Our Unexpected Vacation

We bought flip flops.  If someone had shown me a photo of Balchik before we went, I would have thought it was a dull, industrial port town.  Somehow, it is and it isn't.  We fell into our seaside days with a sudden rush of excitement and energy that took us by surprise - Balchik is wonderful, it was a pleasure we felt we shouldn't be having, it was a mess of ugly buildings and murky water, cement by the black sea and... fishing boats, bathing suits, grilled seafood, evening breezes and easygoing charm.  We started calling it our accidental vacation, but unexpected is really a better word.  We never plan on spending days like this, so they feel even better when they appear out of the blue.

We bristle when we're asked if we're "on holiday."  Our lives sometimes seem too good to be true - and we try, as much as we can, to have fun.  But traveling for years isn't a vacation, it's not easy.  We long for a break - this isn't something that's easy to say to everyone, but it's true.  Life on the road is lonely and mostly bleak.  Vulnerability is a constant.  We struggle every morning to remember exactly where we are.  The languages shift, the mood shifts, we have to greet strangers at every turn.  Things get stolen.  People stare at us or yell at us.  Finding something interesting every day is exhausting.
This is why we sometimes feel ourselves bracing against "vacation."  If we're enjoying ourselves too much, it somehow seems escapist or unreal.  Sure, we're usually in places where people spend their holidays, but that doesn't mean we aren't working while we're there.
In Balchik, on a narrow stretch of boardwalk along the Black Sea, we succumbed to happiness.  We were ensnared as soon as we caught sight of the water.

Balchik is unlovely, as far as small beach towns go.  But then again, it has its own yellow and blue beauty, a kind of shoreline sweetness that isn't a product of buildings or history.  Its the spirit of the place that felt uplifting, an intermingling of sun and tourism that made us feel we could be happy as long as we cast off our t-shirts and lay down on the sand with everyone else, gorged on grilled blue-fish, drank inexpertly-mixed cocktails and gave ourselves over to the meeting of water and limestone.  It worked.  A few hours after crossing the border we were loving Bulgaria and its people, our fellow tourists, the purity of the light, the lapping water.  We were suddenly on vacation!

Balchik hasn't been blessed with a naturally beautiful coastline.  What is there?  Nowadays, a jumbled line of pressed-cement tetrahedrons protecting the shore from erosion.  A few manmade beaches, some cement piers for swimming.  There's a harbor with three cranes and many uniformed guards.  There are fishing boats and a botanical garden, sunbaked soil and heat-hardened undergrowth, rampant construction, helicopters making their clamorous way down for practice landings on the docks.  There's a pretty backcloth of limestone that glows yellow in the evening light, some planted lavender, many roses.  There's a lively stretch of waterside restaurants and a slow-moving crowd of diners strolling among them in bathing suits and sandals.

In truth, Balchik was to be the beginning point of a long, westerly line drawn across Bulgaria.  It had seemed like a good jumping off point because it was at the eastern end of things and promised less resort-bustle than Varna or Albena.  It was just another town to plan for, the kind of place that looks like a point on the map before it swims into view.

But how easy it is to forget: catching sight of the sea makes any traveler's heart jump!  There it was, after hours of yellow and green, slowly shifting gears, drowsy passengers on an early morning bus.  It wakes you up, that first glimpse of the water, and makes you realize that traveling isn't about re-tracing cartography.  It's about arriving somewhere.

On the land to the west of town - unseen from shore, Balchik squarely faces the water - are endless fields, neatly plowed.  The region has been a bread basket for centuries, and wheat gave Balchik it's first identity.  Before tourism, this was where the Bulgarian and Romanians sent their grain out over the Black Sea.  Hulking remnant remain - huge silos by the beach and a large mill and trading complex, now sun-bleached and vacant looking.  As holiday makers came, the focus turned to swimming pools and hotel beds.  An old, salt-corroded sign by the beach pointed the way to water skiing, a discotheque and "shopping center."  The sign was probably put up with some hope.  There is none of that in town.

