Other than the Roma people I'd never really realized how ethnically diverse Romania was. The majority of the people are Romanian, but then there are also a large minority of Hungarians, of course the Roma and small numbers of Serbs, Ukranians, Tatars, Turks and Slovaks. And although they aren't as numerous as they once were, the area of Transylvania we passed through on a slow moving local train was the heartland of the Romanian Germans.
Transplanted during Hungarian rule in the twelfth century, these Germans were yet another bunch of Saxons who ended up far from their homeland in East Prussia. In Transylvania they built fortified churches which made the already beautiful villages we passed even lovelier. And in the case of Sighisoara they built an entire fortified town atop a rocky knob overlooking the Tarnava River.
Sighisoara is one of the prettiest towns I've ever seen, with its multiple defensive towers, central clock tower and church spires all rising still higher above the old town, its walls and its orange tiled roofs. We arrived at our chosen guesthouse literally seconds before a German woman who was informed we'd got the last room (though our lovely host did phone a mate to find her another place to stay). We were greeted with shots of Palinca, Romanian plum brandy and shown up to our room with an absolutely fabulous view out over the old town.
Sighisoara is a very popular spot for day trippers from Brasov and Sibiu. On our first evening we got to wander its polished cobbles with almost no one else around. Medieval towns always seem particularly magical in the evening gloaming! In particular, when we popped out through a tiny little gate to the outside of the walls the view of one of the defensive towers was exactly what one expects on hearing "Transylvania". (Interestingly, each of the town's guilds was responsible for one of the towers, so they have names like "bootmakers' tower", "butchers' tower", and "tinsmiths' tower".)
Even the next day with the daytrippers in full effect and the restaurants abustle, the Vlad (the impaler) Tepes birth house and the torture museum drawing their crowds, Sighsoara was still an absolute delight. And as with many such places, a short walk away from the main square and streets (e.g. up the two hundred or so covered stairs to the Catholic Church and associated cemetery [if you're going to build your church on top of a hill high above a town that sees lots of snow in the winter, making it easy for your parishioners to get there on Sunday is a sensible move]) then you could quickly be all alone again.
Before saying a fond farewell to Sighisoara in the afternoon we tried our first corvigi, round baked goods similar to Turkish simit or larger, much narrower bagels. They're often coated with poppy seeds (Mac), sesame seeds (Susan!) or Sunflower seeds (I don't remember) and are a very moreish snack.
We generally chose the cheaper, slower Regional trains in Romania, both to save money and because train travel through the Transylvanian countryside was just a delightful experience in and of itself. So taking it a bit slower was no bad thing. Rolling hills, distant mountains (some still snow capped), endless rustic orange roofed villages and swollen rivers, flowing high and fast with the June rains that kept us out of the mountains.
The old town of Sibiu is, for many, one of the highlights of Transylvania. It was pretty enough, but I have to admit that it felt just a little bland to us, especially after Sighisoara. The two main squares of Sibiu and the surrounding streets (we stayed on one, in a lovely place with a kitchen and a washing machine [hooray for laundry!]) were very clearly not our favourite part of the city. That was the lower town. Less scrubbed up, full of second hand clothes shops and a great little market where we bought a big hunk of slightly sour, semihard smoked cheese and two litres of homemade wine in a reused water bottle.
From Sibiu it was another beautiful train journey to the town of Deva. From Deva we wanted to catch a bus down to nearby Hunedoara, however it wasn't immediately clear where it left from, or even if there was one aside from the single long distance bus that passed between the two towns. Now Romanian, being a Romance language had proved easier to learn than, say, Polish, but only five days into our visit, we were still at a very basic level. And for some reason I found myself trying to speak Spanish to everyone. Funnily enough, when I asked a man in the station a out the bus to Hunedoara in garbled Romanian he replied "habla Español?" and we sorted everything out with no trouble. Then on arriving at our (wonderful) accommodation in Hunedoara, it turned out that one of the two managers also spoke Spanish, so I had a nice chat with him as well. Apparently it's quite common for Romanians to learn at least one other Romance language. I'm always so tickled when my mediocre second or third language skills come in handy somewhere other than in their homelands!
The main reason for our visit to Hunedoara (and most people would say, mostly correctly, the only reason to visit Hunedoara) is the fabulous Castle Corvin, which is just plonked down, quite incongruously, in an industrial suburb of the town. As with Castle Bran (so we'd heard) the exterior of the castle is far more impressive than the inside. Also similarly to Bran (but smaller in magnitude) the area just outside the entrance was a mass of souvenir stands and museums of questionable connection to their immediate surroundings. So we contented ourselves with a circuit around the castle, which mostly backed onto people's back gardens.
Though there were no other sightseeing highlights of Hunedoara, we had still more fabulous Romanian baked goods there, including a delicious cherry jam filled crescent thing dusted with powdered sugar, cheese stuffed corvigi, and a sweet poppy seed filled strudel. While we would get on to having a few restaurant meals in Romania, self catering with local produce and baked goods were serving us very nicely indeed thank you.
One night in Hunedoara is plenty, and while I was sorely tempted by the wild Retezat branch of the Carpathians to the south, the forecast still made alpine hiking seem like a poor idea, so we returned to Deva to catch the final train of our travel through Romania.
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