30/10/2024
"The Transylvanian brand is about being the home of the undead, but “Dracula’s Hidden Kingdom” is about how life thrives in “one of Europe’s last wild frontiers,” a Romanian region boasting an abundance of species that recalls a virtually bygone continent.
Unscathed by modern agriculture, wildflower meadows carpet large swaths of the countryside and support, among other things, nearly 200 different types of butterfly. Whether it is due to the past movie roles of Mr. Irons or just the limpid quality of his speaking voice, there’s a certain mellifluous decadence imparted when the actor speaks about the glories of Transylvanian flora and fauna, the bees that hum above the wildflowers and the multihued bee-eaters that wing their way in from the south in early May and feast on bugs for the rest of the summer. Among the many photographic marvels of “Dracula’s Hidden Kingdom”—the intimate portraiture of the little-seen lynx, for instance—is the ingestion of a bee by a bee-eater, Mr. Irons explaining how they use their beaks to make their prey edible, just as a tiny spray of bee venom is squeezed across the screen.
There aren’t many humans in “Dracula’s Hidden Kingdom,” though there is a brief sidebar on Sânziene, the summer-solstice celebration during which “spirits roam free and fires are lit to ward off the evil ones.” Vampires? Mr. Irons doesn’t specify, though he does take the opportunity to segue into the tale of the warlord Vlad Dracul, aka Vlad the Impaler, whom we are told put 20,000 Turks on skewers, “the skies filled with their dying screams and departing souls.”
The history of Transylvania includes religious warfare and fortified churches, many of which now serve as homes for the country’s 26 different types of bat, notably the greater mouse-eared version, a ferocious predator that uses hearing rather that the more species-familiar sonar to locate prey.
The history also includes the discovery in recent years, in western Transylvania, of charcoal cave drawings approximately 30,000 years old—far older, if far cruder, than the Lascaux drawings in France—and which include renderings of the bison that once ranged over Europe by the millions and now number only a few hundred (though that is an improvement over recent decades).
Directed by John Murray and Jamie Fitzpatrick with a visual and musical acknowledgement of the supernatural aspect of Transylvanian lore, the program is a catalogue of Romanian creatures, from lacquered-looking staghorn beetles to sherbet-colored hoopoes (long-billed birds with crests and stripes) to brown bears to the countless wolves that stalk the region’s vast forests.
Transylvania is presented as a virtual wonderland of species unendangered and flourishing, Eastern Europe’s version of the Serengeti. And though Mr. Irons doesn’t say it, the region’s dreadful place in the public imagination may be exactly why it has survived so long as a kind of sanctuary for vanishing European wildlife."
