Bucharest - Transilvania

What a day we’ve had today. Adrian picked us up a little early, which turned out to be just as well in the end, as it was a tight schedule. We headed out of the City a bit before 8 am, heading for Transylvania to the Pele Castle and the Bran Castle (Dracula’s Castle).  As we left the City behind the traffic thinned somewhat and after 150 kilometres, we arrived at Pele Castle around 9:30 am, only to find it didn’t open on Tuesdays until 11 am. Over to Plan B!!  We’ll go to Bran Castle first instead, so, off we went.  As we passed through villages you could see the change in architecture of the houses.  Most in these areas were similar to Swiss style, fashioned that way for the snow to slide off the roofs more easily, and more brightly coloured. We arrived at Bran Castle, which is in the city of Sianai, around 10:45 am, and entered the quite large Castle grounds.  This Castle sits high above the town on a very craggy outcrop of rocks.  Quite an imposing looking structure really. We were told that Bram Stoker chose this Castle for the setting for his mythical creature ‘Dracula” because it met the things he wrote about in his book. The Castle was like most other Castles one visits, with its numerous rooms, turrets and wishing well in the central courtyard.  Interesting place to visit, more particularly if you know the legend of Vlad the Impaler and the story of the mythical ‘Dracula’, which we admit, we didn’t really know.

Dracula's Castle

 We then travelled on to Brasov, originally a German built City.  Here we visited the Black Church which is the biggest Lutheran Church between Vienna and Istanbul.  Originally it was a Roman Catholic Church, but it was burned down by the Austrians, killing the 2,000 people they locked inside the Church, as well as destroying lots of the artefacts from the time.  A few treasures survived the fire and are displayed in the building now. This building has indeed VERY tall ceilings and a HUGE pipe organ. There are stalls for the merchants of the town to sit in along the side walls, stalls for the travellers and stalls for the poor. Seems everyone is covered.

We walked around the huge town square whilst having the History of it explained to us and ended up having some soup for our lunch there.  Adrian wanted us to try a Romanian spread made from eggplant and mayonnaise then mixed with finely chopped onion as well. I usually don’t eat eggplant, but, not wanting to insult or offend Adrian, I tried it, and it was quite nice.

 Brasov

From Brasov we returned to Peles Castle and we were so glad we did, and that it was AFTER Bran Castle. Adrian was worried that we would not get back before they closed up, but, we made it with about ½ hour to spare.  Peles Castle is truly magnificent!  The amount of wood carvings and the ornate fittings etc, took one’s breath away really, and had to be seen to believe the beauty of them all. Every room was done out in carved wood, be it the ceilings, walls or furniture. Even the statues, and there were plenty of these, were carved from wood and they were just lovely.  What craftsmanship! The mirrors that came from the Murano Glass factory in Venice were just beautiful too with the delicate glass flowers adorning the sides of the mirrors. The weapons room was full of swords, shields, amour and spears all displayed with their coat of arms. This Castle is fairly modern in comparison to others we’ve seen in that it has a ‘dumb waiter’, electric heating, an elevator and an old fashioned inbuilt vacuuming system.

 Peles Castle

For the people who wondered why we would come to Bucharest early for our trip on the River Boat we have to say that it is a lovely part of the World, not much visited, which means people are missing out on an interesting place.  We have really enjoyed our time here and the past 2 days on our tours have been so interesting.  The information we have been told about the History of these places visited is mind boggling and it is hard to remember everything, but it has shown us another side of these countries.