His body was buried in the church of the Snagov Monastery, on an island near Bucharest. His body lies in front of the altar. In 1935, a richly dressed but beheaded corpse was exhumed at Snagov, a fate known to have overtaken Dracula, whose head was supposedly wrapped, perfumed and dispatched as a gift to the Turkish sultan.
They say that impalling was one of Dracula's favourite punishments, but he was not the only one who made use of it at the time. Other German and Spanish princes would do the same. He used the method for boyars, thieves and criminals, Turks, Saxons and those who conspired against him; more than once it happened that a whole forest of sharp stakes with enemies' heads would rise around Târgoviste, the capital of Wallachia at the time.
Horrified by these atrocities, the Saxons printed books and pamphlets in which they told about Vlad's cruelty. These booklets also reached Germany and Western Europe, where Dracula became known as a bloody tyrant.
In 1897, the Irish writer Bram Stoker published Dracula, which made Vlad the Impaler famous world-wide. Stoker read the stories about Dracula printed in the 15th and 16th centuries and was struck by his acts of cruelty. He decided to make him his character; he also read several books about Transylvania (a name of Latin origin, meaning "the country beyond the forests"), and thought that this "exotic" land would make a proper setting for Dracula's deeds.In fact, Stoker used Vlad only as a source of inspiration, since in his novel, Dracula is not prince Vlad the Impaler, but a Transylvanian count living in a mysterious castle where he lured his victims. His story takes place in the Bistritza area, and the castle lies near the Bârgau Pass (in the Carpathian Mountains). As Stoker had never visited Transylvania, most places and happenings were pure fiction.
Legend and true history about Dracula intermingle and are being kept alive by tourist destinations like the Monastery of Snagov near Bucharest, or Bran Castle near Brasov. The castles and cathedrals which make up the typical image, even if simplified, of the Western Middle Ages in point of arhitecture, are matched, in the Romanian world, mainly by times mansions. Most of the lay edificies have disappeared, worn out by times or destroyed by wars, earthquakes, fires. In medieval arhitecture, influences of western trends can be traced, at grater or lasser extent, in the three lands inhabitted by Romanians.