The History of the Kingdom of Barovia

The historian of Barovia works in conditions that would be recognised, and pitied, by any scholar of occluded records. The lord of this land has ruled it for more than four centuries. He controls what is preserved and what is not, what is released and in what form, and he is not a disinterested curator. Any document that survives in Barovia does so because Strahd von Zarovich allowed it to survive, and any document he has allowed to survive should be read with that permission in mind.

The primary sources available to this account are the following. The crypt inscriptions in Castle Ravenloft, which are stone and therefore the most resistant to subsequent alteration. The Tome of Strahd, his own account of himself, circulated in his own name, which this history treats as evidence of what he wished to be believed rather than as straightforward testimony. The older journal, written during the years 347 to 351 and beyond, which predates the transformation and records events as they unfolded; it is more reliable on specific facts than the Tome, though still his hand and his perspective. A History of the Barovian Army, the valley’s official account of the goblin war and its resolution. Skin and Steel: A History of the Ba’al Verzi, a Barovian historical text whose relevance will become apparent. The diary of Gregorri Kolyan, a musician who wrote in the years immediately following 351, the most valuable near-contemporary witness available, and a document whose history of tampering is itself instructive. And the testimony of the Standing Stones near the village of Barovia, recorded through a priestly intermediary some generations after the events described here. It is accepted here because it answers too closely to the independent physical record at Sergei’s crypt to be dismissed as invention, and because the stones themselves predate the count by a margin that places them beyond his curating reach.

One source demands particular attention before this account proceeds. The Kolyan diary was released in a form that falsified its dates by approximately a century, placing a document written in years 353 and 354 into an apparent context of four generations later. The insertions Strahd made to the original text are identifiable by their register: they read not as a musician recording his fear and observations but as a governor of the record, and they serve specific purposes that become obvious on examination. These insertions are noted where they occur. The corrected dates are used throughout. The falsification is itself evidence: a man who alters the dating of an eyewitness account two years after the events described is a man who understood, almost immediately, that the record needed to be managed.

What this history cannot recover is independent testimony from anyone who was present at the castle during the events of 347 to 351. Those people are dead, or gone, or silent in ways that silence does not naturally produce. What remains is stone, and Strahd’s own account of himself in various forms, and Kolyan’s observations from just outside. It is enough to work with. It is not enough to settle every question, and this account does not pretend otherwise.

The Castle Before the Count

The castle that now bears the name Ravenloft did not begin with Strahd von Zarovich. The crypts record a lineage of kings and builders that reaches back to Endorovich, styled the Terrible, whose keep was raised by an architect named Artimus using slave labour. Other rulers followed in sequence. By the time the Von Zarovich family came to occupy the castle, it had already changed hands more than once and carried the weight of a history that predated them.

The royal crypts contain a paired tomb for Barov and Ravenovia, king and queen interred together in the same chamber. Nearby, the crypt of Ciril Romulich is inscribed “Beloved of King Barov and Queen Raven, High Priest of the Most Holy Order.” These are the two direct references to the ruling family in the castle’s stone record, and they establish the basic shape of the household: a king and queen, a high priest who was beloved of both, and a court that had the complexity and standing to maintain a first counsellor and a wizard alongside the church.

The inscription on Stephan Gregorovich’s crypt reads “First Counsellor to King Barov.” The man the king trusted above others with the conduct of the kingdom’s affairs. Khazan, whose epitaph reads only “His word was power,” was the court wizard. The brevity of the inscription is not absence of honour: in a series of epitaphs that speak to relationships and roles, a man whose word was power needed no further description. Ciril Romulich’s “beloved” is the word that tells the most: not merely employed, not merely respected, but loved by both the king and the queen. A priest in that position was the conscience of the household, and his standing with Ravenovia as well as Barov suggests she was not a peripheral figure in the governance of the castle. She was present in it.

Also interred in the royal crypts are Dorfniya Dilisnya and Pidlwik her fool, and Elsa Fallona. Dorfniya’s presence requires thought. She bears a different name from the ruling line, Dilisnya, not Von Zarovich, and holds the rank of duchess. A duchess buried in the royal crypts alongside kings and their counsellors is most plausibly a woman of royal blood who stood outside the direct line of succession, perhaps the king’s elder sister, a branch of the family that retained an underlying name while the ruling line took the dynastic designation. This is inference, not certainty, but it is the inference that fits best with what the crypts show. If it holds, then Dorfniya was present in the household as a figure of considerable standing without formal authority, and her fool, Pidlwik, was her instrument of influence.