There was sun and plenty of barstools, pretty evening light and beach-reddened people.  We swam, though the water wasn't great, and drank, though the cocktails were weak and basic.  After the first day, we took off our shoes and bought sandals.  Not long after, we decided to lie on the sand.  Hours passed, the weekend energy ebbed as people took naps after lunch, then surged as they went out looking for dinner.  There were three nights booked at the hotel.  Balchik's sights don't take much longer than half a day to see.  Why not take a little vacation?  After all, we were already there!

The 'Quiet Nest' On The Black Sea

"I never thought about how well the sound of the sea goes with the smell of roses," Rebecca said.  We were walking through a June flood of blossoms, the ground strewn with petals. In the Bulgarian seaside town of Balchik, high up above the beach, a cascading paradise of terraces and waterfalls spills down towards the water.  It's crowded, hot, steep and overpriced - but completely worth it.  Once the private retreat of Queen Marie of Romania, it's now one of the best looked-after and beautiful botanical gardens we've ever seen.  Marie loved it so much she had her heart buried here, locked up in a gold box.  The heart's no longer here, the gardens have been thrown open to the public, it's not even Romania anymore - but the place is still full of stories about the queen, her lovers and love for Balchik.

Marie of Romania began her extraordinary life as Princess Marie of Edinburgh, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria on her father's side, a granddaughter of Emperor Alexander II on her mother's side.  She grew up in Windsor Palace and the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg and, from the beginning, was something of an enchantress.  In June 1900, Cosmopolitan said that "without being regularly beautiful, she is exceedingly pretty and winsome, in addition to which she excels in all the arts of coquetry and flirtation."  Indeed, flirtation became something of her calling card - her own daughter, when trying to dispel rumors of her mothers infidelities said that there had "only" been three men other than her father who had become regular characters in the family's life, but that's mis-stating the accusation.  Marie was a legendary seductress.
The young Princess's first cousin, Prince George (later King George V), proposed to her when she was seventeen, but her mother refused to let her marry him, finding for her instead the somewhat boring Prince Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Romania.

Marie never liked Ferdinand, but she loved Romania.  On a trip along the shore, riding on horseback, she fell especially for Balchik, which wasn't much more than a rocky cove of limestone cliffs and shady vineyards.  She described being pulled into mud huts so that she could bless the children there, and riding past all sorts of character in the villages around.  It was a distant, wild land at the time, far removed from the royal court in Bucharest.
A few years later, in 1926, as her husband's health declined, Marie began work on a garden and "palace" there, to be the seaside residence of the court.  It's a small, understated building to be called a palace, but it's pretty and comfortable and quirky, which is exactly what the queen had wanted (her mountain "palace" in the Carpathians was a treehouse).  On one side is a church, on the other a minaret (Marie had begun following the Bahá'í faith, which recognizes all religions as one), beside it is a watermill, in front is the sea.

At the time, Marie was perhaps more beloved in Romania than her husband - while Ferdinand had abandoned the front during WWI, his wife had worked in Army hospitals and stayed quite close to the action, handing out medals and calling herself an "encourager" - Romanian soldiers were said to have gone into battle shouting "Regina Maria!" instead of the name of their king.
Marie showed up to the signing of the Treaty of Versailles uninvited, to represent Romania against her husband's wishes. While there, she negotiated for Besserabia to be added to her crown lands, which more than doubled Romania's pre-war population and made her a heroine.  In the process, she also shocked Woodrow Wilson with frank discussions about sex - she showed him a photograph of her "love child," and explained to the president why this daughter was darker-skinned than her other children.

In fact, there were a whole host of sensationalized affairs - everyone from Lord Waldorf Astor and Crown Prince William of Prussia to Russian Grand Dukes and a certain Colonel Joe Boyle of the Canadian Army found their way into Marie's bed - including one that would leave a lasting mark on Balchik itself.  Jules Janin, the Swiss gardener, was said to have been lured to the Black Sea coast not only by the position as gardener to the queen, but also as one of her lovers.  She built him a little house, high up in the garden, and entrusted the entire garden design to him.

What Janin created is spectacular.  A playful mix of formality and wilderness, it brought the more modernist English garden aesthetic of the twenties to a warmer, seaside climate.  There are rows of cacti intermingled with boxwood topiary, ginkos and rubber trees, wooded glades of wildflowers and square-lined flower beds.  It's a colorful, eclectic mix that has nothing to do with the court gardens of other royal residences.  Wandering from space to space, the demeanor of the plants changes, from stiffly arranged to almost untended and relaxed.  There are two waterfalls and a few rocky pools, water sounds are a constant.  Views outward over the sea open up unexpectedly, then gets closed off again.  In all, there are about two thousand species planted here.  Hundreds and hundreds of roses fill in the margins, all just reaching their peak when we visited.

