Lake Bicaz and Bicaz Gorge.

    In the painted monasteries we had reached the northernmost regions of our trip and it was time to go back south. We drove past the town of Targu-Neamt and then arrived at Lake Bicaz, a large lake and popular vacation resort. It was a beautiful drive through the autumn leaves on the mountainous roads. There were occasional views of the lake in the distance. This is where you want to enjoy the scenery and leave the driving to someone else. But the season has gone by and there was not that much traffic any more.

left: Bicaz Gorge

    In a section where the gorge widens, there were several restaurants. We had lunch in one of them, the Edelweiss. For such a splendid location, prices were very reasonable. A bit further we passed a lake, where a large section of the mountain, including many trees, had slid into the waters. Above the water-line the trees had rotted off . Everywhere were stumps barely sticking out of the water, which was colored red by wood decomposition products. It must be very smelly, but we didn’t check.

    We then drove through the Joseni Valley, which was located between two mountain ranges. This is the coldest place in all of Romania where temperatures of -40℃ are quite common, because the cold air is trapped in between.

Sighişoara

    In the late afternoon we arrived in Sighişoara. We were now back in Transylvania. The town is a very popular tourist destination in Romania. It is also known by the German name of Schäßburg, or the rather threatening sounding appellation of Castrum Sex in Latin. That should throw fear in any young boy with a guilty conscience.

    During the 12th century, Saxons were invited by the King of Hungary to settle and defend the frontiers of his realm, including Sighişoara. Over the centuries the city became an important strategic and commercial center, with German artisans and craftsmen dominating the economy, as well as building the fortifications and defending them. In the 16th and 17th century there were at least 15 guilds, such as the bakers, the locksmiths, the leather workers, the shoemakers, the turners or lath-workers, the tinsmiths, the hat-makers, and others.

     The best-looking hotel in the citadel of the town was the Sighişoara Hotel. However, it was fully booked, so we had to stay in the lesser Wagner Hotel, together with a big French tour group. They descended en masse at the same time for breakfast,  occupying all the available seats, and overwhelming the staff with their demands. A French tourist group will always believe they have the right of liberté, égalité, and fraternité to immediately appropriate the best seats and space available. And to walk counter to the prescribed direction of traffic.

left: View of the clock tower from the center of Sighisoara.

     The town is a small, enchanting place with an authentic medieval architecture; it is very well preserved, but tourist shops are slowly encroaching into the landscape. The town has two parts. The citadel is built on top of a hill with a great view of the surrounding areas. The lower town lies way down in the valley of the Tarnava Mare river, and is hence not commonly visited by the tourists. They tend to stay in the small upper town and in summer the small place is jammed.

right: The little town square in the middle of Sighisoara.

   A few steps away is the house where Vlad II Dracul lived, and where his son, Vlad III Dracula, was born. And next to this building is the small Weapons Museum, with an interesting selection of medieval weapons. Walking around, we could see the city walls and some of the towers. The tinsmiths tower was dated 1704 and was still pockmarked by bullet holes.

    We had dinner was at the Stag’s restaurant nearby. Their Tort de Nuca, or Walnut Cake, was superior than even a good Tiramisu. And their goulash soup was also amazingly good, with just the right amount of tang.

   Biertan.

left: 16th century locked door to the Church Treasury in Biertan.

    To the left of the nave is a door in the wall leading to the Church Treasury. The locks in this door, built in 1515, are impressive in their ingenuity. As you turn the key, rods appear all around the perimeter of the door which will seat in the appropriate holes in the wall. This door has at one time been lifted of its hinges for an international exposition in Paris, where it won a gold award for technical ingenuity.

    On the grounds around the cathedral is this interesting, simple, one-room building. This is the “marital jail” where couples nearing a divorce are locked up with only item of the necessities of life, i.e., one pillow, one spoon, one fork, one knife, etc.

right: The marital jail at the Cathedral of Biertan

Prejmer

    Our next stop was the fortified 13th century church of Prejmer, 18 km northeast of Brasov, and one of the best preserved of its kind in Eastern Europe. The entrance was a 30 meter long vaulted gallery with three consecutive gates. They want to be sure you stayed outside if you had no business coming in. From the outside all you see is a quadrilateral with rounded corners, about 12 meters high, with shooting holes in the upper part.

left: The fortified church at Prejmer.

