Long before Romania existed, the lands north of the lower Danube were inhabited by the Dacians (or Getae), a Thracian people of farmers, herders and warriors who by around the turn of the era had built a powerful kingdom in the Carpathian mountains. Their political and religious centre was Sarmizegetusa Regia, a fortified citadel high in Transylvania, ringed by sanctuaries and workshops, and their strength rested on the famous gold and silver mines of the massif. Under king Decebalus, Dacia became both a threat and a temptation for Rome: its raids south of the Danube unsettled the province of Moesia, and its gold stirred imperial greed.
The clash came with the emperor Trajan, Hispanic by birth and one of the great conquerors of Roman history. In two brutal wars — the first in 101-102, the second in 105-106 — the legions crossed the Danube. For the second campaign, the architect Apollodorus of Damascus threw a monumental stone bridge across the river at Drobeta, a feat of engineering. The Romans pushed into the heart of the mountains, cut off Sarmizegetusa's water and took the city in 106. Decebalus, cornered, killed himself rather than be taken prisoner, and his head was sent to Rome. The conquest was carved for ever into Trajan's Column, still standing in the Italian capital, whose reliefs tell the campaign in detail.
So on 11 August 106 Dacia became Rome's newest province and one of its richest, thanks to its gold mines. Rome brought in colonists 'ex toto orbe romano', founded cities, laid roads and spread Latin. This is where the central thesis of Romanian identity begins: out of the fusion of those Latin colonists and the Daco-Roman population there supposedly arose a people who kept a Romance language — Romanian — even though the emperor Aurelian officially evacuated the province around 271-275, under pressure from the Goths and other peoples. That 'Daco-Roman continuity' north of the Danube is denied by much of Hungarian historiography, which holds to the theory of a later migration of Romanised shepherds from the south. The debate, far from purely academic, has fed the dispute over Transylvania for centuries. What is beyond doubt is the result: Romanian today is a Romance language, a sister of Italian, Spanish and French, written with words such as pâine (bread), timp (time) or carte (book).
During the long millennium that separates Rome's withdrawal from the formation of the medieval Romanian states, the lands north of the Danube were a corridor and a camping ground for migrating peoples: Goths, Huns, Gepids, Avars, Slavs, Bulgars, Pechenegs, Cumans and, in the thirteenth century, the Mongols. The Romanians, by their own tradition, survived by falling back into the mountains and the forests, organised into small rural communities (cnezate and voievodate). It is a dark period, with few written sources, in which the Orthodox Church and the liturgy in Church Slavonic shaped the culture of these lands, turning them towards Byzantium and the Slavic world rather than towards the Latin Rome their language came from.
By the fourteenth century two independent Romanian states finally crystallised. South of the Carpathians came the principality of Wallachia (Țara Românească, 'the Romanian land'), consolidated by the voivode Basarab I, who around 1330 defeated the king of Hungary at the battle of Posada and secured its autonomy. East of the mountains the principality of Moldavia was born, its founding attributed to Bogdan I around 1359, when it too broke free of Hungarian tutelage. Both principalities were elective and turbulent monarchies, where the boyars (the landowning nobility) chose and overthrew princes, and their history was marked by figures who fought the great neighbouring empires: Mircea the Elder in Wallachia and, above all, Stephen the Great (Ștefan cel Mare) in Moldavia, who reigned for almost half a century (1457-1504), held off the Ottomans, the Hungarians and the Poles, and had dozens of churches and monasteries built, which is why the Orthodox Church canonised him centuries later.
The third Romanian land, Transylvania, followed a different path. From the eleventh and twelfth centuries it was absorbed into the kingdom of Hungary, which organised it as a voivodeship and settled it with colonists: the Szeklers (a Hungarian-speaking population placed there as border guards) and the Saxons, German colonists invited by the Hungarian kings from the twelfth century on, who founded prosperous walled towns such as Sibiu (Hermannstadt), Brașov (Kronstadt) and Sighișoara (Schäßburg). Political power and privilege stayed in the hands of three 'nations' — the Hungarian nobles, the Saxons and the Szeklers, united from 1437 in the Unio Trium Nationum — while the Romanian majority, peasant and Orthodox, was excluded from those rights. That inequality, built on top of the dispute over who lived in the region first, would become one of the great fault lines in the history of central Europe.
No Romanian figure is as well known worldwide — or as distorted — as Vlad III, voivode of Wallachia, nicknamed Țepeș, 'the Impaler'. He was born around 1431, probably in the citadel of Sighișoara, the son of Vlad II Dracul. The name Dracul comes from the Order of the Dragon (draco in Latin), a brotherhood of knights created by the emperor Sigismund to defend Christendom from the Ottomans, to which his father belonged; Vlad III was therefore called Drăculea, 'son of Dracul', the name posterity would turn into Dracula. As a boy, he and his brother were handed over as hostages to the Ottoman court, an experience that marked his life.
Vlad ruled Wallachia in three separate spells (1448, 1456-1462 and 1476). His fame comes above all from the second, when he governed with an iron hand. He set out to strengthen central power against the boyars, whom he repressed harshly, and he resisted Ottoman expansion, refusing to pay tribute to the sultan. His favourite punishment — impalement, the source of his nickname Țepeș, from țeapă, 'stake' — he applied to enemies abroad and at home alike. The most famous episode is that of 1462: retreating before the army of Mehmed II, he left behind a 'forest' of thousands of impaled Ottomans along the roadside, a sight so appalling that, according to the chronicles, it made the conqueror of Constantinople himself turn back. He died fighting in late 1476 or early 1477; according to the sources, he was beheaded and his head sent to the sultan preserved in honey.
It is worth separating the historical man from the legend. The monstrous image of Vlad spread during his lifetime and above all after his death through German and Russian pamphlets that exaggerated his cruelties for political ends; historians today debate the victim numbers, heavily inflated by those hostile sources. In Romanian memory, by contrast, he is remembered rather as a stern but just ruler, a defender of the country against the Turks. The link with vampires is a much later literary invention: the Irish writer Bram Stoker borrowed the name 'Dracula' for his 1897 novel and set it in a castle in Transylvania, a region Vlad barely ruled. Bran Castle, today marketed as 'Dracula's castle', has a flimsy historical connection with the real voivode. Vlad Țepeș is thus a textbook case of a historical figure turning into a myth: do not confuse the fifteenth-century Wallachian prince with the fictional vampire count.
Through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Wallachia and Moldavia fell into the orbit of the Ottoman Empire. Unlike the Balkans or central Hungary, the Romanian principalities were never annexed or turned into Turkish provinces: they kept their autonomy, their Christian princes, their Orthodox Church and their institutions, in exchange for recognising the sultan's sovereignty and paying him an annual tribute (the haraç) that grew ever heavier. It was a vassalage that preserved Christian identity but subjected the economy and the politics of the principalities to the Sublime Porte, and that also left them exposed to the clashes between Ottomans, Habsburgs, Poles and Russians fought out on their territory.
