Notes from Transylvania

Transylvania is the part of Romania that most people have heard of and least people can describe. It sits inside the curve of the Carpathians, and for most of its history it was governed from somewhere other than Bucharest.

From the twelfth century, German speaking settlers, known later as the Transylvanian Saxons, were invited in and built towns and villages across the south of the region. Their villages are the ones with a church in the middle wrapped in defensive walls, built that way because raids were a fact of life. Several of these fortified churches are on the World Heritage list, and Sighisoara, a walled hill town that is still inhabited, is on it too.

Most of the Saxon population left in the twentieth century, in stages, and largely for Germany. What remains is the built landscape, some of it beautifully restored, some of it not, and a small number of people who stayed. Hungarian is still widely spoken across the region, and in parts of it, it is the majority language. Romanian, Hungarian, German and Romani have coexisted here for a very long time.

For a visitor this means the region reads differently from the rest of the country. The village layouts, the roof lines, the way the houses meet the street, all of it belongs to a different tradition than the one you see south of the mountains.

It also means that the Dracula question, which is what brings a lot of people here, is the least interesting thing about the place. Bran Castle is worth seeing as a castle on a rock. The rest of Transylvania is worth seeing because eight hundred years of people who did not agree with each other built it side by side.