There are six main terraces below the parklike upper reaches of the garden.  It's said that Marie wanted one for each of her children (including the "love child"), and the character of each supposedly reflects the nature of her different offspring.  From above, the terraces look sun-burnt and dry.  Lower, one finds ingeniously placed pockets of shade and pools of water.  Stairs meander up and down, it's impossible to find a direct route from one place to another.  Just beyond the lower wall, strolling couples pass by with ice cream cones and sunbathers pay to sit below umbrellas.

June is probably the best month to go garden visiting - the colors are the brightest, the flowers are at their most raucous, the leaves have most of their springtime green.  There is now a winery housed in some of the old buildings, and free tastings are included in the admission price - we tasted some honeyed wines during a lull in the tour-group crush, but didn't linger there long.  All the people made the gardens a bit hectic, but one could sense the peace that it once possessed, when only the sound of the waves would waft up the slope.  Marie called Balchik her "Quiet Nest."

When Marie died, she was to be buried at Castle Bran, in Transylvania, which had become her primary home.  Her heart, though, was buried in her seaside chapel in Balchik, enclosed in a glass jar within a gold sarcophagus.  It was supposedly her last wish.
Not much more than two years later, though, Bulgaria gained control of this part of the coast.  Though the new proprietors promised to take good care of Marie's heart and the chapel, the Romanians decided that they wanted to have their queen's organ remain in Romanian soil, so they reburied it in the Transylvanian alps.  Unfortunately, not long after this, the new communist government dug the sarcophagus up again and put it in storage, where it's mostly remained - it's now scheduled to be part of a temporary exhibition at a museum in Bran.  It's sad - I'm sure the Queen wouldn't have cared who controlled Balchik.  After all, it's still her place.

Meeting the Locals

There are certain things we've come to expect from seaside towns.  There are the old men with skin that looks more like the product of a tannery than a suntan.  There are colorful boats and piles of tangled nets.  More than anything, there is our sudden urge to consume as much fish as humanly possible.  Our success has varied, simply because we're talking about living creatures here.  And you can't always count on all your guests to show up for dinner.  In Greece, we were faced with the depressing truth that the water all around us had been drastically depleted of its fish.  On Lake Ohrid in Macedonia, we had to play a game of dodging the famous Ohrid trout, whose own survival in the world is facing some serious struggle against the human appetite.  So, really, we didn't know what to expect in Balchik, a small town in the north of Bulgaria's Black Sea Coast.  What would the local fish be and would we get a chance to meet them?

The answer is yes.  A chalkboard at the very first place we stopped displayed the list of available fish.  We could make out the Cyrillic, but the names were still mostly a mystery to us.  Goby, shad, garfish, scad?  Every body of water in the world has its own residents, just like on land.  It's not going to be lobster and salmon everywhere (even if the menu says so).  But we were still taken aback by this list of strangers.  We went to the fish market for some insight, to put some faces to names.  There were just a handful of people with buckets and trays, set up near a parking lot.  Without any signage, it was difficult to really use their offerings as a reference, but we could at least see that it was mostly small fish along the lines of sardines and the small bluefish pictured (grilled) above.  Okay, I won't be ordering too much dourade or tiger shrimp, then.  We wondered about the barbecued octopus and squid we'd already had.  The octopus had been skewered with sliced pickle (more amazing than you'd think) and the squid had been sauteed and then sprinkled with toasted bread crumbs - deconstructed fried calamari. 

Next to the market was a lunch joint, basically a food truck without wheels.  Lunchers filled the picnic tables set outside and the posted chalkboard left absolutely no room for miscommunication.  There were only five fish listed and just two had prices filled in next to them.  We'll have one of each, please!  A попчета (popcheta) and a сафрид (safrad).  The silvery fish are the safrad, also known as scad or, more familiarly, horse mackerel.  They had none of the bitterness of sardines or the density of sprats.  They were so lightly floured, just an opaque coating like sea salt on a car that's been parked near the water.  The larger, golden ones are the popcheta, translated to round goby.  It's a bottom dweller, so its fins have that paddle look and its mouth resembles the front of a Ferrari 250 Testa Rossa.  Both plates tasted like the fish had been alive that morning, the oil had been poured and heated just for us and the man who worked the fryer had the touch of a great pool player.  They were out of this world.

