Halloween in Transylvania

On Thursday, Marina only teaches one class, and has no classes on Friday (although she usually attends a Romanian culture class that day), so we took off for Transylvania. Our Airbnb in Craiova was inexpensive enough that we were comfortable keeping it through our Sunday departure, and got an Airbnb in the town of Hunedoara for two nights.

Marina was looking forward to having some variety after arriving in Craiova almost a month before. Transylvania is famous for its castles. While this includes Bram Castle, supposedly the inspiration for Dracula’s Castle, we decided to avoid the expected crowds and head elsewhere.

We had a four hour drive, and we absolutely did not make our trip more interesting by putting a tiny bit of deisel fuel (motorină) rather than gas (benzină) in the tank. No, why would we do that?

The drive wound us slowly through many villages, as we watched Oltenia turn to Transylvania, with different styles. Transylvania has well-known red roofs. Lots of the villages were Romani, and we saw two funerals.

We had our first real travel hiccup when we arrived at our Airbnb and the host was not there to meet us and did not respond to our calls and texts. We suspected that we had been scammed. After half an hour of waiting on a not very comfortable street corner, we contacted Airbnb and headed to a hotel. It turns out that we hadn’t been scammed. The host didn’t speak English and was just not appropriately responsive. In the meantime, we were refunded the Airbnb cost and the hotel was lovely.

After finally getting settled, we went out for dinner and a walk. Castelul Corvinilor (Corvin’s Castle) was beautiful and a little eerie in the moonlight.

The next day, after the hotel breakfast, we headed back to the castle in the daylight.

The Gothic-Renaissance castle is one of the largest in Europe and dates to the 15th century. Legend says that Vlad the Impaler was imprisoned there. There was a handy display of torture. Mostly, it was just fun to wander around all the halls and towers. Behold many photos!

Marina particularly enjoyed the Game of Throniness of it all.

This was Halloween day, and for the first time in a while we ran into a bunch of Americans including a busload doing a tour of Transylvania for Halloween. It did not make us miss America. Overall, there was some Halloween acknowledgement here and there, but it’s not really a big deal in Romania.

After the castle, we had pizza for lunch in the nearby city of Deva. We debated whether we should walk up to the top of this small moutain to see the Deva fortress (the funicular was sadly not taking passengers).

Who were we to pass up the challege? There was not a lot of context for the fortress, but it was a lot of fun to walk around an there were beautiful views. Which we deserved, because it was a monster to go up! Many a stair. It was also near an Olympic training facility and some of us born before 1970 were excited about the Nadia Comăneci bust.