Romania

Transylvania: Castles, Fortresses and the Transfagarasan

After 4 days in Bucharest, observing its eclectic mix of architecture and hearing tales of the dangerous eccentricities of its former dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, I was ready to leave Romania’s capital city, see its countryside and explore its non-communist past. I signed up for a 4 day tour titled Transylvania Castles with the Romanian company Rolandia, expecting to see lots of Romanian Orthodox churches, some medieval fortresses and hear too much about Dracula. The tour met all my expectations and provided a few surprises along the way.

Background and History:

Romania today is made up of 3 Romanian speaking regions: Moldavia, Wallacia and Transylvania. The first two regions united in 1859, then in 1867 Romania became independent from the Ottoman Empire. Transylvania was added in 1918; a victory prize to Romania for joining the Allies during WW1, taken from the losing Hungarian empire. Each region has distinct histories influenced by their neighbors: Moldavia is next to Poland and Russia, Transylvania was part of the Hungarian empire for 800 years and still has a large Hungarian speaking minority, and Wallacia was historically part of the Byzantine and Ottoman Empire. Bucharest is located in Wallacia.

Dracula and his castles:

Mention the word Transylvania and the word Dracula instantly springs to mind, so let’s get some things out of the way immediately. Dracula, the book by Irish author Braun Stoker, focuses on a vampire who lives in a castle high above a river valley in Transylvania, with a proclivity for drinking human blood. No such vampire existed in fact or in Romanian folklore. It was pure invention, popularized by Hollywood and stores wanting to sell Hallowe’en costumes.

The real Dracula was better known as Vlad the Impaler, a Romanian prince in the 15th century. His name was Vlad Dracula, translated from the Romanian meaning Vlad, son of the dragon. Raised as a hostage by the Ottomans, Vlad returned to Romania in 1456 and came in conflict with Transylvanian Saxons. After suppressing them, the Ottomans ordered him to pay tribute. He refused, causing the Ottomans to send an army against him. To repel the army, Vlad had 2000 Ottoman prisoners impaled, wrenching a pole through the body but avoiding piercing internal organs, ensuring the victim would take at least 48 hours to die. Vlad then burned the crops, killed all the livestock in the vicinity, poisoned the water and installed his 2,000 poles, with bodies hanging on them, beside the road where the Ottoman army could not miss them. The plan worked. The Ottomans, starving and thirsty by the time they got to Transylvania, saw their dead comrades and refused to fight, retreating back to Constantinople. Vlad the Impaler, despite his sadistic tendencies, is revered as a Romanian hero, victorious against the hated Ottomans and defender of the Christian faith.

Bran Castle, also known as Dracula’s castle, was given its moniker in the 1980’s by the Romanian government aiming to promote tourism to the region. Although it bears some resemblance to Dracula’s castle described in Stoker’s novel, rising steeply above the town of Bran, near Braslov, it was never owned by Dracula’s inspiration, Vlad the Impaler. He may have visited it, slept in it a few nights or been imprisoned there, but most of this is conjecture. Nonetheless, it is the top tourist attraction in Transylvania.

The Castle is accessed through a fairground of ice-cream and cotton candy vendors, booths selling t-shirts emblazoned with Dracula and other souvenirs stands ,everything to give it the air of a giant tourist trap, which it is. Despite trying to time our visit to avoid the worst of the crowds, the parking lot was filled with buses taking mostly Americans on 2 day excursions from the Danube river trips and Romanian school kids.

Bran Castle dates from 1438, built by Transylvanian Saxons to defend against the Ottomans and to guard the border between Transylvania and Wallachia. Its usefulness as a fortress was limited and it fell into disrepair. In the 1920’s it was given to Queen Marie (wife of the second king); it was most recently used by her daughter Ileana until the Communists took it over in 1948. The latter became a nun, which gives you an indication about the interior decor.

To say it was jam-packed with visitors is an understatement. We crawled along at a snail’s pace in a giant pack up the entry stairs, through a room giving the history of the castle, then waited in another line to gingerly make our way up a dark, narrow, uneven stone staircase, the most frightening thing in the castle given the distinct possibility of someone tripping on the stairs, falling and breaking their neck.. In the main living quarters, the walls were white plaster, the ceilings covered in dark wooden beams and collections of armor, weapons, furniture and period costumes were on display. How exciting!