Speaking of the world, we were actually helping it out eating those round gobies.  They are an invasive species, an aggressive fish that comes in and takes over.  Their one ecological benefit is that they happen to really like eating zebra mussels, which are even more invasive and have succeeded at completely wiping out the Black Sea's scallops.  We saw this man separating a net full of small, black and white zebra mussels.  They are too tiny to be worth eating (and many people strongly advise against it anyway), so I wasn't sure what his mission was.  Now I think that maybe he was really in the goby game.  Just sorting out his bait?

Luckily, the big, plump, all black, edible mussels are also here in the Black Sea.  Signs around town tout them as "100% organic Black Sea Shells."  We can see what look to be mussel farms out in the water.  They look a lot like trampolines submerged in water, a ring with a netted fence.  Restaurants serve mussel salad, mussels with rice, mussel saganaki (with melted cheese), mussels au natural.  At a vaguely Greek (but not really at all) restaurant named Mikado, we ordered "the Captain's mussels," which I hoped wouldn't be similar to the chef's salad and come with slices of ham.  You never do know in the Balkans.  They came brothless with a sweet tomato sauce and soft, julienned carrots.  The Captain has good taste.

Balchik is historically a fishing village.  That doesn't mean that there are boats lining the harbor or that early morning mass exodus of lone fishermen.  This is no Marsaxlokk.  Most of the business seems to center around tourism.  Still, Balchik's fishing tradition has instilled a real love of seafood into their cuisine.  I could eat grilled fish every day, but I've really been appreciating the variety of methods and approaches here in Balchik.  Menus have it smoked, marinated, stewed, fried, steamed, grilled, skewered and tartar'd.  They even have it all wrapped up in rice and seaweed with a wedge of avocado and diced cucumber - at least at the restaurant below The White House Hotel.  It's not too often that you can sit by the water and have four pieces of a sushi roll before your order of perfectly charred sea bream arrives.

And when it arrives, it's hard to compete with.  The char tastes like barbecue and the flesh like the sea.  It tastes even better than that bit of salmon, because it's local.  It is a product of the time and the place, the here and the now.  And we're here by the Black Sea!  And it's summer!  You want more proof?  There's sand between my toes right now.   Balchik has treated us well.

Gypsy Kitchens: Salată de Vinete

In the rural town of Ieud, we stayed with two local schoolteachers.  Their house was on the edge of a meadow, we ate on a porch looking at wildflowers and old barns.  Over two nights, our hostess made us a staggering array of delicious food: green bean stew (thick with butter), honey cakes, carrot and potato patties, crepes, a soup of matzo-like dumplings, creamed peppers, candied plums, stewed cabbages, fried cheeses… everything, she said, was from their garden, everything was "very natural."  We ate until we couldn't anymore.
The star, though, was her homemade salată de vinete.  She scooped it out of an old canning jar and put it on the table with fresh bread.  We ate an embarrassing amount.  Something like baba ganoush, salată de vinete is what Romanians love to do with eggplant.  Creamy, smokey, lusciously textured, it's a dish that's hard to believe isn't full of mayonnaise or oil.  In fact, it's one of the richest-tasting healthy foods you can imagine - and it's about the simplest thing to prepare.

Salată de vinete doesn't have to be any more complicated than eggplant, cooked and skinned and mashed with salt.  In fact, the name means nothing more than "eggplant salad."  We decided to do it a little bit differently, though, to make the recipe worthwhile.  So, we added onion, garlic, dill and green olives, plus a little oil and white wine.  Throwing in just the dill and raw garlic would have been fine, or just the olives.  Paprika would also be a great addition, or another kind of chili powder.  Cumin could work, tahini would make it more like baba ganoush, lemon juice would have been excellent.  The idea is to use the eggplant as a base for some other flavors, and, really, whatever appeals to you would probably work.
What we did was simmer about half a yellow onion and three cloves garlic in a little white wine and oil until it was soft and the wine was almost gone.  This mixture got added, along with minced olive and de-stemmed fresh dill, to the mashed auborgine.  But lets not get ahead of ourselves - the main thing is to soften up the eggplants.