A court jester’s historical function was not entertainment. It was the licensed delivery of what no counsellor could safely speak directly to power. Whatever Dorfniya needed to say that a duchess could not say in her own voice, Pidlwik said it. His burial in the royal crypts confirms he was understood to have mattered. His name reads less like a birth name than a deliberately coarse fool-name, the kind of bodily, indecorous label worn as part of the role’s licensed vulgarity.

Elsa Fallona’s crypt bears no epitaph and records no relationship. She mattered enough to be interred here, and the record says nothing further.

This was the court Strahd came home to: or rather, the court whose absence he came home to, because by the time he arrived, they were gone.

The Departure and the Absence

The Tome of Strahd presents a life of honourable military service: a firstborn son who spent his youth in the wars, who “thundered across the land like the wrath of a just god,” who returned only when the valley needed saving. The historian is obliged to treat this account with caution. The Tome is Strahd’s own composition, circulated under his own authority, and it presents exactly the kind of past that a man in his position would find useful: a prior life of justice and sacrifice that makes the subsequent transformation a tragedy rather than a consequence.

What the older journal establishes, independent of the Tome’s framing, is a single fact of considerable significance: when Sergei arrived at the castle in the fourth moon of year 350, Strahd had never met him. “My youngest brother whom I have never before met” is how the journal records it. Sergei grew up in the same household Strahd grew up in, learned his swordsmanship there, spent his formative years there, and his oldest brother had never once come back. Whatever the reason for the departure, it produced an absence so total that two brothers raised under the same roof were strangers to each other.

The Tome says nothing about why he left. The older journal says nothing about why he left. The reason for the departure is not recorded in any source available to this history, which is itself a kind of record. When a man’s own account of himself omits the reason he spent the better part of his life away from his family while they died and his homeland suffered, the omission is not accident.

Skin and Steel: A History of the Ba’al Verzi is not, on its surface, a document about Strahd von Zarovich. It is a history of an assassin’s guild, describing their methods and traditions. It becomes relevant here because of the dagger. On the morning of the year 351 wedding, the older journal records Strahd presenting his brother with a Ba’al Verzi assassin’s blade. He describes it with complete authority: the sheath made from the skin of the weapon’s first victim, the hilt-runes of power, the tradition that it is bad luck to draw it without drawing blood. He handles it with the ease of long familiarity. He produced it for the occasion from his own possession, having carried it for years.

Skin and Steel records that a Ba’al Verzi assassin crafted the weapon himself, from the skin of his first victim, and that the first kill, by guild tradition, had to be someone the assassin knew. Not a stranger. Someone from their own circle. The credential required a personal killing to earn.

Strahd’s dagger has a sheath. He made it. The person whose skin he used was someone he knew.

The Tome contains the name Zarak, an old priest, described as elderly when Strahd was a child, mentioned in no other source. No crypt. No independent record. No one in the valley appears to remember him. He exists only in Strahd’s own account of his early life, named once and not examined. An old priest in a royal household would have known the young Strahd. The killing of a priest, a figure who could not be fought back against without scandal, someone whose death would require an explanation that a family could not safely provide, would account for an exile that had to be enforced but could not be openly named. And a priest remembered only by the man who killed him is, conveniently, a victim who cannot be independently examined.

This account cannot confirm that Zarak was the first kill. It can observe that the only named figure from Strahd’s early life who is entirely unverifiable answers too neatly to the Ba’al Verzi tradition, that his name appears precisely where a first victim’s name would need to appear if Strahd wished the record to seem settled, and that a killing of that nature would account for both the departure and the silence that followed it. This is not proof, but it is the kind of coincidence a historian is not entitled to ignore. He returned only when those who might have remembered were in the ground.

The Collapse of the Court

The Tome says Strahd “called for my family, long unseated from their ancient thrones,” and brought them to Ravenloft. The phrasing is notable. Not summoned from power, not brought from a living court, but gathered from a position already lost. By the time Strahd sent for them, the family had already ceased to rule.

The family records note that all deaths in year 351 occurred at Castle Ravenloft on the day of the wedding. This covers the massacre. It does not cover the deaths that preceded Strahd’s arrival: Barov and Ravenovia, and apparently Stephan Gregorovich, Khazan, Dorfniya, Pidlwik, and Elsa Fallona, all of whose crypt positions suggest they died in the same general period: the year of the goblin attacks, before Strahd came back.

A History of the Barovian Army gives the official account: the goblins attacked, the valley suffered, and on the ninth night Strahd arrived with thousands of men and routed the enemy before dawn. The Most High Priest Kir used the Holy Symbol in secret during the battle and then hid it. Strahd’s victory was total. This is the story the valley was given.

