book review the historian elizabeth kostova

The only chink in the Ottoman expansion was Vlad Tepes, who is called Dracula today because he had been inducted into the Holy Order of the Dracul (an Orthodox Christianity sect) in his lifetime. The Ottomans, you will remember, had invaded Constantinople (current-day Istanbul) in 1453, destroyed the Byzantine empire and invaded Eastern Europe quite successfully. He used to be a prince of Wallachia (current-day Romania), called Vlad Tepes, or Vlad III or Son of the Dracul (Dracul meaning ‘dragon’), who was an enemy of the Ottoman Turks. They were being nosy about the burial site of Dracula.įor the beginner, Dracula was not always a vampire. You see, her parents have gone missing due to their highly inquisitive nature as historians. The Historian traces such a story of cruelty, through the narration of a sixteen-year old girl, of whose name we are kept blissfully unaware, and who is in search of her father Paul, and her mother Helen Rossi.

I saw the fluttering banners, the splashes of blood on the legs of their horses, the spear and the crescent, the glitter of sunlight on scimitars and chain mail, the beautiful and mutilated young heads, faces, bodies heard the screams of men crossing into the hand of Allah and the cries of their faraway mothers and fathers smelled the reek of burning houses and fresh gore, the sulfur of cannon fire, the conflagrations of tent and bridge and horseflesh.// wail sounded more like a summons to hell-a string of horrorstricken notes that seemed to arise from the memory of a thousand Ottoman camps, a million Turkish soldiers. Ask Elizabeth Kostova, and she will tell you that history is a story of cruelty, written in blood, repeated in folklore, preserved in architecture and recorded in the notebooks of historians. History is many things, from the story of man’s achievements to the tale of his errors, from the story of evolution to the tale of cultural degeneration. What is history? That is a question that is asked in every introductory class on the subject, and each time the answer is varied and vague.

Book review the historian elizabeth kostova