A large region in central Romania, ringed and crossed by the Carpathian mountains, with thick forests, old towns, and a lot of heavy industry now — steel, chemicals, machinery. It is a real place where real people live, about seven million of them, and it has a long, complicated history: it was part of Hungary for centuries, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and only became part of Romania after the First World War. That history is why many Transylvanians speak Hungarian or German as well as Romanian. But outside Romania, almost nobody thinks of any of that first. They think of vampires — because in 1897 an Irish writer named Bram Stoker set his novel *Dracula* there, in a castle in the Transylvanian mountains, and the name stuck to the idea forever. Stoker never visited; he picked the place off a map and out of library books because it sounded distant and wild to English readers. So in ordinary English the word does double work. Used seriously, it names a region. Used loosely — and it very often is — it means "a spooky place where something supernatural happens," the way people say a dark old house "looks like something out of Transylvania," or joke that a friend with pale skin who never goes out in the sun is "from Transylvania." That second use is a joke, and it is worth knowing that Romanians are, understandably, a bit tired of it. The country does sell the Dracula connection to tourists — you can visit castles that claim the link — but the historical man behind the name, Vlad III, was a fifteenth-century ruler of Wallachia, a different region, and he was not a vampire, just brutal in the ordinary human way.