The Transylvanian Trilogy isn’t what you think it is. Assuming you were thinking it involved vampires.

It’s natural that you might suppose so. The one thing everyone knows about Transylvania is that it’s the home of Bram Stoker’s fictional Count Dracula. Most also know that it’s an actual territory in Romania. That’s true now, and has been for many decades, but it’s not the whole story. We tend, or at least I do, to get stuck on a concept of world geography that was formed by the globes and maps that we used in elementary school, and think of those borders as more or less permanently fixed. Nothing could be further from the truth.

But I’m not here to talk about my general ignorance, just one example of it. Or rather, one former example of it. Through an informal program of reading where one book leads accidentally to another, I have lately been traveling down the Danube into central and eastern European history, and I’ve learned a lot about Transylvania. Did you know that this region was for a thousand years, from the turn of the first millennium to the early 20th century, an essential part of Hungary? The trans-sylvan “land beyond the forest” was wide and wild, and its residents were seen as more rugged and authentic than those closer to the capital city of Budapest–it seems to have occupied much the same place in the Magyar imagination that the American West does in ours. The handing over of Transylvania to Romania in the aftermath of World War I was a devastating blow.

That national calamity is what Miklós Bánffy slowly, deliciously works his way toward in his sweeping trilogy. The individual volumes borrow their titles from the famous writing on the wall in the biblical book of Daniel, a prophecy about the collapse of a legendary kingdom–They Were Counted, They Were Found Wanting, They Were Divided–and together they describe the decline of a fascinating real place.

The story begins as a young nobleman (a Bánffy stand-in) returns from diplomatic service abroad and is flung back into the social and political Hungarian swirl. Tempted by selfish interests but dedicated to the betterment of his society, he charts a course toward the future, beset on all sides by frivolity and obliviousness. Old ladies gossip and young ladies angle to win marital competitions while generals compare mustaches and bicker pettily about their junior status in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, all unaware that their lives are about to turn upside down.

Though written in the 1930s, the trilogy is both in style and substance the last of the great 19th-century novels, grand and stately and ambitious and utterly immersive. The characters, including the upright Count Abady, the captivating Adrienne with her “flame-colored shift,” and the doomed artist Laszlo, are playthings of their omniscient author but also fully dimensional, and the set pieces they occupy will not soon be forgotten by anyone with the leisure to read them. Hunting parties, parliamentary debates, duels, intrigues, stolen moments of romance, midnight sledge rides through the snow … it’s positively sumptuous. The lush surface enraptures, but there’s also an underlying seriousness that appeals, an insistent moral drumbeat that asks What Is the Right Way to Live? There’s simply too much to this epic to do it proper justice here, so I’ll just flippantly call it a cross between Gone with the Wind and War and Peace with an added dash of paprika.