Ironically, the remnants of a real castle constructed by Vlad the Impaler exists. Poenari stands high on a cliff, overlooking the river valley below. Originally built in the 13th century, Vlad made it one of his principal residences. It can normally be visited by those foolhardy enough to climb the 1,000 steps up, but it was closed for renovations when I was there, sparing me making excuses for not climbing up:

Peles Castle:

Nestled in the Carpathian Mountains close to Sinaia, Romania’s first modern king, Carol 1, built his summer residence, Peles Castle. As he was originally German, the castle is new-German Renaissance in style, half-timbers on the exterior and ornately decorated rooms panelled in carved wood inside. In the music room, stain glass windows depict scenes from fairy tales. There’s a complete theatre with room for an orchestra, a miniature hall of mirrors, 170 rooms and countless chandeliers made with Murano glass. During the communist period, the castle was expropriated by the state and used as, first a museum to show the decadence of the wealthy, then as a writers’ retreat for politically acceptable authors. Following the fall of Communism, the property reverted back to Carol 1’s family.

The German Settlements:

In the mid-12th century, the Hungarian king reigning over Transylvania invited German speakers to settle the area, both to defend against foreign aggressors (the Tartars) and to establish trading centres. Known as the German Saxons, the immigrants established cities still existing today: Sibiu, Brasov and Sighisoara, to name a few. These medieval cities have large, central squares surrounded by cobblestone roads, walls and gates, and bright, rainbow coloured houses and shops, with rich ornamentation and a refreshing absence of ugly social realism/communist style buildings that blot Bucharest.

The cities were spared the plight of many German cities that were destroyed during WW1 and WW2, making Transylvania a more intact representation of 16-18th century German architecture than Germany. Not so the ethnic Germans. Many left during and after the world wars and Ceausescu allowed thousands more to emigrate to West Germany in return for payment from that country. The death knoll was the fall of communism in 1989, when an estimated half million ethnic Germans left.

Today, their legacy remains in the architecture of the Transylvanian towns and in the Evangelical churches. No relation to the American evangelical movement, the Evangelical churches were fortified to provide refuge in case of attack. Over 200 stand today, most open to tourists but lacking congregations as there are fewer than 15,000 Germans remaining in Romania.

Romanian Orthodox Churches:

Despite their kings being Catholic and the communists, atheists, the Romanian Orthodox Church is thriving and new and old churches dot the country, including those at Sinaia, Alba lulia and Curtea de Arges, but also many new ones:

Unlike in Bulgaria, photography is permitted inside. After 3 very lovely churches, I begged off visiting any more and walked in the gardens instead.

Fortresses:

Not to be confused with palaces, which serve only as residences with no defensive purpose, Romania has its fair share of fortresses, generally reachable only by climbing to the top of high hills.

Râşnov Fortress was constructed by Teutonic Knights in the 12th century. Built both for defensive purposes and as a place of refuge, it contains 30 mostly reconstructed houses and shops inside the walls:

Hunedoara/Corvin fortress was constructed beginning in 1440, one of the few fortresses which also had an impressive palace inside:

There were other castles and fortress, but listing them all would take a while. Needless to say, if you like medieval castles, Romania will be a delight as it is full of them.

Prince Charles, Gypsies and a Road:

Just ss Kosovo has a love affair with Bill Clinton, Romania is enamoured with Prince Charles. This love affair is not proclaimed on gigantic billboards, but is most evident in the tiny village of Viscri, where the Prince owns a holiday house where he plays farmer (shades of Marie Antoinette?). We didn’t go there, but dined at another house in town. Our hostess was a local, our “restaurant” a table in a room off her courtyard filled with hay and chickens running around. Her pigs were in the back, the only sink was outside and the entire scene was rustic. Despite the primitive surroundings, she and her husband served us a wonderful meal. The bread was purchased from another local woman, the soup was made from homegrown vegetables, she had slaughtered the chicken in the main course earlier that day and baked the chocolate and walnut cake served for dessert. Homemade rakija was served, along with elderflower syrup and soda.

After lunch we indulged in as close as I wanted to get to a rural experience, a ride in a horse drawn cart. All through Romania, most farms are small and the farmers use carts rather than expensive, energy inefficient tractors and other motor powered contraptions. We had seen the carts all over the place and jumped at the opportunity to take a 30 minute ride around Viscri in one, but there was no sighting of Prince Charles or even a billboard with his picture.

Throughout the Balkans, I kept hearing about the gypsies (no one called them Roma): in the former Yugoslav countries, we were repeatedly warned about the nimble fingers of the Roma pickpockets. In Bulgaria, our guide derisively referred to them as parasites and thieves, living off the wealth of hard working citizens while refusing to contribute or integrate into Bulgarian society. The attitude in Romania was softer; people spoke of the need to correct past discrimination and of affirmative action programs designed to attract gypsies to universities and provide them with government jobs.