    If the owner wanted a piece of the ham in times of peace, he/she had to cut off a piece in the presence of the “ham guard”, who would stamp the cut, and the piece had to be replaced within a certain time

 

right: Some of the 270 rooms in the church of Prejmer.

Braşov

    Our destination for the day was Braşov, one of the larger cities in Romania, and also a popular tourist destination, partly because of the surrounding mountains where you can ski in the winter. The German name of the town is Kronstadt, and many Germans still live there. Some of them may have been descendants of the large group of Saxon colonists who came into this area between 1141 and 1162.  At one time, it even became a German colony. In that period, the indigent Romanians were denied many privileges, and their Orthodox religion was not recognized.  And like many towns in Transylvania, there is also a significant Hungarian minority in Braşov. They came later and were allowed to build the Black Church, the biggest cathedral east of Vienna, only surpassed in size by St. Stephen’s cathedral. And yes; the stones used were black.

left: On the big square in Brasov.

    The center of town, with the Big Square and the adjacent Black Church, is eminently walkable. There are wide pedestrian streets, flanked by fashionable stores and sidewalk cafes. We stayed at the “Ambient Hotel”, which was a very nice 4 * establishment, with spacious rooms, modern furniture, and many amenities. It was one of the nicest places we stayed during our trip.

    Dinner was in the mountains above the city, in an upscale ski resort about 15 km outside Braşov. Outlaws used to live in this area and the restaurant was aptly named Coliba Haiduci, “The Outlaw’s Hut”.  This area looks like a very nice vacation resort, with hotels, ski-lifts, and a large outdoor ice-skating rink.

right: Entrance to the “Outlaw’s Hut” restaurant, outside Brasov.

    It was an exceptionally delightful restaurant with their walls covered with skins and guns. The food served was also very good, tender, and tasty, even though it was the same grilled combination platter we have been served in other places. With the same ingredients you can always create something special, if you are a good chef.  There was chicken, pork, beef, mushrooms, sausages, chicken liver and the appropriate garnish. And we ordered a nice dessert wine, a 2002 Beciul Domnesc Feteasça Neagro to end the meal.

Bran Castle.

right: Bran Castle, also known as Dracula’s Castle in the background. Note the small attic windows in the  contemporary roof below, a fairly common architectural detail.

    It is now also known as “Dracula’s Castle”, the presumed home of the titular character in Bram Stoker’s novel “Dracula”. But the premise that this is the home of Vlad Tepes, or Vlad Dracula, is a myth and just a marketing gimmick.  Vlad Tepes only stayed there for two days, locked up in a dungeon during the period when the Ottomans controlled Transylvania. In 1920 it became a royal residence of the king of Romania, but the Communist regime appropriated the property in 1948. It appears that the heirs of the royal family may get the castle back. 

left: Cabernet Sauvignons posing as Dracula’s Blood.

    On the grounds of the castle is now a market selling all kinds of Dracula memorabilia, including Dracula’s Castle miniatures and  wines, marketed as Dracula’s blood, Vampire Blood, and other appropriately appetizing names.  These wines are designed to give you a vampire-sized hangover, complete with bite-marks on your necks and red stains on your underwear.

Sinaia and Peles Castle.

    This was originally the site of a monastery founded by a person who had been to Mt. Sinai. But the area is now a huge vacation resort. There are vacation homes everywhere. The reason was that King Carol I decided to build his castle here some time ago and so people flocked here to build their homes here too. The castle in winter is shown above.

    In 1858-59 Moldova and Wallachia decided to unite the two principalities under one administration and to avoid local politics, they invited a non-aligned prince from a noble family to rule. He was the German prince Carol of the Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen family. Although the first few years were very difficult for him, as can be expected, a few years later he commanded the Russian-Romanian troops in the war between Russia and the Ottoman Empire. This war brought independence for Romania and in 1881, Romania became a kingdom with Carol I as the first king of Romania and his very talented wife Elisabeth as queen.

left: Peles Castle in the background.