It is not an impossible story. The goblin attacks were real: the account of the Holy Symbol’s making, written from within the castle during those years, confirms a people frightened and a household under genuine pressure. But the full inner circle of the court dying in a single year, inside the strongest fortification in the valley, while a professional military commander with a large army was somewhere in the field, requires accepting that the goblins were capable of penetrating the castle’s defences and killing the court’s most capable members, the same goblins who were routed in a single night when Strahd finally engaged them directly.

A second reading is possible, though it cannot be confirmed. The account of the Holy Symbol’s making records that “the master of the castle had left for war” in the period immediately before Strahd’s arrival. If the family already understood what Strahd’s return meant, if the exile they had enforced had not been forgotten, then a king going out to meet his son rather than wait behind walls is not implausible. He goes to negotiate, or to warn, or to buy time. Meanwhile others depart. The middle brother’s crypt in Castle Ravenloft is entirely empty, and what can be established confirms he lived his entire subsequent life away from the castle. A man who barely escaped a massacre might leave an empty crypt. A man who was warned and departed deliberately would leave the same record.

Under this reading the goblin attacks are real but incidental: they provide the conditions under which the deaths of the court require no further investigation. The ruling circle died during the period of the siege. That is all anyone can be expected to say.

What the physical record confirms is simpler and more disturbing. Strahd can be found at his mother’s tomb in a fury, not grief, but rage. He weeps in his brother Sergei’s crypt. He has named his castle after his mother and sealed her in it. But in every account he gives of himself, in the Tome and in the older journal and in what he told Gregorri Kolyan, he does not once mention his father. Not in sorrow, not in anger, not as a reason for any action he took. A man who rages at his mother’s tomb across four centuries has not forgotten his parents. He has forgotten one of them specifically, and the one he has forgotten is the king.

The Return

The older journal records the arrival in the twelfth moon of year 347: “At long last, the war is over. The enemy has been decimated, destroyed, or driven out. I have found a valley that lies before the ruins of the warlord’s castle. I have taken both.”

He came to a valley he was born in and calls it found. He took a castle that had been his family’s seat and records the taking as conquest. Whether the language is the emotional distance of a man long away from a place that no longer felt like home, or the deliberate posture of a man establishing a claim from first principles rather than inheritance, the journal does not clarify. Both readings fit.

What follows in the journal is a period of unease. He does not like peace. The people do not like him. He rebuilds the castle and names it after his mother. Then, in the eleventh moon of year 349, he calls for his family. They arrive in the fourth moon of year 350, bringing with them the youngest brother he has never met.

The older journal shows something the Tome does not: genuine warmth toward Sergei, genuine admiration for his skill, the visible ache of a man who wanted his youth back and thought a brother might return some part of it. He records something that reads like fraternal affection operating alongside a jealousy he does not disguise. He had the castle. He was alone in it. Then Sergei arrived knowing nothing, and for a time Strahd appears to have tried to hold back whatever in him cannot allow things to last.

Sergei went into the village. He helped people. He was treated like a young god. And in the village he met Tatyana.

The Tome records what followed with a candour that itself invites scrutiny: Strahd describing his own jealousy with a directness that serves the self-pitying narrative of the tragic lover. She called him “Old One,” and “elder,” and “brother.” That last word is worth pausing on. She cast him as a familial figure and could not be made to see him as anything else. She loved Sergei. They were betrothed.

Kir, the Pendant, and the Failure of the Calculation

The Most High Priest Kir died suddenly in the sixth moon of year 350. The older journal records it in a single flat sentence. No cause, no context, no expression of feeling beyond a note that Sergei insisted on a day of national mourning and that the clergy gave Sergei leave to wear “the Priest’s Pendant, a pretty enough bauble to which Sergei attaches a great deal of, perhaps even too much, emotional value.”

Strahd did not know what the pendant was. The Holy Symbol of Ravenkind, crafted by Ciril Romulich in year 347, blessed at the standing stones with the priest’s last breath, used once in secret by Kir against the goblin king and then hidden, passed to Sergei as Kir’s designated successor without either of them knowing its significance. The secret died with Kir. The most dangerous weapon in the valley hung around Sergei’s neck and his brother dismissed it as a pretty bauble.

The standing stones would later confirm, through the priest Sasha Petrovich, what the pendant actually was: “The Piece of the Sun, which was also the great Holy Symbol of protection for the Raven’s Kind. It rests near those it was meant to protect.” Near those it was meant to protect. Near Sergei. In the crypt prepared for him.

