because it was scary, and I chose to do it myself.
No one else was down there when I was, so it was a long walk through the narrowing tunnel (fully decked out with fog, low lights, and sound effects), past Dracula's tomb to the very end of the cave, a near pitch black room with a huge open cage and eerily minimalistic cross tombstones.
I walked back up feeling proud of myself for going down there, even if it didn't really have much to do with my project.
Until I realized it did.
Okay, maybe not Dracula so much as the stonework. I was looking at more of it on my way out and thought about the immense amount of artistry that had gone into most of the pieces, these stones from Budapest's history. My Magellan Project is officially studying art and politics (it's been morphing into a sort of art/politics/history hybrid now), but in my proposal I mentioned brushstrokes and other painting terms because I want to focus on painting in the arts side of things. Dracula helped me realize that that wasn't what I was doing, and it shouldn't be, really.
Whether it's Dvorak's music, Petofi's poems, or stone carvings in a labyrinth, the art that is relevant to the politics and history of any nation is never made in just one form.
Even though I wanted to focus on paintings, I haven't been, and I'm glad. The art I find alongside what I go to see, sometimes even whole exhibitions themselves like the stones in Dracula's Chambers, are equally as important, and as I look back now I'm realizing how much I've learned from all the different kinds of art I've seen.
Thanks, Dracula.