    Peles Castle is a jewel, built in the German neo-Renaissance style in a huge hilly and wooded area, with mountains in the background.  Carol sold all his properties in Germany to finance this castle, which was therefore built using not a single penny of the Romanian treasury. Building started in 1873 and the castle was officially inaugurated in 1883. The building had all the modern conveniences of that time. It had a very well-designed central heating system, electrical lighting, an elevator, and even a central vacuum system.

        Queen Elisabeth watched the building grow and wrote in her journal:

“Italians were masons, Romanians were building terraces, the Gypsies were coolies. Albanians and Greeks worked in stone, Germans and Hungarians were carpenters. Turks were burning brick. Engineers were Polish and the stone carvers were Czech. The Frenchmen were drawing, the Englishmen were measuring, and so was then when you could see hundreds of national costumes and fourteen languages in which they spoke, sang, cursed and quarreled on all dialects and tones, a joyful mix of men, horses, cart oxen and domestic buffaloes.”

    This is actually a very interesting entry, because it also shows the hierarchy of the different nationalities. The Gypsies were way down; the French and the English were on the top of the ladder.

    The most sumptuous room is the Hall of Honour, the reception hall of the castle, three stories of the main building high, paneled with nut-tree woods and intricate inlays. The richness of the sculptures is awesome. The glass ceiling is adorned with stained-glass windows, representing allegorical scenes and heraldic motifs. The ceiling can be retracted by either an electric motor or manually. There are more than 175 stained glass windows. At the end of one corridor is a 2.5 by 5 m size glass mirror, 11 mm thick, and so perfectly made that the glass was almost invisible to the viewer. Then there are the Armories with a rich collection of over 4000 European and Oriental weapons from the 14th - 18th century.

    If you wish to view the interior of the castle, you join a tour group, leaving at regular intervals. But Cristian is one of the very few outside guides, who is allowed to lead his own tour with the proviso that he takes stragglers along from the other “official” groups. For us this works much better. Our group was much smaller and Cristian appears to know much more about the Palace than the average young lady working there as tour guide.

right: Entrance area to Peles Castle.

    It is actually amazing how relatively unknown this castle is.  I had never heard of Peles castle before and now I would place it in the same class as Neuschwanstein, Lindenhof, or Wartburg. Or any of the French castles in the Loire Valley. The furnishings of Peles Castle are richer and the wall decorations and inlays are more intricate and complex. All the room are lavishly decorated and appointed with sculptured coffered ceilings and walls. The exterior looks like a castle from a fairy tale.

    But maybe this ignorance is mine only. Today it is a full-scale tourist destination. If you are not a paying guest, the waiters at the nearby restaurant will accost you as you try to sneak into their toilets.

Bucharest.

    Cristian drove us back to Bucharest, passing Romanian oil-fields on both side of the road. The capital was about 2-3 hours away, but that did not include the king-size traffic jam at the airport. We spent almost as much time there as the journey from Sinaia to the capital.

    For the next two nights we stayed at the 5* Marriott Bucharest. Rack rate for an executive room was 1000 RON, which was around $380 at that time. Plus 19 % VAT, I believe. I did get my room using 20,000 Marriott reward points/night. It was of course a posh establishment, with lots of marble in the structure. And where even for breakfast, people would dress up a little bit.  The building was located close to Ceauşescu’s monstrosity, the Palace of Parliament, and the hotel building was apparently constructed at about the same time to house the visiting delegates. 

    In the evening Cristian treated us to a dinner-show at the Terasa Doamnei, a downtown restaurant with traditional Romanian folklore dancers as entertainment.. The place was full, so we were seated in the non-smoking balcony of the restaurant. Except this is where all the cigarette smoke of the whole building ended up.  And yes, the main course was a large platter with a selection of different grilled meats and sausages.

Constanta

    We had also booked a river cruise, entitled “Eastern Europe and the Black Sea” from Vantage. The trip starts in Bucharest, goes eastwards to Constanta, and then it goes back upstream to the West to Budapest. From the Marriott Bucharest a bus took us south to the port of Oltenita on the Danube, where we boarded the “River Explorer”. Overnight the ship sailed downstream to Cernavoda, and the next day we boarded our buses for a day trip to Constanta, 60 kms away.