One dazzling moment broke that pattern in the year 1600. Michael the Brave (Mihai Viteazul), voivode of Wallachia, managed for the first and only time to bring the three Romanian countries under a single sceptre: after defeating the prince of Transylvania at the battle of Șelimbăr in 1599 and occupying Alba Iulia, he also took Moldavia in 1600. That union of Wallachia, Transylvania and Moldavia lasted barely a few months — Michael was defeated by the Transylvanian nobility and the Habsburgs and murdered in 1601 — but nineteenth-century Romanian nationalism raised it to a symbol and a precedent of national unity, turning Michael the Brave into a founding hero.
In the eighteenth century, Ottoman rule hardened into the so-called 'Phanariot regime'. Distrusting native princes, the sultan began appointing as rulers of Wallachia and Moldavia wealthy Greeks from the Phanar district of Constantinople, who bought the office and set about recouping their investment by squeezing the population. It was an age of corruption, crushing taxes and decline, though also of administrative and cultural modernisation of a Greek stamp. The Phanariot period, together with the Russo-Turkish wars that ravaged the principalities, fed the resentment against the Ottoman yoke and the desire for emancipation that would explode in the nineteenth century.
While Wallachia and Moldavia orbited the Ottomans, Transylvania went another way. After the Hungarian disaster at Mohács (1526), the region set itself up as an autonomous principality, a vassal of the sultan but in practice independent, and became a refuge for Protestantism — Calvinists, Lutherans, Unitarians — and a rare example of religious tolerance for its time, enshrined in the Edict of Turda of 1568. That pluralism, however, did not extend to Orthodox Romanians: although they were probably already the majority in the countryside, they remained excluded from the system of the 'three nations' (Hungarians, Saxons and Szeklers), with no political representation and no recognition of their faith.
After the Ottomans withdrew from Hungary at the end of the seventeenth century, Transylvania passed to the Habsburgs of Vienna, who brought it into their empire and consolidated their control after 1711. To weaken Protestantism and win over the Romanians, Vienna promoted the creation of the Greek Catholic (Uniate) Church at the end of the seventeenth century: part of the Romanian Orthodox accepted the authority of the pope in exchange for keeping the Byzantine rite and gaining access to certain rights and to education. Out of those Greek Catholic schools in Blaj came the 'Transylvanian School' (Școala Ardeleană), a movement of scholars who at the end of the eighteenth century used historical and linguistic arguments to ground the Latin origin and the Daco-Roman continuity of the Romanians, laying the intellectual foundations of nationalism.
That awakening had two milestones. In 1784 the great peasant revolt of Horea, Cloșca and Crișan broke out, an uprising of Romanian peasants against the feudal lords that was crushed harshly and whose leaders were executed. And in 1791 Romanian leaders presented the emperor with the Supplex Libellus Valachorum, a petition claiming for the Romanians — invoking their antiquity as descendants of Trajan's colonists — the same political rights the other nations of Transylvania enjoyed. Vienna ignored it, but the document marked the birth of the Romanian national movement in Transylvania. In the revolution of 1848, which shook the whole empire, the Transylvanian Romanians, led by Avram Iancu, confronted the Hungarian revolutionaries — who wanted to unite Transylvania with Hungary — and demanded their own national rights, in a clash that foreshadowed the conflict of the following century.
The romantic nationalism that swept Europe in the mid-nineteenth century caught fire among the Romanians, who began to dream of a single state bringing together Wallachia and Moldavia. The 1848 revolution in the principalities was put down by Ottomans and Russians, but the idea of union kept growing, backed as well by the France of Napoleon III. The chance came after the Crimean War and the Congress of Paris of 1856, which placed the principalities under the guarantee of the great powers. In a bold move, the assemblies of Moldavia and of Wallachia elected the same man as prince: Alexandru Ioan Cuza, chosen in Iași on 5 January and in Bucharest on 24 January 1859. That double vote created a single state in practice, the United Principalities, which in 1862 officially took the name of Romania and Bucharest as its capital.
Cuza pushed through deep modernising reforms — secularisation of the vast monastery estates, a land reform that handed land to the peasants, a civil code, education — but he fell out with conservatives and liberals alike, and in 1866 they forced him to abdicate. In his place, the political class brought in a foreign prince, as was the custom for the sake of stability and prestige: Carol I, of the German house of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, who would reign for almost half a century (1866-1914).
The great goal was to shake off Ottoman sovereignty. The Russo-Turkish war of 1877-1878 gave the opening: Romania allied with Russia, proclaimed its independence on 9 May 1877 and its army, with Carol himself in command, fought with distinction at the siege of Plevna, in Bulgaria. Independence was recognised internationally in the Treaty of Berlin of 1878. In the negotiations, however, Russia kept southern Bessarabia and compensated Romania with Northern Dobruja, the strip between the Danube and the Black Sea with the port of Constanța, which left a lingering bitterness towards the powerful ally. Now fully sovereign, Romania declared itself a kingdom in 1881 and Carol I was crowned king. Under his long reign the country modernised, built railways and universities and a capital that people began to call 'little Paris', although the vast peasant mass remained in poverty, as the bloody rural revolt of 1907 showed.
Romania entered the First World War in August 1916 on the side of the Entente (France, the United Kingdom, Russia), with the declared aim of conquering Transylvania and uniting all Romanians in a single state. The campaign began in disaster: the armies of the Central Powers occupied Bucharest and much of the country within a few months, and the government and the court had to take refuge in Iași, in Moldavia, the only region that held out. In 1918, with Russia collapsing into the Bolshevik revolution, Romania was left isolated and was forced to sign a humiliating peace with the Germans. But the final collapse of the Central Powers that same autumn turned the situation completely around.
The fall of Austria-Hungary and of the Russian Empire opened the door to what Romanians call the Marea Unire, the Great Union. Within months, three regions with a Romanian majority or a strong Romanian presence proclaimed their union with the kingdom: Bessarabia (today's Republic of Moldova), which had broken away from Russia, voted to join on 27 March 1918; Bucovina, in the north, did so on 28 November; and, above all, Transylvania, where a great national assembly gathered at Alba Iulia on 1 December 1918 proclaimed union with Romania. That date, 1 December, is now the country's national day.
So was born 'Greater Romania' (România Mare), which with the addition of Transylvania, the Banat, Bessarabia and Bucovina reached its largest historical extent, close to 295,000 km², and doubled its population. The peace treaties of 1919-1920, in particular the Treaty of Trianon with Hungary, set those borders in stone. It was the high point of Romanian nationalism, but also the origin of lasting tensions: the new Romania was a multinational state with large minorities — Hungarians and Germans in Transylvania, Jews, Ukrainians — and Hungary never accepted the loss of Transylvania, which it remembers as an amputation. The interwar period had parliamentary life but also growing instability, corruption and, by the 1930s, the rise of a violent fascist and antisemitic movement, the Iron Guard (or Legion of the Archangel Michael), which would sow terror and push the country towards catastrophe.