There is a strange myth about eggplants that they're hard to cook - some spook story handed down through generations of American cooks has frightened us all into thinking there's only one way to cook them (breaded and fried, smothered in a casserole, pressed and steamed, whatever your mother told you).  We can see and taste other results - meltingly soft roasted dishes, delicacies off the grill, baba ganoush - but aren't really sure how these things relate to the toughened rounds of flesh we're used to.  Well, stop being afraid.  It turns out that there is almost nothing easier to cook than an eggplant.

Start by preheating the oven to 350° F.  Then, turn on one of your gas burners and char the skin of your eggplants from tip to tip.  The fruits turn a sickly orange-purple, and blister a little, but they're pretty hardy.  Our stove also wasn't that powerful.  A fork helps, as they get pretty hot.  Don't worry about this process too much - it's more to give them a nice smokey flavor than to cook them.  Really, don't expect to blacken the skin - aim for a second degree burn.
We had fantasies of doing this over a grill or open fire, then cooking the eggplants wrapped in foil, tucked into the coals.  It'd work perfectly - humans haven't always had indoor ranges, after all.
When your fruits have a nice char, put them into some kind of coverable, oven safe container.  Prick them a few times with a fork, if you haven't already.  Cover them tightly and put in the oven for half an hour to an hour or until soft all the way through (don't worry, you'll be able to tell… they melt into puddles).

The nice thing is, it doesn't really matter how long you keep your auborgines in the oven, they really won't overcook.  When we made Imam Biyaldi in Istanbul, we simmered the pot for hours.  When they're soft, split open the skin (which will barely have enough tensile strength to hold together) and scoop out the watery, steaming innards.  Combine this glop with whatever else you'd like to add and mash until smooth.  We used a pair of kitchen shears to help things along.  If you have the luxury of owning a blender or food processor (our rental apartment wasn't well equipped), a few seconds of pulsing should result in something even more luxuriously smooth.
It may not seem believable, but the salată de vinete doesn't need anything other than salt.  It will taste oily and delicious without anything additional.  We added a little oil (about two teaspoons), plus our onion and garlic mixture, the olives and as much dill as we'd bought.  Let the mixture cool in the fridge at least an hour to bring out the full flavor, or serve warm - it's a hard thing to mess up!
(Throw the skins out, they're bitter.)

Salată de Vinete with Green Olives and Dill Recipe

Ingredients:
2 medium sized, ripe eggplants
1 small yellow onion, finely diced
3 cloves garlic, diced
4 tbsp. olive oil
1/4 cup white wine
1/3 cup green olives, pitted and chopped
Dill, de-stemmed
Salt

Method:
- Preheat oven to 350° F.
- Simmer onions and garlic in white wine and 2 tbspn. oil until softened and wine is almost all gone, about ten or fifteen minutes.  Remove from heat and set aside.
- Over an open gas burner, singe the skins of both eggplants from tip to tip, using a fork if your fingers get hot, working quickly and not burning the skin too badly (if your range is very powerful).  Put the fruits into an oven safe container, cover tightly and place in oven.  Cook until soft - between 1/2 and 2 hours, with about an hour being ideal.
- Remove eggplants from oven, split open skin and scrape flesh into a bowl.  Discard the skins.
- Add to the bowl the onion mixture, olives, remaining oil and dill and mash well, or use a food processor to make really smooth.
- Let mixture cool at least an hour in the refrigerator, then serve with bread, crackers, chips or spoons.

Check out all of our recipes.

Paying with Plastic

 

A little over a year ago, we drove through Romania en route from Moldova to Italy. It was our first visit to the country and a brief one at that - less than 24 hours. We got a quick glimpse of the landscape (beautiful), the roads (treacherously sidewalkless), and the currency (like none we'd ever seen before). It's always a frantic thing to cross a border and then just drive and hope that an ATM will show up at some point. Once it does, you hear that heavy electronic shuffling of bills inside the box and then a stack is spat out at you. What will it look like?? Especially because the Eurozone has made this sort of thing a little more rare, it's exciting to try some new money on for size. Romanian lei are beautiful. Bright, flowery, shiny...? They are crisp, clean, smooth like wax paper or something else? In our hands, they slip around against each other.  In Romania, whether by cash or card, you're always paying with plastic.