     In the south of Romania the Danube forms the boundary with Bulgaria. In that section the river is considered to be international waters and it is free from taxation. But where it flows into the Black Sea, it spreads out in a large shallow delta, making navigation of large vessels between the river and the sea impossible. To solve this problem, Ceausescu created the Danube channel, which is in Romanian territory. He conveniently used many political prisoners for this job, killing a good number of them in this process. But now Romania has a port which will allow large vessels to go from the Black Sea into the European heartland. And it can tax any vessel traversing this section of the waterway.

    Constanta is old, with a history dating back at least 26 centuries. The Greeks were here in the 6th century BC. It was at one time the furthest outpost of the Roman Empire and the poet Ovid was banned here in AD 9 by the emperor Augustus. The official reason was the publication of his poems on love and sex, the Ars Amatoria and the Remedia Amoris. Considering the licentiousness of the period, this does not sound to be a valid reason. Rumor has it that the emperor was displeased with his reporting of the scandals of his granddaughter Julia.

left: The now empty Casino on the pier of Constanta.

    Things have changed. In 1914, there was a royal gala at the Casino to host the Russian Imperial Family. It was a glittering affair. There were diplomatic negotiations in the background, but to no avail. The Grand Duchess Olga refused to marry prince Carol of Romania. He was the eldest son of king Ferdinand I, the successor to king Carol I, the first king of Romania.  I suppose she had heard about the reputation of the prince as a playboy and also that he had super-endowed genitalia, Many of his sexual partners were said to have been seriously injured during their romps. Her refusal did not ward of Fate. The Grand Duchess was killed four years later by the Bolsheviks along with the rest of her family.

    Constanta is now the biggest port on the Black Sea and in the next few years it optimistically expects to be the second largest port in Europe, after Rotterdam.  The town has abundant seaside resorts and in the summer thousands of tourists flock here to enjoy the beaches, the big theme parks, water sports, the open-air restaurants, nightlife and entertainment.  But I did not feel the vibrancy of Bucharest in the faces and clothing of the people around. Maybe because it was fall and the season was over. It was raining and cold and the open-air restaurants were deserted; so were the beaches.  I suppose everybody who was anything had already long left the place for Bucharest, leaving the sad detritus of the local poor behind.

right: The Glycon Serpent

     They have nice glass artifacts from the 3rd century AD. Their most well-known sculptures are “The Glycon Serpent” and “The Goddess Fortuna and Pontos”. The first is a marble sculpture dating from the 2nd Century AD, and is considered a “good” divinity, a patron of house and family. It is also the guardian of the temple.  The second one is another marble sculpture from the same period. Pontos is the God of the Black Sea.

left: The goddesses of Nemesis and Vengeance

    On the left is a picture of a sculpture of two similar goddesses. It is good to have them on your side and let your enemies know about it. What is interesting are the “dediculas” they each hold in their left hands. This is a rod, with which they can measure the number of the significant deeds of a person, both good and bad. I wonder whether I can buy one on e-Bay.

     Close by is a building housing a large Roman Mosaic.  These colorful mosaics have faded over the years, because they have been exposed to floods, earthquakes, and hostile elements. They are really not that impressive anymore. I was actually wondering why they charge so little for a photo permit at the entrance.

    But in the old days they were part of a large complex on three levels linking the upper town with the harbor. There are some remains of aqueducts which brought water from the mountains 10 km out of town.   

    Lunch was in a restaurant in the huge Mamaia resort, some 3 miles north of Constanta. where all 150 passengers descended en masse.  The Mamaia resort, one of the largest in the area, has a huge amusement park with a long aerial tram, numerous hotels, a casino, sporting facilities, nightclubs and restaurants and a long strip of fine sand beach. But tourist season was over, it was raining, and the place looked sad and deserted. All the glitter, expensive cars, beautiful women and their touts have disappeared for other places, to reappear again next year.

    And the wind and rain were fierce that day, so we did not feel like braving the elements just to be able to brag that we have wetted our toes in the Black Sea. I am positive the water will be just as wet and salty as the other ocean waters we have tested. No more, no less.

    And so we left Constanta.