Kir’s death has the timing of a calculation. A fully ordained priest cannot marry. With Kir gone and Sergei as the natural successor to the office, the expectation would be ordination, and ordination would remove Sergei from Tatyana without violence between brothers. The guild-mark Strahd carried makes the means available. The timing, precisely when Sergei’s attachment to Tatyana was becoming clear, makes the motive plain enough. The argument cannot be proven from any source available here. It is, however, the reading that fits the sequence, and it is the reading that makes sense of the words Strahd spoke over his brother’s body in year 351: “You were supposed to have been a priest.”

Not grief. The fury of a man who had already killed someone to avoid this outcome and found himself here anyway, defeated by a love he had not understood was not amenable to being managed.

Sergei refused ordination. He chose Tatyana. He stepped away from his vows entirely and accepted her hand.

Year 351

The spring entry in the older journal is fragmentary and emotionally shattered in a way that makes it among the more reliable passages in the record: a man in extremis does not compose his lies with the same care. What it confirms: Strahd killed Sergei. He presented the Ba’al Verzi dagger as a wedding gift on the morning of the murder, handling it with the authority of long ownership. He used it. He spoke the words recorded above over the body. What followed, the killing of the guests and staff, Tatyana’s flight, her death from the battlements, is recorded in his hand.

The account he later gave Gregorri Kolyan differs from the journal in several respects. In the Kolyan version, a guard overheard his plans and had to be killed; Strahd was mortally wounded in that fight and drank the guard’s blood as the pact was made; the murder of Sergei was completed with a single brutal blow, no weapon named. This version removes the dagger entirely from the story. A man telling his own history to a captive audience might omit the detail that most clearly marks him as what he was before the transformation. The guard and the mortal wound and the blood-drinking transform the story from professional premeditation into desperate passion. That transformation is the point.

What the journal and the Kolyan account agree on: Sergei died. Tatyana died. The castle ran with blood. The creature Strahd had made a pact with, what he called Death, though his names for things cannot be trusted as descriptions of their nature, completed its part of the bargain and left him what he has been ever since.

The Tome’s account of this moment is the most theatrical: “I am The Ancient, I am The Land.” The claim of unity with the land is at least partially true in the sense that Strahd’s condition and Barovia’s condition have become, across four centuries, genuinely difficult to separate. What the land is now, it became because of what he did. That is not the mystical union of a condemned lord and his domain. It is the simpler, darker truth of a place shaped over centuries by the single will of the man who controls it.

The Years After

Gregorri Kolyan wrote his diary in the ninth moon of year 353, approximately two years after the events at the castle. He was a musician who had noticed something wrong with the valley and had the particular misfortune of pursuing that feeling toward its source. His observations are the nearest thing to an independent contemporary witness available to this history.

“There is a physical nature to this change,” he wrote. “Colours are not as vibrant, sounds not as immediate.” He described a people with “a dampness over their souls, like a dreamy autumn day.” He was certain the change had begun roughly two years before he wrote, placing its origin squarely in year 351. He did not then know what had caused it. He was trying to find out, and his finding out led him to Strahd, who seized him and kept him in the castle for five days, sharing what Kolyan called “intimate secrets.”

Strahd released Kolyan. He then held the diary for what appears to have been some time, before releasing it with its dates shifted a century forward and three insertions that are not Kolyan’s. Two of them assert that Strahd had ruled for over a century and had not been seen in half that time, statements that would be true at a century’s remove but were plainly false at the two-year mark where Kolyan actually wrote. One of them inserts the word “youngest” into Kolyan’s description of Sergei, ensuring any reader understood clearly that Sergei had no prior dynastic claim. It is a small word. It is not Kolyan’s. Its placement is precise.

A man who alters a document to make the events it describes seem a century older than they are is a man already arranging how he will be remembered, while it is still recent enough to matter. The falsification shows what he believed needed obscuring.

Kolyan’s own observations, beneath the alterations, show a valley that had changed fundamentally and a people who did not understand why. The spiritual suppression he documented, the fading of colour and sound, the withdrawal from ordinary life, the indifference even to being paid for goods, is the condition of a people subjected, within the last two years, to something they had no framework to understand or resist. The change began in year 351. Its source was on the hill.

The older journal continues beyond 351 into decades and then centuries of the same recurring loss. Tatyana reappears in year 400 in the body of a villager named Marina. He courts her. She dies: “this time by her father’s hand,” he records, “the fool.” He kills the family. She reappears in year 475 as Olya, and again something is wrong: “a not-quite-finished work of art, as though a part of Tatyana is missing.” She dies of fever. In the same year a vampire named Jander Sunstar arrives in the valley. “He thinks he is a guest here. He thinks I am his friend.” He keeps Jander and studies him.