Romania is one of about seven countries in the world who have completely switched to polymer banknotes, a plastic covered bill first developed and issued by Australia in 1988. The United States tried its hand at making this brand of currency, but smudgy ink turned people off from the tests. Last year, Canada switched its $100 bill to polymer. While polymer notes are more expensive to make, they are almost impossible to counterfeit. See that little transparent window shaped like the masks of comedy and tragedy (in honor of the man on the bill, Ion Luca Caragiale)? Try faking that. Oh, and the hologram. The higher the leu's value, the more security elements are in the design. This isn't the first thing someone will tell you about the benefit of polymer cash. Nine times out of ten, a comment about Romanian money will elicit this excited response, "You can put it through the laundry and it's okay!" The stuff is basically indestructible.
Seriously. We tried ripping it, washing it. It doesn't crease or wrinkle. It bounces back out of most folds and basically leaped from my hand when I tried to crumple it. See for yourself. No scotch-taped bills or sweaty summer money here in Romania. It can't even get dirty!

Polymer money is said to have a lifespan four to five times longer than paper money, which is mostly great. However, there are those times when a country's currency needs a little shape-up. In 2005, the Romanian leu needed to shave a few zeros off. From January to July of that year, they were officially the world's least valued currency unit. Gosh. After reevaulation, the 1 million leu bill became the 100, the 10,000 lei became 1 and all denominations in between. They kept the design of the bills basically the same, just with four less zeroes. They took the opportunity to re-size them a little, too, shaping them to match the euro banknotes. That way, when Romania switches to the Euro, they won't need to refit all of their ATMs.

People say that Romania is set to switch to the euro in 2015. Sure, their ATMs will be fine, but what about all the visually impaired people that depend on the polymer money's value specific texture? Really, I'm just sad to see this currency go. So darn pretty. Each note has a national figure, his corresponding window design and a flower. There's George Enescu beside a music note and a carnation. Nature and artists take the places usually reserved for architecture and politicians or royalty.

I feel like the money that's exchanged between hands within a country is part of that place's cultural identity. What it looks like, who is on it, remembering those days when a hundred was worth a million. It's also a part of travel, fiddling with a pocketful of coins and taking way too long to leaf through funny money. On the upside, polymer money is completely shreddable and recyclable. Its material is used to make plastic gardening appliances. So, if things go according to plan, Romanians may have themselves a whole bunch of brand new wheelbarrows in 2015.

Dracula Wuz Here

“We are in Transylvania... and there shall be to you many strange things.” ― Bram Stoker, Dracula

Like any teenager whose melancholy had a gothic slant, I went through a bit of a vampire phase. So, fifteen year old me would have been really excited to arrive in Sighişoara, the birthplace of the real Dracula, Vlad Țepeș. Little Vlad, son of Prince Vlad Dracul ("Dracula" means "son of Dracul"), only lived here for four years. Still, the Dracula Tourism that hit Romania after Vlad was 'discovered' to be Bram Stoker's inspiration in the 1972 book In Search of Dracula, is still reverberating.  When those first foreigners arrived, Bram Stoker's book had never been published in Romanian.  People didn't know what the heck they were talking about! Dracula the vampire?

In Romania, Vlad the Impaler is considered a folk hero not a villain.  His notorious bloodthirstiness was mostly directed at invading Turks. Still, the connection between the fictitious vampire and his historic namesake has been a bit of a cash cow throughout Transylvania.  Tourist attractions that are more fiction than fact.  In Sighişoara, there are indeed plastic fangs and t-shirts that say things like "I Met Dracula Last Night. Come Closer and I'll Whisper the Story in Your Ear."  Even the most relaxed feeling cafe displays "Cafeaua Vampirului " coffee beans for sale.  The bags are cleverly sealed with dripping red wax.  It's all very silly.  More than anything, it feels unnecessary - because Sighişoara happens to be an impossibly pretty town that doesn't need a gimmick. 

