On a dark and stormy night in May this year, exactly 125 years to the day that Bram Stoker published the definitive vampire novel, two people pored over a document more than 500 years old in a room in Transylvania – signed by Dracula himself.
Gleb and Svetlana Zilberstein’s mission? To extract genetic material from the letters written by Vlad Dracula – the historical inspiration for Stoker’s vampiric count – left there by his sweat, fingerprints and saliva.