By សតិវអតុ

Happy Samhain/Halloween, etc! Most people know this holiday as a time for dressing up, and children getting candy from “trick or treating.” But this was the most important holiday of the year, before Christianity came to Europe. The Druids, witches, Wiccans and other pre-Christian religions saw this day as a kind of New Year day. It was the most important holiday of the year, in which people celebrated the end of the harvest and the beginning of the new year. It was also a time where people believed that spirits could visit the living. That is why many people wore masks. They carved pumpkins out of fruits, such as turnips. (Pumpkins came from the new world, so Europeans didn’t have them).

It is amazing that any of these traditions remain, since Halloween can be viewed as a non-Christian holiday. At one point the Christian Church came up with All Saints Day, for a holiday after Halloween, where people were supposed to dress as their favorite saints and go to mass.

The tradition today seems to focus on horror movies and scary costumes. So here is an article about Bela Lugosi, known on the screen as Dracula and other frightening characters. However, Lugosi was a revolutionary before he came to the US and he supported the Hungarian Revolution of 1918. It was lead by Bela Kun.

So here is a biography of Bela Lugosi:

Bela Lugosi, the most famous Dracula of Hollywood, and the Hungarian Soviet Republic.

From A Vallekan in Romania:

His interpretation of Count Dracula marked a milestone in classical cinema and gave the popular myth many of the characteristics with which he is known today. Bela Lugosi was not only a talented actor, but also in himself a fascinating character, first-person protagonist of the Hungarian Revolution of 1918 and of the ephemeral life of the Soviet Republic of Hungary, as a militant of the Communist Party.
Born under the name Blaskó Béla Ferenc Dezső, on October 20, 1882 in Lugos, then

Hungary, a territory that later became part of Romania just after its military invasion and the taking of Budapest to end the new Bolshevik state, Bela Lugosi was a famous actor of the silent film era that shook the audience with his roles in horror films.

His place of birth was about 80 kilometers from the western border of Transylvania and Poenari Castle, one of the historic homes of Vlad the Impaler, the voivode that gave rise to the famous legend of Dracula of the English writer Bram Stoker, to whom Lugosi would present with great acclaim both on stage and on screen. As you can see, his artistic name would take him from the city where he was born, the current Romanian Lugoj.

Lugosi lived hard moments at the beginning of his life. The youngest of four brothers decided to flee from the bosom of his middle class home to open a path for himself in the world of theater, with just 12 years of age. Being only a child and determined not to depend on his parents, he had to work as a miner and then in the railway lines that connected the different localities of his country. All this would cause that he could not access or have an education as it would have corresponded if he had followed under the skirts of his family, rich bankers, but come to less.

He tried to participate with small roles in local traveling productions, but his lack of education and his temperament made it difficult for him to succeed.

"They tried to give me small roles in their works, but I was so ignorant, so stupid, that people laughed at me. But they allowed me the taste of the stage and also the rancid taste of humiliation. "

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