The Transylvanian countryside in Romania seems endless, untamed and multiple shades of green as it rolls along outside our window as we drive the two and a bit hours from Sibiu to Brasov. Our route today is all backroads where en route we will be stopping at Bran Castle, legendary home to arguably Transylvania’s most infamous inhabitant, Count Dracula.
Leaving Sibiu and the lines of multi-storey tenement blocks on its outskirts you immediately transition through an industrial area full of rusty supersized factories with supersized chimneys belching steam, ( Rosie hopes ), straight up into the windless skies. From there, you immediately hit the countryside.
Its scruffy, lush looking countryside where long grass lines the roadside interspersed with colourful wildflowers. There are huge unfenced fields as far as the eye can see and glimpses in the distance of church towers and red roofs allude to picture perfect villages.
Romania too is a country that loves its castles and this one perched high on the hillside flashed past on the road in the distance looking so picture perfect.
To get to Bran Castle we head inland, deeper into the Transylvanian countryside. Settle in Rosie, these single laned, winding roads are going to be slow going said The Operator as he pulls in behind 4 transporter trucks each loaded with 8 cars apiece and all heading the same way as us.
Rosie dosent mind the slow going, it gives you more time to browse at your surroundings. The closer we get to our destination the fields start to disappear and the forest and hills become more pronounced. It is abit of a damp, drizzly overcast day and the beautiful villages we have seen from afar are faded and crumbling up close. As we drive through them they look like they haven’t seen any sunshine in decades.
They are all quiet, with barely a person to be seen on the street or any signs of life. The shutters on most are pulled tight and the roofs look like they all need recladding and have seen better days. There were no footpaths as we drove down the main road in between the rows of houses, just grass verges and a drainage ditch.
The deeper we get into the Transylvanian country the more prevalent the horse and carts become and this team had its foal trailing its harnessed mama down the road. The towns look so poor and decrepit yet Transylvania is a province rich in mineral mining, natural gas and agriculture. It claims to be the most wealthy and diverse province in the country yet, in the countryside itself there was no evidence of this.
Most of the small villages we pass through have a jumble of electrical wiring criss crossing the streets and coils of wires hanging from the electrical poles.
On top of these power poles in some of the villages there is a stork nest holder that sits on top of them. A huge cradle that the big birds can build their unruly nests on. Each cradle held an enormous shaggy nest and it must have been breakfast time because each nest had Mama standing up tall in it feeding her chicks whose heads you could just see above the sticks.
The road surface we were travelling was getting worse, but, as a consolation the traffic was becoming less, so much so that the horse and cart were becoming quite a common sight on the roads. What a sight! Stocky ponies pulling stocky carts filled with …stocky and surly looking men.
We stopped at this wee village as a half built church on the roadside caught Rosie’s eye. It was still red brick and hadn’t had the plaster render applied and looked quite charming because of it sitting on its rubble mountain right on the side of the road.
Behind it was flowing a river and a small village spread out from the other side of the bridge. As Rosie and The Operator were standing on the bridge all of a sudden a tractor and ten cars all zoomed across it and headed through the village, this was the most traffic we had seen on the road in a while. Rush hour in rural Transylvanian paradise.
On the grassy roadside verges along our entire route are mile marker posts. Counting down the miles to the nearest large town. The Operator stopped on the roadside for Rosie so she could take a picture.
The Operator was watching for traffic as Rosie was standing on the road taking her pics….you might want to have your camera ready said The Operator, I think you will want a picture of this.
Clip clopping down the road were two cows with bells hanging from their necks being led by a typical rural looking Romanian lady with a scarf on her head and wearing gum boots. She was chatting away to the cows as she led them to pastures green for the day. Rosie smiled, said her cows were very beautiful and could she take a picture please? Pointing to her camera. The lady stopped, shyly smiled and posed for a picture with her placid beauties before walking off again continuing her conversation with her girls. Gold, just gold Rosie.
Then, just around the next corner was a beautiful cemetery. Rosie stopped and walked into the knee-high grass in between the gravestones to take some pics. Rosie can say this was the untidiest cemetery she has ever visited in her travels. Yet in its untidiness, it was beautiful!
Wildflowers and lupin grew in the uncut grass that surrounded the stones and plots. The unusual thing is that a lot of the actual graves had been tended to recently and there were even some burials as recent as last week, but no one had mown a nice path for their loved one to make a final journey over making it easier for those who were carrying said loved one on their final journey. They had been laid to rest, trekking them through the long grass…..curious.
We had finally reached our destination of Bran, it was cold, grey and the fine misty rain had set in. Fog was swirling in lazy tendrils amongst the treetops of the forest that surrounded Bran Castle. The castle itself loomed overhead, grey and imposing sitting on its rocky promontory.
It was the day you had kind of hoped for when you visited Dracula’s Castle as clear blue sky just wouldn’t have fitted with the romance of it. The castle itself is actually very pretty….large wooden beams, whitewashed walls and Rosie doesn’t really want to say it, a rather cheery looking terracotta roof. More fairy story than horror story….you decide.
Rosie is looking forward to taking some awesome pics of Bran Castle so The Operator has googled where the best spots are to take good pics. It turns out that the best spot is from a sheep paddock on the outskirts of the town.
So, through the town we went as per the instructions from the www. Past the castle we went till we saw a wooden bridge crossing the river on the right about a kilometre out of town. Go across the bridge into a sheep paddock, from there you will get great pics. Check and Check. We were the only people there in the drizzle and wait for it, the pics to come, are fantastic.
