I'm Romanian and incidentally I vacationed several times in the close vicinity of the Bran castle. Vlad the Impaler (Vlad Tepes or Vlad Draculea) was very much a real person (and the Bran area is pretty nice, I definitely recommend visiting). While the vampire connotations are indeed mostly fabricated, he was known for more mundane gruesome acts, like affectionately poking people with a stick (see pic).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vlad_the_Impaler

http://www.livescience.com/images/i/000/071/430/i02/Impaled....

> While the vampire connotations are indeed mostly fabricated,

I was specifically talking about the connection to Bram Stoker's Dracula - Vlad was a real person, (with a bloody history) just as whoever built this English wall they found was/were (presumably minus a few gory tales), but that doesn't mean Stoker knew anything about him.

Vlad is definitely real. There's a legend that Count Dracula (you know, the vampire) was based on Vlad, but there's not much evidence Stoker took anything but the "Dracole" name (though I think that's the German spelling).

Vlad, the Poker.

Vlad, the pentester.

Next time I play the WSOP main and lose a dress-up bet, I know what I'm going as.

The idea of a historical King Arthur is a silly quixotic quest, at least with current evidence. The point of the story is not historiographical. It's even more hopeless than discerning a historical Moses, where we actually have texts attributed. Solid evidence (that I'd argue is easily debunked just by writing style alone). This means people just project romantic shit without the pain of objectivity.

Yes, sadly, there are not an awful lot of surviving credible written historical records from Anglo-Saxon England. The ones that have survived often have been written hundreds of years later and generally not considered 100% reliable. This means that we have to go by archeological evidence. Hence the joke that we should bury our deceased pets in elaborate military uniforms, in order to confuse future historians.

There are quite a few contemporary Anglo Saxon chronicles, especially from the time of Alfred the Great onwards. Arthur is a legend from way before all that stuff, though.

Didn't they say the same about Troy?

Then they found actual evidence. I'm happy to change my mind if there is something convincing beyond "hey this fits our expected timeline"; there are extremely convincing textual clues matching the location of Troy. We don't even have that with King Arthur.

The excavation of Troy also destroyed a lot of evidence in the dude's eagerness to find the "original" Troy, so if anything it's a good argument against eagerly digging around looking for myths.

To be fair, The Bosporus isn't short of possible archaeological digs. I would hate being a developer anywhere around there.

>so if anything it's a good argument against eagerly digging around looking for myths.

I wouldn't read to far into the article, I don't think they are digging around looking for myths so much as excavating a undocumented, historic site and using the King Arthur story for media coverage or interest.

Note how everything related to King Arthur is simply added by the author of the article and all the quotes from the individuals involved in the project don't mention a thing about Arthur, but limited to: items located, potential origins of the items recovered, possible dates etc...

Hah, I can understand the confusion—I meant the reporters were metaphorically digging through looking for a story about the myth.

So they found the U.N. Building