The Apulum of Liber Pater

An Acolyte, Alexandru Miklos, went on a lonely pilgrimage to the Roman ruins of Colonia Aurelia Apulensis, a city in Transylvania. While there, he explored and worshipped at the temples of Liber Pater (also known as Bacchus, or Dionysius). He returned to the States a year later, claiming that the god entered his body during this pilgrimage. Alexandru certainly possessed an aura of unusual puissance, and was capable of many new and unseen things. His fellow Acolytes believed he was the real deal, and decided that he was himself worthy of the veneration once given to Liber Pater, because he was Liber Pater. They attacked him and put him into Torpor.
Over the last 10 years, they have built a Temple in his honor. This is no stark domain, no sanctuary of cold floors and sharp edges. It is a lush Temple full of thick carpets and plush pillows. It is kept very warm — hot, even — by the presence of burning braziers (these Acolytes do not shun the Red Fear, believing it to be a tribulation one must surmount).
The Temple itself is built inside of an old, burned-out Episcopalian church downtown. The pews have been removed, and the pulpit and Altar turned into a sacrificial slab. Where the crucifix once hung, the Acolytes placed the now desiccated corpse of the slumbering Alexandru. He hangs draped in ivy. In the church’s basement, the vampires dug out ceremonial pits (called favissae) where mortals are occasionally kept and bled. Beyond that is a small, locked room where various draughts of blood and bottled lacrima are kept (all stored in sacred clay jars, or dollum). The entire Temple is decorated with lewd friezes and pornographic stained glass windows, all meant to contribute to Liber Pater’s inclinations toward ecstasy and debauchery. The outside of the Temple still looks like a burned-out church. This maintains the neighborhood’s ignorance of what really goes on inside the building’s walls.
Type
Temple / Church
Owning Organization