It's been a long time and I forgot some of the geographical details. I probably wouldn't have remembered it was Vanna he sailed from if the movie hadn't reminded me. I also probably only remembered the names of the crewmen for the same reason.
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Yes, Dracula sailed from the Bulgarian port of Varna, but he was not probably from Hungary. Of course, you know that when the novel was written there was no independent Hungarian state, as it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the name being the English version of the title that resulted from the 1867 Compromise that elevated the Hungarians to a privileged position within the Habsburg Empire.
I thought Franz Josef, who was the Emperor during both 1867 and the events of the novel, was King of Hungary as well as the Emperor. Unless it was an ancestral title that had been abolished and recreated in 1867? My understanding was that to people within the Empire, they very much retained their national identity, and largely saw the Austrians/Hapsburgs as the lesser evil compared to the other ethnic groups with whom they shared the state. In other words, Hungarians preferred to think of Franz Josef as King of Hungary, rather than the Emperor, and Croats etc preferred to think of him as their Emperor, rather than the king of their Hungarian conquerors, and so forth.
It doesn't sound as though Dracula came from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, though. Jonathan Harker travels east from "Bistritz", which is a Germanicized version of Bistrița, within the Empire but near its eastern borders, and then east through the Borgo Pass out of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Part of what makes the journey terrifying is that he leaves the security of a major power and finds himself in the wild and lawless northern territories of the newly independent Kingdom of Romania.
Had Dracula come from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it would still likely have been easier for him to travel West in the Empire, rather than go south to the Bulgarian port of Varna and risk a voyage by sea.
Yeah, you're probably right. I just figured he went east to get a Russian ship, keeping the whole Eastern thing going.