Grasping at straws, visiting a bust of Vlad, eating an overpriced meal in his childhood home (completely rebuilt), going to the Torture Museum in hopes of some details about the gruesome methods of the Impaler, the Bram Stoker-reading, Anne Rice obsessed sophomore inside of me was disappointed. But then I realized, at fifteen I had never travelled outside of North America.  The cobbled streets of Greenwich Village, New York made my heart flutter.  I dreamed of backpacking around Europe.  Vampiric let-down or not, Sighişoara would have knocked my socks off. 

Mission: Dracula called off, I began to really take the place in. In the History Museum, located inside the town's iconic clock tower, the old doors, glass cases filled with button-up satin shoes and fraying top hats evoked that seductive, violent first half of the 2nd millennium.  The Medieval period, when violence pervaded the atmosphere and human contact could easily be the kiss of death. It was the time of the guillotine and the plague.   There was pomp, theatricality, morbidity, beauty.  A yellowed cloth-bound book was opened to a page with ink illustration of a moustachioed man in a three piece suit being stretch and limbered up by pilates-like contraptions.  There were calipers and apothecary bottles.  Instantly, I felt like I was in a world of capes and banquets.  Of vampires.

From the top of the Clock Tower, I looked out over Sighişoara. Transylvania -  Beyond the Forest.  The meaning is obvious and perfect.  It does nothing to take away the mysterious feel inherent in the word.  Transylvania.  The canvas of roofs below zig-zagged in all directions, their skyline climbed up and down frenetically like notes played by a harpsichord. The mountains beyond seemed to stretch for eternity.  There is nothing twee about the region's natural beauty.  The pastel of the houses is replaced by emerald green hills, rust-red rooftops and cobalt blue night skies. Quite simply, it's magical. 

The magic continued in Sibiu, one of Transylvania's most important cities.  Building are animated by unique rooftop windows.  Heavily lidded by shingles they look like eyes watching your every move.  A few nubby stones poke out from smoothly plastered walls.  It is a cheery place, revitalized in 2007 when pronounced the year's European Capital of Culture.  Fresh coats of paint.  Fresh blood.  Wait... are those... bats?!?  False alarm - just birds.  Fanciful trimming on Venetian-style mansions reminded me of lace cuffs and brocade velvet.  That lovely bridge with flower pots hanging from it was named "Liar's Bridge."  That cool old bastion was nicknamed "The Gate of Corpses."  In Transylvania, the whimsy feels a little darker.  The romance, a little cryptic. 

Sibiu is filled with covered alleyways that lead to small courtyards.   Heavy wooden doors close these passages off from the street, from the world.  Across from the Orthodox Cathedral, where black-robed priests moderated a lively debate amongst head-covered women after mass, this walkway shone like a gem.  The ankle-twisting cobbled stones paved in a slant down to one of Sibiu's many squares transitioned, with just a small lip, into smooth, flat, even marble.  Figures were painted on the walls and ceiling.  It was beautiful and, had the doors been closed just a few minutes earlier by a departing priest, hidden away.  It was like the flash of a beguiling smile. 

Oh, fifteen year old Rebecca.  Sibiu was like a storybook you would have devoured cover to cover.  In the Lower Town, below the historic Citadel, buildings decayed.  Plaster chipped and people begged.  Arched walkways gave the streets a gothic frame.  You would have felt the sorrow in it, the eternal sadness and ruthlessness. You would have been so moved by it all, felt so much just looking at it.  Everything you read vampire literature for - a sense of timelessness, savage beauty, shadowy figures and romantic loneliness - was all right here in Transylvania. 

Twenty-six year old me climbed the Council Tower in Sibiu.  Unlike in Sighişoara, the horizon line was there ahead.  The forested Carpathian Mountains were too far away to clearly discern and the buildings of this much larger city stretched out as far as the eye could see.  Below, the International Theatre Festival as going on.  Crowds gathered to watch a circus practice in the main square.  Bram Stoker could not have picked a better setting for his novel.  Who cares if he never actually stepped foot in Romania.