The outbreak of the Second World War was devastating for Greater Romania. In the summer of 1940, under pressure from Hitler and Stalin, the country lost a third of its territory in a matter of weeks without a fight: the Soviet Union annexed Bessarabia and northern Bucovina; the Second Vienna Award, dictated by Germany and Italy, handed Hungary the northern half of Transylvania; and Bulgaria recovered southern Dobruja. The disaster brought down king Carol II and raised general Ion Antonescu to power. He proclaimed himself Conducător ('leader'), governed at first alongside the Iron Guard and then, after crushing the bloody legionary rebellion of January 1941 — accompanied by a pogrom in Bucharest that left more than a hundred Jews murdered — installed a personal military dictatorship.
Antonescu allied Romania with Nazi Germany and, in June 1941, joined the country to the invasion of the Soviet Union alongside the Wehrmacht, with the aim of recovering Bessarabia and Bucovina. Romanian troops fought as far as Stalingrad, where they suffered enormous losses. But the darkest chapter of these years is the Holocaust in Romania, in which Antonescu's regime bore direct responsibility of its own, not merely as a German satellite. It began with the Iași pogrom, at the end of June 1941, in which the Romanian authorities murdered at least some 13,000 Jews between the killings in the city and the 'death trains' in which thousands suffocated. Then came the mass deportations of Jews — and also of thousands of Roma (Gypsies) — to the region of Transnistria, the strip of occupied Ukraine under Romanian administration, where they perished by shooting, hunger, cold and disease.
The toll is terrible and, for decades, was denied or played down. According to the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania, chaired by Elie Wiesel, the Romanian and German authorities were responsible for the deaths of between 280,000 and 380,000 Jews in the territories under Romanian control, on top of the tens of thousands of Jews of northern Transylvania — under Hungarian rule — deported to Auschwitz in 1944. The Romanian stance towards the Jews was contradictory: while exterminating those of Bessarabia, Bucovina and Transnistria, in 1942 Antonescu halted the deportation to the German camps of the Jews of the country's core, which saved much of the community of the Old Kingdom. In August 1944, with the Red Army at the border, the young king Michael I staged a coup, arrested Antonescu and switched sides: Romania began fighting against Germany. The turn brought the end of the war forward but did not prevent what was coming: the Soviet occupation. Antonescu was tried and shot in 1946.
With the Red Army occupying the country, Romania fell into the Soviet orbit. Within a few years the Communist Party — tiny before the war — seized all power through fraud, coercion and repression. In 1947 king Michael I was forced to abdicate and the Romanian People's Republic was proclaimed. Under Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej a textbook Stalinist regime was installed: forced collectivisation of the countryside, nationalisation of industry, five-year plans, a cult of the party and an omnipresent political police, the Securitate, which filled the prisons and labour camps — such as the notorious Danube-Black Sea Canal or the prison at Sighet — with 'class enemies', former politicians, priests, peasants and dissidents. Gheorghiu-Dej also managed to get Soviet troops withdrawn from Romania in 1958.
On his death in 1965, Nicolae Ceaușescu took the reins and would govern for almost a quarter of a century. At first he raised some hope and even sympathy in the West: he eased censorship a little, allowed more cultural openness and, above all, kept his distance from Moscow, condemning the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. That image of an 'independent' communist earned him credit, visits from Western leaders and international prestige. But the mirage did not last. After a trip to China and North Korea at the start of the 1970s, Ceaușescu was left fascinated by Maoism and by the Kim Il-sung model, and came back obsessed with a delirious personality cult: he had himself called 'Leader' and 'Genius of the Carpathians', and placed his wife Elena and his family in the key posts of the state.
The 1980s were years of growing misery. Determined to pay off the country's foreign debt in full, Ceaușescu exported much of its food and energy and subjected the population to brutal rationing: power and heating cuts, endless queues, shortages of bread, meat and even light bulbs. At the same time he launched pharaonic megaprojects, such as the enormous House of the People in Bucharest — today the Palace of the Parliament, one of the largest buildings in the world — for which he razed an entire historic district of the capital. His 'systematisation' plan aimed to demolish thousands of villages and herd the peasants into concrete blocks. The repression of the Securitate, the hunger and the cold, together with coercive natalist policies that banned abortion and contraception and filled the orphanages with abandoned children, made 1980s Romania one of the most oppressive and grotesque regimes in the Eastern bloc.
When in 1989 the communist regimes of Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and East Germany itself were collapsing peacefully, in Romania Ceaușescu seemed immovable. His fall, however, was the fastest and the most violent of them all. The spark flew in Timișoara, the big city in the west, on 16 December 1989: a protest in defence of László Tőkés, a Reformed pastor of the Hungarian minority whom the authorities wanted to evict, turned into a mass demonstration against the regime. Ceaușescu ordered the army and the Securitate to open fire, and on 17 December there were many dead, although the city did not give in.
The outcome came in Bucharest. On 21 December, Ceaușescu called a great rally at the balcony of the Central Committee, confident of the popular backing he had always had. In front of the state television cameras, the crowd began to jeer him and to chant slogans: the dictator froze, bewilderment written on his face, in a scene broadcast live that marked the end of the spell. That night and the next, Bucharest filled with demonstrators and with gunfire. On 22 December, with the army going over to the revolt, Ceaușescu and his wife Elena fled by helicopter from the roof of the building, but they were captured shortly afterwards.
What followed was confused and bloody. A self-proclaimed National Salvation Front, made up largely of former communists led by Ion Iliescu, took power, while in the streets there was fighting against supposed 'terrorists' loyal to the regime in a battle that was never fully explained. On 25 December, Christmas Day, Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu were tried by a summary military court, convicted of genocide and 'economic sabotage', and shot immediately; the images of their bodies went around the world. The Romanian revolution left more than a thousand dead, most of them after the fall of the presidential couple. Its character — a genuine popular uprising, a palace coup exploited by the nomenklatura, or both at once — is still the subject of historiographical debate and of court cases decades later. What is beyond dispute is that it put an end to more than four decades of communism.
The post-communist transition was slow and difficult. The first years were dominated by Ion Iliescu and the National Salvation Front, with murky episodes such as the mineriads, the violent incursions of miners into Bucharest to put down the student opposition in 1990 and 1991. The economy, backward and bloated by communist heavy industry, went through a harsh restructuring, with inflation, unemployment and large-scale emigration: millions of Romanians left to work in Italy, Spain and other Western European countries, and their remittances became a pillar of the economy. Corruption, at once an inheritance and a persistent feature of the new system, became the great problem of public life.
Even so, Romania set about its integration with the West with determination. It joined NATO in 2004 and, after years of reforms demanded by Brussels, the European Union on 1 January 2007, together with Bulgaria. It was a profound transformation: European funds for infrastructure, open borders, free movement for its citizens. Because of persistent doubts about corruption and organised crime, the European Commission kept a Cooperation and Verification Mechanism in place for years to supervise the Romanian judiciary, and full entry into the Schengen area was delayed until well into the 2020s.
