Transylvania’s inhabitants were imagined as races polluted by Turkish bloodlines

Evidence

The Balkan state of Transylvania is a site of racial degeneration referred to in the text as the “whirlpool of European races.” Its inhabitants are “infected” with Turkish bloodlines. The theme of racial pollution, as noted earlier, is a central part of the story, and the vampire’s cannibalism is a symbol of the threat of miscegenation. Stoker, an Irish Protestant, was, like many of his compatriots, fixated on the dangers posed by Irish Catholics: For LeFanu and Stoker, both members of the Protestant Anglo-Irish ruling class of nineteenth-century Ireland, these legends [of vamps, vampires, necrophiles, and necrophilles] were at once local folklore and metaphors for their class’s anxieties about the unhyphenated Irish, who were emerging from centuries of suppression to demand political and economic power. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 535