However, said the instructions, if you want the best pics EVER, walk to the back of the sheep paddock and follow the dirt track up a steep hillside into the woods until you get to a bluff with a cross on it, looking back, over the precipice will give you the BESTEST pics ever!
Well, that’s a challenge for The Operator and not for Rosie….good luck my love Rosie waved, as The Operator disappeared into the gloomy Transylvanian forest. Rosie will just stand and wait in the open, in the middle of the sheep paddock, in the rain, all on her own. Check out these photos The Operator took…this is exactly how Dracula’s Castle should look.
A wooden fortress has stood in the place where Bran Castle now sits ever since the 12th Century. Bran is the Turkish word for gate and the castle is the gateway to the town and has provided protection over Bran and its surrounds for centuries.
There is no mention again of Bran Castle in official records until 1337 when the King of Hungary gave permission for the people of Brasov, (the rich next town over) to replace the wooden fort with a stone castle….as long as they paid for it mind you. So where does Dracula fit in? Rosie hates to say this…but he doesn’t really.
Dracula is a fictional character. He was invented by Bram Stoker, an Irishman, who had never actually visited Romania before but set his 1897 horror story in the mist shrouded Carpathian Mountains in Romania.
Bran castle to some extent fits Stokers description of Count Dracula’s castle: it stands beautifully poised and elegant on the edge of a cliff overlooking a river gorge…but in real life it is certainly not as dramatic as Stokers descriptions or the TV adaptions.
Stoker also may have based his character Count Dracula on the infamous Romanian Prince, Vlad Tepes, also known as Vlad The Impaler or Vlad Dracul who was a 15th century prince in Wallachia, the next province over from Transylvania, whose actual castle is now a ruin.
Vlad Tepes real life connection to Bran Castle is pretty tenuous and was primarily based on location. Bran Castle sits at the mouth of a mountain pass on the trade route between Vlads principality of Wallachia and Transylvania. Bran Castle was an important stop and customs post on this trade route and he would have regularly passed through between provinces.
Vlad was not a popular guy and, in a nutshell was exiled for dirty deeds. He then returned with help of Hungarian troops and took back Wallachia. The Princes of the other provinces opposed him and Vlad responded by attacking their villages, taking prisoners and impaling them on spikes where they took many days to die a grisly pain ridden death. This practice at the time was actually quite a common form of torture to extract information back in the day. Admittedly Vlad did take it to a grisly new level and this became his gruesome signature.
People living in rural Romania in the 15th and 16th centuries were also a very superstitious bunch, who for centuries believed in ‘undead’ spirits that only came out at night and were normal people during the day. This story sounds familiar doesn’t it? Let’s not let the facts get in the way of a good yarn Rosie says.
Vlad the Impaler – Photo Wikipedia
Twenty minutes later, all on her own still in the sheep paddock. Rosie was feeling a bit paranoid and ‘watched’ in the gloom of the day. The silence was intense, punctuated only with the horror movie soundtrack of occasional screeching crows. True! Rosie had resorted to not keeping her back in one place too long and was slowly rotating between Vampire castle on the hill above and pockets of dark, gloomy forest behind.
Medieval Depiction of Vlads Impaling Days – Photo Wikipedia
Then, thankfully, slithering down the muddy mountain came The Operator. He was smug, and quite right, these photos he has taken above are pretty awesome. His watch said that he had climbed 31 floors to get them. Rosie is glad she never attempted it, no offence said The Operator, you wouldn’t have made it. Rosie believes some things are best left to the professionals.
We wandered away from the castle along a deserted track following the river to a small park with some weird sculptures cashing in on the whole Vlad the Impaler thing, another half constructed church stood on the other side of the river and three kids with no raincoats rain out of a tumbled down house to go play in the river culvert in the rain, they breed em tough here alright.
Into the town of Bran we went, all set to go inside and visit the castle. This is when the fairy tale ended and the horror story truly began.
The town of Bran is tiny and totally inundated with tourists! 800,000 people a year visit this castle and the beautiful quaint ancient town is over run with tourists, tour groups and tour buses.
Heading up to the castle gates, what was once an elegant sweeping roadway entrance cut through the green forest, it is packed solid with gaudy souvenir sellers selling everything and anything with fangs on it.
The queue at the ticket booth was not too bad, Rosie and The Operator lingered, undecided whether to purchase a ticket to tour the castle. What clinched it for us was so many people were coming out and didn’t look they had just had the most inspirational historical experience. Most said it was something they wished they had not done…it was a conga line of people, granny steeping one after the other through ‘an OK’ castle.
No way said Rosie. Agreed said The Operator. We will forever have our memories of the sheep paddock in the rain….all on our own…only 500 metres from all the bedlam that is the town and the so called legend of Bran Castle, oops, Dracula’s Castle.
On the outskirts of town, Rosie did a double take. Check out this abandoned, boarded Transylvanian Mansion said Rosie! The Operator reckoned it didn’t look as abandoned as first glance afforded….does this not look amazingly like a haunted house straight out of a horror movie! Totally!
Shaking our heads we drove out of town and straight onto Brasov, thirty minutes down the road and a world away from this crazy town.
Sitting in our apartment looking over the town square at the dreary weather and the Hollywood-esque Brasov sign high on the misty hilltop we reflected on the day, Rosie adjusted the crucifix around her neck, and waited for night to fall.
Tomorrow, we will explore what looks like another beautiful town nestled in amongst the Transylvanian forest. We cannot wait.
Romania is Fantastic! Check out Bucharest Old Town where we started our journey.
Sibiu was our next stop and was unforgettable.
Corvin Castle was a fairytale treat.