The Romania of today is a democratic republic and an EU member state of almost twenty million people, with an economy that has grown strongly and a booming technology sector, but still marked by regional inequality, by the emigration of its young people and by the struggle — at times heroic, with huge citizen mobilisations against corruption — to consolidate the rule of law. The country has also begun to face its past head on: it officially acknowledged its responsibility in the Holocaust after the report of the Wiesel Commission in 2004, and it is still working through the memory of communism and of the 1989 revolution. For the traveller, that layered history — Roman Dacia, the medieval monasteries, the Saxon citadels of Transylvania, the Ottoman legacy, the palaces of the kingdom, the scars of communism — is written into every region of the country.
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The region around Bucharest is the historic core of Wallachia (Țara Românească, literally 'the Romanian land'), the principality that Basarab I consolidated around 1330 by defeating the king of Hungary at the battle of Posada and securing its independence. Stretching between the Southern Carpathians and the Danube, Wallachia was one of the two cradles of the Romanian state, along with Moldavia. Its fertile plain made it rich in grain but also vulnerable: Ottoman armies passed through it, and its princes ruled for centuries in the shadow of the sultan, to whom they paid tribute in exchange for keeping their autonomy and their Orthodox faith.
The history of Wallachia is full of legendary voivodes. Mircea the Elder, straddling the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, fought the Ottomans and extended the principality as far as the sea. Vlad Țepeș, the Impaler, ruled from these lands in the middle of the fifteenth century and moved his court to Bucharest, which he mentions for the first time in a document of 1459. Constantin Brâncoveanu, at the start of the eighteenth century, gave his name to an artistic style of its own — the brâncovenesc style, a mixture of baroque, Renaissance and Byzantine tradition — before being executed in Constantinople along with his sons for refusing to renounce his Christian faith.
The old capitals of the principality mark out its historical geography: Câmpulung, Curtea de Argeș — with its sixteenth-century monastery, a jewel of Romanian art and the pantheon of the kings — and Târgoviște, where the Chindia Tower associated with Vlad Țepeș still stands and where, curiously, the Ceaușescus were shot in 1989. Over time, Wallachia's centre of gravity shifted to Bucharest, which in 1862 became the capital of a united Romania.
Bucharest (București) grew up as the princely court of Wallachia and, after the union of 1859 and the choice of the city as capital in 1862, became the great metropolis of the kingdom of Romania. During the long reign of Carol I and the first decades of the twentieth century it lived its golden age: broad Haussmann-style boulevards were opened, the Romanian Athenaeum, the Royal Palace and buildings of eclectic and art nouveau architecture went up, and the city earned the nickname 'little Paris' of the east, crowned by its own Arch of Triumph. It was a cosmopolitan cultural centre, with cafés, theatres and a brilliant intellectual life in the interwar period.
The twentieth century hit the city hard: the bombing of the Second World War, the earthquakes — the one in 1977 was especially destructive — and, above all, communist reconstruction. In the 1980s, Nicolae Ceaușescu undertook a radical transformation of the centre: he razed an entire historic district, with its churches and grand houses, to build the enormous Civic Centre and the House of the People (today the Palace of the Parliament), a cyclopean building that is one of the largest and heaviest in the world, a symbol of the regime's megalomania raised on the country's hunger.
Bucharest was also the stage for the end of the 1989 revolution: in what is now Revolution Square, in front of the old Central Committee building, the crowd jeered Ceaușescu on 21 December, and in the streets and in University Square people fought and died in the days that followed. Today the Romanian capital mixes that layered past: the few traces of 'little Paris', the huge blocks and avenues of communism, the Orthodox churches hidden between buildings and an intense nightlife and cultural scene in the old town (Lipscani).
In the Prahova valley, where the Southern Carpathians rise north of Bucharest, lies Sinaia, an elegant mountain resort that owes its name and its origin to a seventeenth-century monastery, founded by a boyar who named it in memory of Mount Sinai after a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. But what made Sinaia famous was king Carol I's decision to build his summer residence here.
Between 1873 and 1883 Peleș Castle went up, a lavish residence in the German neo-Renaissance style, with towers, timber framing and terraced gardens, considered one of the jewels of European romanticism and one of the most beautiful castles on the continent. Its interior, decorated with carved wood, armour, stained glass and themed halls, reflects the taste and the wealth of the new Romanian monarchy, German in origin (the Hohenzollern-Sigmaringens). Pelișor Castle was built next to it later, for king Ferdinand and queen Marie. Peleș was also a pioneer: one of the first castles in Europe with its own electricity supply and central heating.
Sinaia thus became the 'pearl of the Carpathians', a summer retreat for the court and the aristocracy, with hotels, a casino and period villas. After the abolition of the monarchy by the communist regime in 1947, Peleș was nationalised and came to be used as a museum and as an official residence for distinguished guests. Today it is one of the most visited tourist destinations in Romania and a testimony to the brief splendour of the kingdom, in the heart of an alpine landscape.
The valley of the river Prahova is the great natural corridor linking the Wallachian plain with Transylvania across the Southern Carpathians, the highest mountains in Romania. For centuries it was a trade route and a way through between the Wallachian principality and the Saxon towns of Transylvania; today, crossed by road and railway, it is the most accessible and most visited mountain area in the country, with a string of resorts — Sinaia, Bușteni, Predeal — that make up Romania's main skiing and mountaineering region.
Above the valley rise the Bucegi and Piatra Craiului massifs, with rock walls, high plateaus and famous formations such as the Sfinxul (the 'Sphinx') and the Babele, rocks eroded by the wind around which legends and esoteric theories have grown. Omu peak, in the Bucegi, tops 2,500 metres. These mountains, a historic refuge for Romanian shepherds and the setting for transhumance, are today a much-visited nature park, with cable cars, mountain huts and trails.
At the northern end of the valley, already in the pass towards Transylvania, is Brașov, and close by Bran Castle, which makes the Prahova corridor the gateway to the most famous tourist circuit in the country. The combination of alpine nature, royal castles and medieval citadels a short distance from Bucharest makes this one of the most travelled regions for visitors looking for both Carpathian scenery and Romanian history.
The history of Wallachia was shaped by its status as a vassal principality of the Ottoman Empire. Unlike the territories turned into Turkish provinces, Wallachia kept its Christian prince, its Orthodox Church and its internal autonomy, but at a high price: tribute to the sultan, constant interference from the Sublime Porte in the choice of its voivodes and permanent exposure to the wars between Ottomans, Habsburgs and Russians, which time and again turned its territory into a battlefield. Princes did not last long, overthrown by boyar intrigues or by the sultan's decision.
In the eighteenth century, Wallachia fell under the Phanariot regime: the sultan, distrusting local princes, began appointing Greek rulers from the Phanar district of Constantinople, who bought the office and squeezed the principality to recoup their investment. It was an age of crushing taxes and decline, though also of a certain modernisation. Discontent exploded in 1821 with the uprising of Tudor Vladimirescu, a revolt with social and national roots that, although it failed and ended with his execution, marked the end of the Phanariot regime and the beginning of the Wallachian national awakening.