Castle Hunting: Făgăras

Făgăraș is a compact, grey town in a broad valley.  On it’s brisk way across Transylvania, the E-68 gets jostled a little here, at a big roundabout, before resettling on its course.  There’s plenty of traffic, but not many people stop. The old block buildings don’t leave much impression.  From the road, the town’s principle characteristic is blandness, its chief features are the roundabout and the sound of downshifting trucks.
Having coffee one morning, the waitress at the bakery asked me why I had come to Făgăraș.  When I told her that I was interested in the castle she laughed and shrugged, as though it were a novel idea.  She’d grown up in town.  The castle probably seemed more a fact of life than a point of pride.

Actually, the people of Făgăraș should be proud of what they have sitting in their midst.  Just by the E-68 (but hidden behind a ring of trees) is a nice, kept-up, wide-moated castle.  Ringed by water and trees, the castle feels cut off from the cement and asphalt of the outside world.  Swans and paddleboaters make their slow circuits, the brick fortress is small and tidy from the outside, the moat is a perfect reflecting pool.  It feels exactly like so many municipal castles do: something – like a park or a town hall – that fills a small, unpretentious role in public life.

Făgăraș was, traditionally, the residence of the wives of the princes of Transylvania, and was one of the primary fortresses in the kingdom.  It's a strange place to build a castle, on this long plain where there's not much to defend and little natural defensibility.  Originally, there was a 12th century earthen and wooden fort on the site, but this burned sometime in the 13th century.  In 1310, needing to modernize his defenses but lacking readily available hard stone, Prince Ladislaw Kán began work on his new brick fortress.

When we think of a castle, we usually picture it as being made of granite or limestone – blocky, square edged, heavy walled.  But many castles, especially ones built in river valleys and on the plains, were built with bricks.  Often it was just too expensive or time consuming to quarry and haul stone to the site.  Brick also has its architectural benefits – walls could be constructed in more precise curves or with more complex elements than they could with stone.
With the advent of canon warfare, the walls were thickened - actually, a second wall was built within the outer wall and the space between was filled with earth.

The moat had existed since at least the 14th century, but was widened and upgraded when the castle went through a renovation in the 1540’s.  Often, moats weren’t filled with water at all, and served as a kind of ditch that increased the castle’s height advantage – this was partially the case at Făgăraș, where water is thought to have filled the moat in some seasons but not in others.  This changed when a stream was diverted close by and a system was put in place to allow the moat to be filled quickly if needed.  It’s broader than a lot of moats, and also far away from the walls themselves – the fear was that water would damage the foundation of the castle, which hadn’t been built to deal with seepage.

Făgăraș houses a catch-all town museum now, with old looms and icons, prehistoric pottery and communist era stamps.  It’s a nice collection, but feels meager for the big space.  This was intended as a residence and a fortress, and the inner castle has some eighty rooms, many of them quite large.  Not everything is open to the public – far from it – but it’s easy to wander for a half hour or so without getting bored.  Unfortunately, there are no good views of the inner walls, and it’s not permitted to climb any of the towers.

Făgăraș suffers a little from being too well preserved.  There is a good deal of construction being done right now, but it’s mostly touch-up work.  In better condition than most similar structures, the inner keep is almost like new – so of course it’s not all open to the public.  More ruined castles are usually more accessible for climbing and exploring, with little to damage.  Here, the old rooms and towers had been appropriated for historical society offices.  Harumph.
The courtyard was undergoing the most work, and was completely torn apart.  The gatehouse too, which looks very nice in other people’s pictures.  The Italianate arches and many of the grand rooms are the work of the 17th century Prince Gabriel Bethlen.

Looking like a ship (can’t you see the prow and gunnels?) marooned in a tiny pond, Făgăraș was especially picturesque at dawn, when the town hadn’t yet awoken and the water was glass-still.  I kept going back all day, to walk around the trees and take pictures of the walls.  You see, I’d asked for two nights at the hotel… and there was nothing else to do.
The next day I drove out on the E-68, hit the roundabout and continued past the clump of trees where I knew the castle was.  So many people had been curious about me in town.  The only visitors they get are those too worn down by driving to go any further, the kind that are gone in the morning.  There are more dramatic castles in Transylvania, I’m told, and ones with more interesting towns built around them, but I grew to really like Făgăraș.  It’s not very brash, but it’s worth a stop.