Dacia — the Draco

The Ophidiary is required to be honest here, and will be: Dacia the manufacturer does not use a serpent as its emblem and has never claimed one. This entry is an act of interpretation, and it is flagged as such.

But the interpretation is worth the page.

The draco was the standard of the Dacian armies, and it is one of the strangest objects in military history. A bronze or metal head — usually rendered as a wolf, sometimes as a dragon — was mounted on a pole, with a long tube of coloured fabric attached behind it. As a rider carried it forward, air rushed through the open mouth and inflated the body, so that the thing writhed above the cavalry like a living serpent. Roman sources describe the noise it made. It whistled. An entire cavalry wing arriving with a hundred screaming fabric snakes overhead is a battlefield tactic aimed squarely at the nervous system.

It appears, carved in stone, spiralling up Trajan’s Column in Rome — the Dacians’ own standard, recorded in permanent marble by the people who destroyed them. The Romans then adopted the draco themselves, and the word travelled down through late antiquity into the vocabulary of European heraldry. A great deal of what Book IV of this Ophidiary discusses arrives, etymologically, through a Dacian windsock.

Romania took the name Dacia for its national car company in 1966, building Renaults under licence in Piteşti. The brand today is Europe’s great argument for sufficiency: cars with no unnecessary content, sold at prices that make the rest of the industry uncomfortable.

There is no serpent on a Duster. There is a serpent two thousand years behind it, howling, made of fabric, filled with nothing but the speed of its own advance.

The Ophidiary considers a windsock shaped like a snake, animated entirely by forward motion, to be the most perfect emblem an automobile company could possibly have. Dacia has it and does not use it. That is the entry.