The nineteenth century brought modernisation and union. The 1848 revolution in Wallachia, driven by a generation of young men educated in Paris, demanded liberties and reforms before being crushed by Ottomans and Russians. A decade later, the election of Alexandru Ioan Cuza as prince of Wallachia and of Moldavia in 1859 created the united Romanian state in practice, and Bucharest, the Wallachian capital, became the national capital. So the old 'Romanian land' of the south became the political centre of modern Romania.
Bucovina, in the far north of Romania, was in the Middle Ages the heart of the principality of Moldavia. Its name means 'land of beech trees', and its wooded hills sheltered the first Moldavian capitals and the seats of its princes. Here reigned Stephen the Great (Ștefan cel Mare), the greatest of the Moldavian voivodes, who governed for almost half a century (1457-1504), held off the Ottomans, Hungarians and Poles again and again, and, according to tradition, had a church or monastery built for every victory. The Orthodox Church canonised him centuries later as 'Stephen the Great and Holy'.
That density of religious foundations turned Bucovina into an extraordinary artistic ensemble. Its valleys preserve fortified monasteries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that are the summit of Romanian medieval art, heirs at once to the Byzantine tradition and to a local style of its own, the 'Moldavian style', which blends Gothic and Oriental elements.
Bucovina's history grew complicated in the modern age. In 1775, the Habsburg Empire annexed the region, which was part of Austria until 1918, when it joined Romania in the Great Union. After the Second World War, the Soviet Union kept the northern half of Bucovina, today in Ukraine, while the southern half remained in Romania. That Romanian Bucovina, with its monasteries and its villages, keeps an air of tradition and spirituality that sets it apart from the rest of the country.
Bucovina's treasure is its painted monasteries, a unique case in European art. Unlike other churches, their outer walls are covered with frescoes that tell, from top to bottom, biblical scenes, lives of saints, the Last Judgement and even historical episodes, painted in fresco in the sixteenth century to instruct a largely illiterate population. That these open-air paintings have survived almost five hundred years of Carpathian winters, rain and wind is in itself a small technical miracle.
Eight of these churches, in Suceava county, are inscribed on the Unesco World Heritage List under the name 'Churches of Moldavia'. The most famous is Voroneț monastery, built by Stephen the Great in 1488 in just a few months to commemorate a victory, and known as 'the Sistine Chapel of the East' for the quality and the intensity of its frescoes. Its distinctive feature is a deep, luminous shade of blue, obtained with a pigment whose exact recipe has been lost, which has gone down in art history as the 'Voroneț blue' (albastru de Voroneț).
The other great monasteries — Sucevița, Moldovița, Humor, Arbore, Probota — complete an ensemble that combines Orthodox spirituality, late Byzantine art and the memory of old Moldavia. Founded and decorated by princes, boyars and metropolitans, they also worked as fortresses against invasions. They are still living monasteries today, with monks and nuns, and they make up one of the most original artistic and religious ensembles in Europe, in the heart of Romanian Bucovina.
In north-western Romania, hemmed in between mountains and isolated for centuries, lies the district of Maramureș, one of the most traditional rural regions in Europe. Here, more than anywhere else in the country, an old peasant culture has survived, with villages of wooden houses and carved gates, traditional dress still in use, craft trades and a life tied to the rhythms of the land. Maramureș also claims one of the historical roots of the Romanian nation: from here, according to tradition, came Bogdan I, the voivode who around 1359 founded the independent principality of Moldavia.
The symbol of the region is its wooden churches. Raised by Orthodox communities that, under Hungarian rule, were forbidden to build churches in stone, they rise with very tall pointed bell towers that look like needles driven into the sky, all of it built in wood without a single iron nail, with remarkable carpentry skill. Eight of them, from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, are inscribed on the Unesco World Heritage List; the one at Peri-Săpânța has one of the tallest wooden bell towers in Europe.
The traditional life of Maramureș — transhumance, the festivals, the music, the crafts in wood and wool — now sits alongside modernity and emigration, but the region is still a refuge of rural authenticity, a long way from the gothic image of Transylvania. Its valleys, its wooden villages and its churches make Maramureș a kind of living museum of the peasant Romania of other times.
In the village of Săpânța, near the border with Ukraine, is one of the most singular and endearing places in Romania: the Merry Cemetery (Cimitirul Vesel). Instead of the sober crosses and the usual solemnity of a graveyard, here the graves are marked by wooden crosses painted a vivid blue — the 'Săpânța blue' — and decorated with colourful reliefs and verse epitaphs that tell, with humour and without any embarrassment, the life and sometimes the death of the person buried there.
The custom began in 1935 with Stan Ioan Pătraș, a local craftsman who started carving and painting these crosses with scenes from each person's life — the shepherd with his sheep, the weaver at her loom, the drunk in the tavern, the accident that caused the death — and adding ironic, tender or cheeky texts written in the first person, as if the dead person were speaking. After he died, a disciple carried on the tradition, which is still alive today and has filled the cemetery with hundreds of colourful crosses.
This lighthearted approach to death has been read as an echo of an old Dacian attitude to the afterlife — the ancients, according to Herodotus, did not fear death — and as an expression of the character of Maramureș. Now a tourist attraction and a symbol of Romanian folk art, the Merry Cemetery of Săpânța sums up the spirit of this northern district: tradition, painted wood, peasant humour and a relationship with life and death very different from the usual solemnity.
The Romanian north lived through the century of empires and wars with particular harshness. Bucovina was an Austrian province from 1775, which gave it a central European stamp — Suceava and above all neighbouring Cernăuți (Chernivtsi, today in Ukraine) were multicultural centres, with Romanians, Ukrainians, Jews, Germans and Poles — and a relative modernisation under the Habsburgs. Maramureș, for its part, was part of the kingdom of Hungary until 1918. Both regions joined Romania in the Great Union of that year.
The Second World War brought the tearing apart. In 1940, the Soviet Union annexed northern Bucovina together with Bessarabia, and the border split the historic region in two: the northern half, with Cernăuți, stayed in the USSR — today in Ukraine — and the southern half in Romania. The large Jewish population of Bucovina fell victim to the Holocaust: under the Antonescu regime, thousands of Jews from the region were deported to Transnistria, where many died of hunger, cold and disease, in one of the chapters of the extermination for which the Romanian authorities were directly responsible.
Under communism, mountain isolation helped preserve the traditional life of Maramureș and of the Bucovina villages, though forced collectivisation hit the countryside there too. After 1989, emigration took many young people to Western Europe, but the two regions kept their exceptional heritage — the painted monasteries, the wooden churches — and are today destinations for a cultural tourism that looks in northern Romania for an authenticity and a spirituality hard to find elsewhere on the continent.