We passed through city after city where gypsies and non-Gypsies lived beside each other, separate schools, separaate groceries, separate recreation centers, but all worshipped in the same church. The biggest surprise for me was the presence of humungous gypsy houses, ornately decorated in a style that immediately marked them as gypsy and often unfinished. Our guide explained that to the gypsies, size was the most important aspect of a house. They would rather have 20 unfinished rooms than 4 finished rooms. And so, all across Transylvania, were gigantic, shells of houses built by the gypsies.

I cannot resist ending with another Ceausescu folly, the Transfagarasan. Built under his orders, it is a 147 kilometer road linking the region of Transylvania with Wallachia having absolutely no useful purpose except as a monument to Communist engineering prowess. Running over and through the Carpathian Mountains, it serves no industry, is a few hours longer than the more direct route, is prohibited to trucks and only opens between July and September, weather permitting. While not oblivious to the lives lost in constructing the road or the billions spent on it, the road is fun to drive and as goofy as can be. Driving it on the second day of the season, hundreds or thousands of Romanians also thought it worthy of a spin. People were picnicking, stopping for photos, even jumping into the freezing glacier-fed lakes beside it. We joined the revelry and duly admired the road:

Next: Back to France

Bucharest: Ceausescu and Architecture

Romania’s capital, Bucharest, with a population of about 2 million, is in many ways just another big, not particularly beautiful, former communist city struggling to find its way in a democratic world. Its attractions for me were twofold: to learn about yet another nutcase communist dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu (see About Albanian for its crazy, Enver Hoxha), and his architectural legacy.

Neo-Classism Architecture:

Bucharest styles itself the Paris of the East. It earned this title after two traditional areas that speak Romanian, Wallachia and Moldovia, were united into a single country in 1866 and ruled by a monarch, King Carol 1, a German ex-pat who was invited to be king since kings were the way to go in the mid-1800’s. This was a glorious period in Romanian history, with the king spearheading modernization programs and constructing buildings in his favourite style, French neo-classism. Many such buildings today remain scattered around Bucharest’s centre:

Other Parisienne influences include passageways, pedestrian walkways through buildings, some in good repair boasting French style bistros and hookah bars, but others less so. A former hotel/brothel passageway has seen much better days:

Colourful umbrellas decorate another passageway, disguising the hazardous nature of the building, which was severely damaged during a massive earthquake in 1977. Hundreds of such buildings exist, with telltale red circles on the outside indicating they are prone to falling down. Owners lack the funds to repair or demolish the buildings, so they await the next big earthquake in order to complete the tear down. Bucharest is in a seismic zone which traditionally experiences a major earthquake every 40 years, so it is 2 years overdue.

A nicer looking, but condemned, passageway

The monarchy had a checkered history. While the first two kings were benevolent and conscientious, the third one, Carol II was a notorious womanizer who rubbed shoulders with Adolf Hitler and assisted Romania’s fascist general, Ion Antonescu, in seizing power. In 1944, the king’s son, Michael re-seized power, arrested Antonescu, switched sides in WW2 and joined the Allies. He ruled until 1948 when the communists took over and promptly invited King Michael and his family to flee the country.

Ceausescu:

Born in 1918 to a peasant family, Nicolae Ceausescu managed to complete 4 years of grade school before being apprenticed to a shoemaker in Bucharest. The shoemaker was a communist and Ceausescu helped out by delivering communist leaflets. He was caught and sentenced to jail. This turned out to be fortuitous as it spared him service during WW2, but more importantly, his cellmate was Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, the communist leader who was installed as President by the USSR following the war.

Ceausescu was Gheorghui-Dej’s right-hand man and upon his death in 1965, ascended to the presidency. His first few years were standard communist dictatorship with farm collectives, a secret service (the Securitate) and a preference for atheism, but in 1968, he endeared himself to the Romanian people when he refused to commit Romanian troops to assisting the USSR’s suppression of the uprising in next-door-neighbor Hungary. That the USSR did not invite Romania to Hungary was overlooked by Ceausescu, but nonetheless marked the beginning of Romania’s attempt to divorce itself from Soviet domination. Ceausescu was not all bad. In his early years, Romania’s literacy rate increased exponentially, highways and metros were constructed and most of the people had jobs and food.

