Sir, – I enjoyed Frank McNally’s description of Sibiu in An Irishman’s Diary (July 12th). He mentions that Nicu Ceausescu was at one stage governor of Sibiu in the 1980s.
In one of my Sunday Miscellany tales, I recounted how I was also in Sibiu but in 1981, having helped a friend navigate an articulated truck carrying a load of frozen beef from Ireland.
When we arrived, Nicu Ceausescu, the playboy youngest son of the communist president of Romania, had just recently been made governor of Sibiu.
However, Frank did not mention that the Irish had already beaten Nicu to it in 1767 when Count Karl O’Donnell was appointed military governor of Transylvania by queen Maria Theresa.
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He based himself in Sibiu for the three years of his rule. He was a descendent of the O’Donnells of Donegal who had left Ireland after the Williamite war in Ireland. He reached the rank of general in the Austrian army.
On the subject of Vlad the Impaler and Dracula, Bram Stoker also had an O’Donnell connection, as his mother was descended from Manus O’Donnell, lord of Tyrconnell, who died in 1563.
Is it possible that the O’Donnell connection gave him the link to Sibiu and to the stories of vampires in the dark woods of the Carpathians?
Take care Frank, if you enter the dark woods while you are over there. – Yours, etc,
FRANK KAVANAGH,
Greystones,
Co Wicklow.