After running almost 2,900 kilometres across Europe, the Danube ends its journey in Romania, where it opens into a vast fan of arms, channels, lakes and reed beds before flowing into the Black Sea: this is the Danube Delta, one of the largest and best preserved wetlands on the continent. The river splits into three main arms — Chilia, Sulina and Sfântu Gheorghe — that trace a constantly changing watery maze, where land and water blur into each other and the delta keeps growing out to sea with the sediment the river carries.
It is, above all, a natural sanctuary of world importance. The delta holds the largest expanse of reed beds on the planet and an extraordinary biodiversity: it is home or a staging post to more than 300 species of birds — pelicans, cormorants, herons, swans — which make it a paradise for birdwatchers, and to dozens of fish species. For its ecological importance, the Danube Delta Biosphere Reserve has been protected as a Unesco World Heritage Site since 1991 and as a biosphere reserve.
The delta is inhabited by communities that live from fishing in isolated villages, reachable almost only by water, among them the Lipovans, descendants of the Russian 'Old Believers' who fled religious persecution in the eighteenth century and settled in these watery lands. The small town of Tulcea is the gateway, and from it the boats set off into a world of water, birds and silence. The Danube Delta is, along with the Carpathians, one of Romania's great natural treasures.
Constanța, Romania's largest port on the Black Sea, is one of the oldest inhabited cities in the country. It was founded in the sixth century BC by Greek colonists from Miletus under the name of Tomis, as part of the network of colonies the Greeks set up all along the Black Sea coast for trade. Later it passed into Roman hands and was absorbed into the province of Moesia; its present name comes from Constantiana, in honour of a sister of the emperor Constantine the Great.
Tomis holds a place in the history of world literature: it was here that the great Latin poet Ovid, author of the Metamorphoses, was exiled in AD 8 by order of the emperor Augustus and for reasons that were never fully explained. Ovid spent his last years in this remote city, at the edge of the Roman world, longing for Rome and lamenting his fate in two works written in exile, the Tristia and the Pontic letters (Epistulae ex Ponto). He died in Tomis around the year 17 or 18. The main square of the old town now bears his name and is presided over by a statue of the poet.
Constanța preserves traces of that antiquity — such as the impressive Roman mosaic of an old commercial building — alongside the mark of its Ottoman period, with a mosque, and above all of its early twentieth-century splendour, when it became the fashionable seaside resort of the kingdom of Romania. From that time comes its most famous symbol: the Casino, an art nouveau building facing the sea that, after decades of neglect and ruin, has been restored. The country's gateway to the Black Sea and to the beaches of the coast, such as neighbouring Mamaia, Constanța combines more than two thousand five hundred years of history with its role as a major port and tourist city.
The region around Constanța and the delta is Dobruja (Dobrogea), the strip of land between the lower Danube and the Black Sea. It is perhaps the most diverse and cosmopolitan region of Romania, the result of a crossroads history through which Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Bulgarians, Ottomans, Tatars, Russians and Romanians passed. That layering left a mixture of populations — Romanians, Turks, Tatars, Lipovans, Bulgarians, Greeks, Armenians — and of religions that is still reflected today in its villages, its mosques and its churches.
For centuries, Dobruja was part of the Ottoman Empire, which gave it an Oriental stamp that sets it apart from the rest of the country and explains the presence of Turkish and Tatar Muslim communities, among the oldest in Europe. The region only became part of Romania in 1878, after the war of independence: in the Treaty of Berlin, Romania received Northern Dobruja in exchange for the southern Bessarabia that Russia took from it. Southern Dobruja (the 'Quadrilateral') was Romanian between 1913 and 1940, when it passed to Bulgaria.
That late integration and that mixture of peoples make Dobruja a case apart within Romania. Here the Greco-Roman remains of the coast — Tomis, Histria, Callatis — sit alongside the traces of Ottoman Islam, the fishing villages of the delta and the modern beaches of the Black Sea. It is the country's window on the sea and its most eastern and most diverse corner, where the history of Romania links up with that of the Black Sea and the Balkans.
The Danube is not only the river that forms the delta: it is an axis that has shaped the whole history of Romania. For centuries it was the frontier of the Roman Empire — the Danube limes — the line separating the civilisation of Rome from the 'barbarian' peoples of the north, and it was precisely in order to cross it and conquer Dacia that Trajan had his famous stone bridge built at Drobeta, at the start of the second century. Later, the river was the border between the Christian world of the principalities and the Ottoman Empire, and the setting for countless wars.
Along its Romanian stretch, the Danube offers spectacular scenery, such as the gorge of the Iron Gates (Porțile de Fier), where the river narrows between mountains on the border with Serbia. There stands the Tabula Traiana, a Roman inscription commemorating Trajan's works, and there, in the twentieth century, the colossal face of Decebalus, the Dacian king, was carved into a cliff above the water. On that same stretch, the communist regime built a large hydroelectric dam jointly with Yugoslavia.
The darkest chapter of the Romanian Danube in the twentieth century is the Danube-Black Sea Canal, a navigable shortcut between the river and Constanța. Its first attempted construction, in the 1950s under the Stalinist regime of Gheorghiu-Dej, became an instrument of terror: thousands of political prisoners — opponents, peasants, intellectuals, clergy — were sent to forced labour in appalling conditions on what came to be called 'the canal of death', where many lost their lives. The work was abandoned and only completed decades later. The Danube thus sums up Romanian history: a Roman frontier, a line of war against the Ottomans and, in the twentieth century, the setting for communist repression.
The Romanian Black Sea coast, south of Constanța, became in the twentieth century the country's great summer holiday area. Even in the days of the kingdom, resorts such as Mamaia or Eforie drew polite society, but it was under communism that the coast was turned into a mass destination. Along the shore the regime built a string of seaside resorts — with mythological names such as Neptun, Venus, Saturn, Jupiter, Olimp — full of concrete hotels where Romanian workers and tourists from the Eastern bloc spent their organised holidays.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the Romanian coast even became a modest window for hard currency: it took in Western European tourists drawn by low prices, at a time when Ceaușescu was cultivating his image as an 'independent' communist open to the West. The sandy beaches, wider than those of other Black Sea coasts, and the warm summer climate made this strip the country's main tourist focus alongside the Carpathians.
After 1989, many of those resorts aged and fell somewhat behind the competition from Mediterranean destinations, but the coast is still where Romanians go to the seaside, with Mamaia as its liveliest point and with historic towns such as Mangalia — the ancient Greek colony of Callatis — at the far south. Beach, Greco-Roman history and communist memory go hand in hand along this coast, Romania's only access to the sea and the eastern finish of a country that runs from the Carpathians to the Black Sea.
Western Romania — the Banat around Timișoara and the Crișana region around Oradea — is a land of fertile plains and cosmopolitan cities, shaped by its position as a border and a meeting point of peoples. For centuries it was part of the kingdom of Hungary and then of the Habsburg Empire, and its population was always one of the most diverse in central Europe: Romanians, Hungarians, Germans (the 'Banat Swabians', German colonists settled by the Habsburgs in the eighteenth century), Serbs, Jews, Slovaks, Bulgarians and others lived side by side in its towns and fields.