Ceausescu was less successful during this period in developing a unique architectural style. Much of Bucharest consists of social realism buildings, rectangular concrete blocks of differing sizes devoid of decoration or individuality. Ceausescu decreed that people needed living space of no more than 7 metres per person, so hundreds of apartments were built with units about 40-50 metres square, less than 500 square feet, for families of 4. He didn’t tear down buildings that exceeded this, but constructed communist style edifices in front of more attractive ones to hide them from view. The blocks still stand today, functional eyesores with deteriorating stucco, air conditioning units sticking out from the windows and laundry hanging on the balconies.

The People’s Palace:

The real craziness started in 1982, following Ceausescu’s visit to North Korea. Inspired by Kim II Sung’s character cult and his grandiose buildings, Ceausescu decided to remake Bucharest into a gigantic monument to himself. As he considered a house with 170 rooms too small for his family of 5, he commissioned the largest building in Europe, to be reached by the largest street in the world, with massive administration structures nearby.

A slight problem arose as the designated area, the centre of old Bucharest, was already heavily populated, but Ceausescu was undeterred. He gave the inhabitants 24 hours to vacate before bulldozing an area 7 square kilometers in size and displacing 40,000 inhabitants. Bucharest’s infamous stray dog problem came about as a result. Most of the dislocated people didn’t have the time or the ability to take their pets, so they were left to fend for themselves. Until 2012, packs of feral dogs roamed the city, but when a boy was killed by one, the government culled them.

Another problem was lack of funds. At about the same time Romania’s IMF international loans funding its infrastructure improvements became due, Ceausescu needed more money to rebuild Bucharest. Determined to pay back the IMF and construct his $3 billion palace, Ceausescu put Romania on an austerity path that saw extreme food rationing, electricity limited to an hour per day, hot water for only 2 hours a week and a substantial decrease in living standards. Borders were closed to imports, everything that could be exported was, including people. Ceausescu joked that Romania’s best exports were Germans (to West German) and Jews (to Israel) who were allowed to emigrate upon payment by the destination countries of between 4,000 and 13,000 Euros per person, depending on their education level. For those who remained, queuing in long lines at near empty food stores, hunger and freezing in the -20 degree winters became the norm. But in 1988, Romania became the only country ever to repay the IMF.

One architect, aghast by the wholesale destruction of Bucharest’s centre, managed to save 13 buildings, including 7 churches, by devising an ingenious solution. The structures were literally dug out of the land, put on railroad tracks and moved out of the demolition zone. Today, it is possible to see these buildings, all plopped down wherever they wouldn’t offend Ceausescu’s sight, such as the library building in the church courtyard, the heaviest building moved to escape the wrecking ball.

The centrepiece of the project, the People’s Palace, rises on a mound, also created, to reinforce Ceausescu’s prominence. One side looks out over Victoriei Street, a few centimetres or a few meters wider, depending on who is talking, than the Champ Élysées.

Ceausescu never inhabited the place. On Christmas Day, 1989, he and his wife were subjected to a 2 hour showcase trial, found guilty of genocide, taken outside and executed. His right-hand man, Ion Illiescu, in a speedy about-face, disavowed communism and took over as president, subjecting Romania to 10 more years of dictatorship, equally if not more so, greedy, but not quite as crazy as Ceausescu.

The People’s Palace was unfinished in 1989, but Illiescu decided to complete it and use it as the country’s Parliament, thus its current name The Palace of the Parliament. It is normally open for guided tours, but the EU set up shop inside for 6 months and closed it to tourists while I was there. Considered the second largest administrative building in the world, behind the Pentagon, it has 8 stories underground, including a nuclear bomb shelter (Ceausescu was paranoid about the USSR attacking him), two motorway tunnels, one leading out of the city and the other to the airport so Ceausescu could escape if needed. Inside are 1100 rooms, some opulently decorated with chandeliers and extravagant carpets, but many unfurnished and unused. It is also sinking to the tune of 6 mm per year due to its weight.

Not so the neighboring Science Academy. Another humongous building, the Science Academy houses researchers and their administrators. Despite Ceausescu’s wife leaving school at 14, she fancied herself a chemist. A university in Romania bestowed a PH.D on her even though her thesis (which was later discovered to have been written by others) was delivered without an audience. Some of the building is currently used for administration and research, its front side an unkempt forest while its backside reveals the extent of the incomplete structure.

Final Thoughts:

Bucharest, French new-classicism, mixed with Art Deco, social realism and monuments to Ceausescu’s ego, some meticulously maintained, others falling to pieces, is a crazy hodgepodge of styles running in parallel with its equally crazy governments. Its history and architecture are intertwined with its governments, for better and for worse.

Next:

Castles, Fortresses and Churches in Transylvania along with a brief mention of Dracula.