My own family history has always been strange.  I have a detailed lineage on my mother’s side, compiled by a monk at St. John’s Abbey, but there are no stories of our ancestors. My wife can tell of her ancestors going back seven generations–invoking family legends of an avenging angel, religious power struggles, genocide, and assassination.  By contrast my own family history is paper dry.  

On my father’s side there is nothing.  Indeed, there has been a conscience effort to forget the old country.  Nothing exists of that time, and deep secrets remain about who we are and where we came from.

My maternal grandmother came from the grinding poverty of the Autro-Hungarian peasantry.  Based on hints about climate, I suspect her father and mother emigrated from Wallachia.  But they were German-Hungarian, which might suggest Transylvania…or it might not.  

In all honesty, I have no connection to my past on either side.  What I do know of my family line is suffering.  The stories that are told are of abuse, cruelty, poverty, fear, and violence.  That open question–shaded by horror–has been something that I have long wanted to explore.  Indeed, I’ve enjoyed stories of Romania–specifically, Brian Lumley’s Wamphyri novels.  My own family history and Lumley’s depiction of Romania have spun themselves out as a vampire story.

As I’ve dug into the occult history of Romania, I’ve become fascinated by the legend of the Scholomance and surprised that the Scholomance has not become more widely incorporated into fiction.  The Scholomance , for those who have not read Bram Stoker’s Dracula is the devil’s school in which students descend into darkness for a full year while they learn the dark arts that allow them to bind dragons to their will and control the weather itself.

I’m a bit disappointed that the Scholomance has remained tangential to my own story of vampiric-flora, but it remains a rich legend that has been underutilized compared to the other horrors that have emerged from the Romanian experience.  I would love to hear more about stories that have featured the Scholomance.