That central European stamp sets the west apart from the rest of the country. After the region was retaken from the Ottomans at the start of the eighteenth century, the Habsburgs repopulated it, drained it and modernised it, giving it a regular street plan, wide squares and baroque and, later, Secession (art nouveau) architecture. The Banat was one of the richest and most developed lands in the empire, with prosperous agriculture and early industrialisation.
Like the rest of Transylvania and the western lands, the Banat and Crișana joined Romania in 1918, after the collapse of Austria-Hungary, although the Banat was divided between Romania and the new kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (Yugoslavia). The German community, a very large one, was for the most part deported to the USSR after the Second World War and then emigrated en masse to Germany, above all in the communist years and after 1989. Even so, the west keeps its plural character and its central European look, which make it feel closer to Vienna or Budapest than to Bucharest.
Timișoara, the great city of the Banat, is known for its central European elegance and for a long list of firsts that have earned it the nickname 'little Vienna'. Set on a plain criss-crossed by canals, for a century and a half (1552-1716) it was the main Ottoman stronghold in the region, until prince Eugene of Savoy took it from the Turks for the Habsburgs. Under Austria it was completely rebuilt along the lines of military engineering and baroque town planning, with fortifications, monumental squares and pastel-coloured buildings that still define its centre.
The city prides itself on having been a pioneer in many things. The most famous: on 12 November 1884, Timișoara became the first city in Europe with electric public lighting in its streets, with a network feeding several hundred incandescent lamps. It was also among the first on the continent to have horse-drawn and later electric trams, and one of the most modern cities of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Its trilingual population — Romanian, Hungarian, German — and its cultural life made it a cosmopolitan hub.
That open character and its face of baroque squares — Victory Square, Union Square, with its Catholic and Serbian Orthodox churches facing each other — make Timișoara one of the most beautiful cities in Romania. In recognition of its heritage and its cultural life, it was European Capital of Culture in 2023. But if the city holds a central place in the country's history, it is above all for what happened there in December 1989.
The name of Timișoara is written into history as the place where the revolution that ended communism in Romania began. It all started on 16 December 1989 around an unexpected figure: László Tőkés, a pastor of the Reformed Church and a member of the Hungarian minority, whom the authorities wanted to evict and transfer for his criticism of the regime. His parishioners gathered to stop it, and what began as a religious protest quickly turned into a mass demonstration against the Ceaușescu regime, in which Romanians and Hungarians marched together chanting slogans of freedom.
The regime responded with violence. On 17 December, Ceaușescu ordered the army and the Securitate to open fire on the demonstrators, and there were many dead and wounded in the streets of Timișoara. A rumour even ran — later disproved in its exaggerated figures — of thousands of victims, which helped to inflame the rest of the country. But far from being cowed, the city declared itself a 'free city' and the revolt spread. Ceaușescu, who was away on a trip to Iran, came back and on 21 December called a rally in Bucharest to condemn the 'troublemakers' of Timișoara: it was there that the crowd jeered him and his fall began.
The spark from Timișoara thus caught across Romania and led to the overthrow and the execution of the Ceaușescus on Christmas Day. The city pays tribute every year to its 'heroes' and 'martyrs', and keeps the memory of those days in monuments and museums. The 1989 revolution left more than a thousand dead across the country, many of them precisely in Timișoara, the city that dared first and that takes pride in having lit the fuse of freedom.
On the border with Hungary, on the banks of the river Crișul Repede, Oradea (Nagyvárad to the Hungarians) is one of Romania's architectural surprises. An old episcopal city of the kingdom of Hungary, with a medieval fortress and an imposing baroque basilica and palace, Oradea lived its greatest splendour at the start of the twentieth century, when it was a prosperous city of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, with an active bourgeoisie and a substantial Jewish community.
From those golden years, between the end of the nineteenth century and 1914, comes its great treasure: one of the richest and most complete ensembles of art nouveau (Secession) architecture in central and eastern Europe. Its avenues and squares are lined with dozens of Secession-style buildings, with undulating façades, mosaics, stained glass, floral motifs and elements drawn from Hungarian folk art. The most famous is the Black Eagle Palace (Vulturul Negru), with its shopping arcade roofed in stained glass. This heritage, long neglected, has been restored in recent decades and has turned Oradea into an increasingly appealing destination.
Like the rest of Crișana, Oradea passed from Hungary to Romania after the First World War, with the exception of the years 1940-1944, when the Second Vienna Award returned it to Hungary; in that period, its large Jewish community was deported to Auschwitz. A border city and a city of mixture, with Romanian and Hungarian population, Oradea keeps that central European air that marks the whole west of the country, along with its exceptional Belle Époque legacy.
Western Romania changed hands more often than almost any other region in the country. After the Hungarian disaster at Mohács (1526), the Banat was under Ottoman rule for almost two centuries: Timișoara was the capital of a Turkish province (eyalet) from 1552, with mosques, baths and a garrison of janissaries. The area was a marshy frontier land, depopulated by the continuous wars between the Ottoman Empire and the Habsburgs.
The great change came at the start of the eighteenth century. Prince Eugene of Savoy, at the head of the imperial armies, took Timișoara and the Banat from the Ottomans in 1716, and by the peace of Passarowitz (1718) the region passed to the Habsburgs. Vienna then undertook a radical transformation: it drained the marshes, dug canals, founded towns on regular plans and repopulated the district with colonists from across the empire, especially the 'Danube Swabians', German farmers and craftsmen who gave the region much of its agricultural and industrial prosperity. The Banat thus became one of the richest and most modern lands of the monarchy.
That double inheritance — the Ottoman passage and, above all, the deep Austrian stamp — explains the singular character of the west: its baroque and Secession town planning, its diversity of peoples and religions, its early industrialisation and its central European mindset. When the region joined Romania in 1918, it brought the new state towns and an urban culture very different from those of the old kingdom of Wallachia and Moldavia. That contrast between the central European west and the rest of the country is still one of the features of Romanian identity.
Transylvania — Ardeal in Romanian, Erdély in Hungarian, Siebenbürgen in German — is the most complex and most disputed region of Romania. Ringed in a horseshoe by the Carpathians, for almost a thousand years it was part of the kingdom of Hungary, which absorbed it between the eleventh and twelfth centuries and organised it as a voivodeship with a statute of its own. To defend and populate this frontier land, the Hungarian kings settled two communities that would shape its history: the Szeklers (székely), a Hungarian-speaking population installed as guardians of the eastern borders, and the Saxons, German colonists invited from the twelfth century on with rights of self-government.
Those Saxon colonists founded the famous walled towns of Transylvania — Sibiu (Hermannstadt), Brașov (Kronstadt), Sighișoara (Schäßburg), Bistrița, Mediaș — and the 'seven fortresses' that give the region its German name. Prosperous thanks to trade and crafts, they gave themselves guilds, walls, fortified churches and a dense network of villages with walled churches that are World Heritage Sites today. Political power was reserved for three privileged 'nations' — the Hungarian nobles, the Saxons and the Szeklers — united from 1437 in the Unio Trium Nationum after crushing a peasant revolt.