The pattern of the centuries is visible in these fragments. He has the valley. He has the castle and his mother’s tomb and his brother’s crypt. Tatyana keeps returning and keeps dying or fleeing, and each time the account of her loss is written in language that oscillates between obsession and fury. The mists seal the valley. He made the mists. He stays inside them because everything that defines him is here, and because he cannot stop waiting for the next time.

• • •

What the Castle Holds

The castle is not a neutral archive. It was rebuilt to Strahd’s specifications from year 347 onward, and what it contains reflects his choices about what to preserve and what to destroy.

The Hall of Heroes contains statues of notable figures from the castle’s history. One statue is headless, deliberately, not through decay. The identity of the figure it depicts was removed. What kind of person warrants not destruction but deliberate defacement, their identity excised while their physical presence is retained? The question has no certain answer. The action suggests someone whose existence needed acknowledging but whose name could not be allowed to be known.

The wedding room has not been touched. The cake has rotted where it stood. The portrait that hangs there shows the wedding party, and the groom’s face has been cut through so many times that the features no longer exist. Tatyana’s face remains, looking up at the obliterated space where the groom stood, with an expression the centuries of destruction surrounding her have not touched. He cannot bring himself to remove it, and he cannot stop attacking it.

Sergei’s crypt was prepared for him, the coffin, the alcoves, the statues. The body was never properly interred, and the pendant was never removed from around his neck. It hung there for centuries, unrecognised, until someone finally looked at it and understood what they were looking at. The most powerful weapon in the valley lay a few hundred feet from where Strahd slept, in the crypt of the man he killed, because no one involved in preparing that grave knew what the dead man wore.

Conclusion

Barovia under Strahd von Zarovich is not a land under supernatural judgment. There is no sentence laid upon this valley from without, no justice distributed by powers beyond the mountains. The mists are his arrangement. The valley is closed because he wills it closed, and what has withered here has withered under that will. The fading colours Kolyan noted in year 353, the abandoned houses and closed shops, the population reduced to a remnant of what it was, these are not the work of fate. They are the long consequence of one man’s choices, sustained across four centuries without interruption.

The history of this place before he took it shows a functioning royal household: a king and queen whose names survive in stone, a first counsellor who held the king’s confidence, a wizard whose word carried the weight of law, a priest beloved of both, a duchess whose burial in the royal crypts speaks to high standing and perhaps royal blood, a court that had warmth and relationship in it, and a church that was genuinely loved. That court was gone before Strahd formally claimed the valley. How it became gone is not fully recoverable from what survives. What is recoverable is that Strahd returned from a very long absence bearing the guild-mark of a hired killer, made from the skin of someone he knew, that a man who can be named only by Strahd himself answers with uncomfortable precision to the Ba’al Verzi tradition, and that those who might have known the truth of his departure were in the ground by the time he arrived.

The older journal shows something the Tome does not: genuine warmth toward Sergei, genuine admiration, the ache of a man who wanted his youth back. He killed Kir to force Sergei into ordination and thereby remove him as a rival for Tatyana, a path that would have cost neither brother his life. He was defeated when Sergei refused ordination entirely and chose Tatyana anyway, leaving no path that did not end in murder. He killed Sergei with a weapon he had been carrying for a very long time, and spoke over the body with the fury of a man who had tried not to do it and done it regardless.

The land has been what it is ever since. Gregorri Kolyan noticed the change two years after it happened and spent the rest of a short life trying to understand it. He was right about what mattered most. He was right that the source was the castle on the hill, and he understood, before he was done writing, that the knowledge would cost him. What became of Gregorri Kolyan after Strahd released him in year 354 is not recorded in any source this historian has been able to find. That absence is itself a part of the record.

This account will not be published in Barovia. The scholar who sets down these conclusions is not without awareness of what they name, or of who controls the roads out of this valley. These pages are written in the conviction that a true account, however dangerous, is worth making, and in the hope that they will reach hands better placed than mine to make use of them.

Sources Consulted

The year numbers used throughout this account follow the calendar employed in the documents themselves. This appears to be an older dating system for which no other records survive or correspond.

The Tome of Strahd, author’s own composition, undated.

The Older Journal of Strahd Von Zarovich, years 347 to 500 and beyond.

The Diary of Gregorri Kolyan, years 353 to 354 (dates corrected from the falsified release; editorial insertions identified and noted).

A History of the Barovian Army, provenance unknown, circulating in the valley.

Skin and Steel: A History of the Ba’al Verzi, provenance unknown, Barovian historical text.

The Testimony of the Standing Stones near the Village of Barovia, as recorded by the priest Sasha Petrovich, approximately year 499 to 500.

The crypt inscriptions of Castle Ravenloft, examined directly.