The great absentee from that pact was the Romanian people, Orthodox and mostly peasant, who probably already made up a very large share of the population but were excluded from political and social rights. On that inequality, and on the politically charged question of who lived in Transylvania first (the Romanians, heirs of the Daco-Romans, or the Hungarians who arrived in the Middle Ages), an identity conflict was built that runs through the whole modern history of central Europe and still echoes today in relations between Romania and Hungary.
Brașov and Sibiu are the two great towns of Transylvania's Saxon legacy. Brașov (Kronstadt to the Germans, Brassó to the Hungarians), at the foot of Mount Tâmpa, was a commercial power sitting at the crossing of the routes between Wallachia, Moldavia and central Europe. Its main square, dominated by the imposing Black Church — the largest Gothic church in Romania, blackened by a fire in the seventeenth century — its walls, towers and defensive bastions, and the narrow lane of Strada Sforii bear witness to its medieval past. Printing arrived here in the sixteenth century thanks to the Saxon humanist Johannes Honterus, and here the deacon Coresi published some of the first books in the Romanian language.
Sibiu (Hermannstadt, Nagyszeben) was for centuries the leading Saxon town and the centre of their self-government, seat of the 'count of the Saxons'. Its historic centre, one of the best preserved in Eastern Europe, is laid out around three connected squares, with houses whose roofs seem to have 'eyes' — the half-closed dormer windows — the Evangelical church, medieval stairways and passages, and a ring of walls and guild towers. Sibiu was the cradle of pioneering institutions, such as the first museum in Romania (the Brukenthal, of the eighteenth century) and one of the country's first hospitals and pharmacies.
Both towns embody the fate of the Saxon community: an educated and prosperous minority that gave Transylvania its urban shape over eight hundred years and that almost disappeared in the twentieth century. Persecuted and deported to the USSR after the Second World War because they were German, and later 'sold' by the Ceaușescu regime to West Germany in exchange for hard currency, the Saxons emigrated en masse, above all after 1989. Very few remain today, but their mark defines the landscape: in 2007 it was Sibiu, precisely, that was European Capital of Culture, and Klaus Iohannis, the mayor of Sibiu who went on to become president of Romania, came from a Saxon family in the region.
Sighișoara (Schäßburg in German, Segesvár in Hungarian) is one of the best preserved inhabited medieval citadels in Europe, and for that reason a Unesco World Heritage Site. Founded by Saxon colonists, it keeps its walled upper town intact, with cobbled streets, colourful houses, churches and a series of defensive towers built and maintained by the different craft guilds. The most famous is the Clock Tower, of the fourteenth century, with its automaton marking the hours and a view over the whole town.
Sighișoara has a link with Romania's most famous figure: it is held that Vlad III Țepeș, the Impaler, was born here around 1431, when his father Vlad Dracul was living in the town. The house marked as his birthplace, in the upper town, is today a tourist draw tied to the Dracula myth, although it is worth remembering that the link between the historical voivode and the vampire legend is a nineteenth-century literary invention.
Beyond Dracula, Sighișoara is living evidence of Saxon Transylvania: its citadel, its walls and its church on the hill — reached by a covered wooden staircase of more than 170 steps — evoke the centuries when the seven German towns of the region prospered on trade and crafts. As in the rest of Transylvania, the Saxon community that built it practically disappeared in the twentieth century, but its urban heritage remains one of the most complete medieval ensembles on the continent.
Perched on a rock in the pass that links Transylvania with Wallachia, Bran Castle is known worldwide as 'Dracula's castle'. The fortress was built in the fourteenth century by the Saxons of Brașov to control the trade route and defend it from the Ottomans, and later belonged to the Hungarian crown and, in the twentieth century, to queen Marie of Romania, who turned it into a residence. Its present fame, however, rests on a commercial misunderstanding: the castle's historical connection with Vlad Țepeș is flimsy — the voivode may have passed through the area, but he did not live there — and its association with the count of Bram Stoker's novel is purely literary and touristic. Even so, its dramatic silhouette fits the gothic imagination so well that it has become the most visited destination in the country.
Beyond the myth, the region of Transylvania offers one of the most spectacular mountain landscapes in Europe: the Transfăgărășan road. Built on Ceaușescu's orders between 1970 and 1974 — officially as a strategic military route after the scare of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia — it crosses the Făgăraș massif, the highest part of the Southern Carpathians, climbing past 2,000 metres of altitude. Its layout, with countless hairpin bends, tunnels and viaducts, has made it famous among driving enthusiasts as one of the most beautiful roads in the world.
Along its course, the Transfăgărășan passes glacial lakes such as Bâlea, waterfalls and forests, and runs near the ruins of Poenari fortress, this one a genuine residence of Vlad Țepeș, far less famous than Bran but historically linked to the Impaler. Closed by snow for much of the year, the road can only be driven in the summer months, when it becomes one of Romania's great natural attractions. Bran and the Transfăgărășan sum up the appeal of Transylvania nicely: the mixture of myth and mountain, of gothic legend and the real landscape of the Carpathians.
Cluj-Napoca, the largest city in Transylvania, condenses the history and the tensions of the region. Its double name says it all: 'Napoca' evokes the Roman city of Trajan's Dacia, and the addition was pushed by Ceaușescu in the 1970s to underline the Daco-Roman origin against the strong Hungarian presence; 'Cluj' (Kolozsvár in Hungarian, Klausenburg in German) points to its long history as a Hungarian and Saxon city. A cultural and university centre since the Middle Ages, with a monumental Gothic church of St Michael and palaces from different periods, Cluj was for centuries one of the capitals of Transylvania and a focus of Hungarian life.
The great turn came in 1918. The fall of Austria-Hungary opened the door to the Great Union: on 1 December 1918, a national assembly gathered at Alba Iulia — the city where Michael the Brave had proclaimed his short-lived union in 1600 — voted for Transylvania to join Romania. The Treaty of Trianon of 1920 confirmed it. For Romanians it was the fulfilment of a centuries-old dream; for Hungary, an amputation it never accepted. The Hungarian minority of Transylvania, still very large, became the citizenry of a new state.
The twentieth century brought more painful swings. In 1940, the Second Vienna Award, dictated by Hitler and Mussolini, returned the northern half of Transylvania to Hungary, which only came back to Romania at the end of the Second World War; in the meantime, the Jews of northern Transylvania, under Hungarian administration, were deported to Auschwitz in 1944. Under communism, Cluj went through ethnic tensions encouraged by the regime's nationalism, especially during the long mayoralty of the ultranationalist Gheorghe Funar in the 1990s. Today, by contrast, Cluj-Napoca is a young university and technology city, one of Romania's economic engines, where Romanians and Hungarians live side by side and the old multi-ethnic Transylvania is trying to make peace with its past.