Travels in Moldova and Bucovina

It was a long, slow train journey from Bucharest to Bucovina, in the north-east of Romania, close to the border with Ukraine. I arrived late in the evening at the little railway station at Gura Humorului, to the west of the county capital, Suceava. My main purpose in coming to Gura Humorului was to visit a couple of the famous medieval painted monasteries nearby. Bucovina had been part of the principality of Moldavia since the 14^th century, but in 1775 it was annexed to the Hapsburg Empire. The name Bucovina, or Buchenland in German, meant beech land, a reference to its rolling forested hills. In 1918, Bucovina was incorporated into the newly united Romanian state. However, in the second world war, the Soviet Union annexed the northern half of the region to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. Northern Bucovina, officially known as Chernivtsi Region in Ukraine, remains part of Ukraine.

I set off in the morning under a hot sun to walk to the monastery of Voroneț (pronounced Voronets), about 3 or 4 kilometres south of the town. Founded in1488, its church is one of eight in the area that are now UN World Heritage sites. The idea of covering the exterior walls as well as the interior with frecoes is credited to the mid-16th century Orthodox Metropolitan of Moldavia, Grigore Roşca, to illustrate biblical stories for the benefit of the illiterate peasantry. Sitting amid wooded hills and protected by a walled stockade, it is a beautiful, peaceful place. The colours of the frescoes are in remarkably good condition given the passage of time, and the faces and features of the saints are still clear. From Voroneț, I headed back to Gura Humorului, and decided that, rather than walk, I would take the local bus to the Humor Monastery, about five kilometres away.

Voroneț Monastery, Bucovina

Built in 1530, the Humor Monastery church is architecturally similar to that at Voroneț, but it lacks a spire. There is, however, a tower a few metres away from the church. The frescoes at Humor have suffered more from weathering than those at Voroneț, especially on the side that is more exposed to direct sunlight. In the frecoes at the Humor monastery, the colouring is different from that at Voroneț. At Voroneț, a particulalrly vivid blue stands out, known as Voroneț blue. But the biblical stories they depict are much the same. I was particularly drawn to the depiction of the Last Judgement that covers the back walls of both monastery churches. As the figure of Christ presides, with the saints seated to either side, the dead rise from their graves, summoned by Angels blowing horns, while wild animals offer up the bones of those they have devoured, and a ship rises from the depths of the sea. While the righteous press to enter the garden of heaven, the damned are pushed by demons, themselves prodded by Angels with their lances, into a flaming river that takes them down to Hell. It is a very vivid scene, no doubt intended to be instructive and frightening to sinful believers.

The next morning I set off by minibus to the city of Iaşi (pronounced Yash), close to the border with the Republic of Moldova. Iaşi had been the capital of the principality of Moldavia from 1564 until 1859, and then of the United principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia until 1862, when Bucharest became the capital of the new, united Romanian state. Historic Moldavia had been much larger before the eastern half of the principality, Bessarabia, was ceded to Imperial Russia in 1812 by the Ottoman Empire, of which Moldavia was a vassal state. After the First World War, the Romanian state expanded to include Bessarabia, as well as Bucovina. But during the World War II, the Soviet Union took back Bessarabia, the majority of which today forms the independent Republic of Moldova, while southern Bessarabia was incorporated into Ukraine.

Church of the Three Hierarchs, Iaşi

Iaşi is known as an important cultural centre in Romania, and is home to the oldest Romanian university and theatre. It is an attractive town, with numerous fine churches and monasteries, as well as civic buildings and gardens which I found were generally better maintained than is the case in Bucharest. The historic theatre is especially beautiful, as is the remarkable Church of the Three Hierarchs. The church was built by one of Moldavia’s most famous rulers, Vasile Lupu (Basil the Wolf), who was of Albanian origin and ruled the principality for nearly 20 years in the 17^th century. The outside of the building is decorated from top to bottom with strikingly original intricate stone lacery. Vasile Lupu also introduced Moldavia’s first printing press and its first codified law. He was a noted champion of Orthodox Christianity, hosting the Synod of Iaşi, which was convened by the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople in 1642 to counter what were seen as Roman Catholic and Protestant doctrinal errors. The spirit of Vasile Lupu appears to live on. Apart from numerous churches, I don’t think I had ever before visited a town whose streets were so full of people in priestly garb. I visited the monasteries of Barboi and Golia, tranquil walled refuges in the heart of the city. There is also an Armenian church, indicating the widespread influence of the Armenian diaspora over centuries.

From Iaşi, I travelled by minibus across the border to Chişinău, capital city of the present-day independent Republic of Moldova. Chişinău was a small town when Bessarabia was annexed by the Russian Empire in 1812, but as the capital of Bessarabia province it was developed over the following decades, with broad avenues, a cathedral and a triumphal arch to mark the Russian victory in the Russo-Turkish war of 1828-29. Following Bessarabia’s unification with Romania after the First World War, in the 1920s a statue of Stephen the Great, medieval Moldavia’s most notable ruler, who reigned for nearly half a century from 1457-1504, was erected in the city centre. The statue has had an unsettled history, reflecting the shifting borders in the region. In 1940, it was moved to Vasliu, in Romania, days before the Soviet annexation of Bessarabia, then back to Chişinău in 1942, when Romania, allied with Nazi Germany, had recovered not only Bessarabia and northern Bucovina, but had expanded into Odessa region in Ukraine. In 1944, as Bessarabia was again occupied by the Soviets, it was moved back again to Romania, and then in 1945, as ordered by the Soviet authorities, it was returned to Chişinău. Finally, in 1989, it was restored to its original place in the city. 

Chişinău

When I visited, in the summer of 2022, Chişinău still had some of its Soviet-era monuments, among them an equestrian statue of Grigory Kotovsky, a notorious gangster turned Red Army commander during the civil war that followed the Bolshevik Revolution. He had a town named after him, Kotovsk, just across the border in Odessa region, in Ukraine. I had stayed there a few years previously. Kotovsky, who was murdered in 1925, was interred in a mausoleum in a Kotovsk park, and there was also a statue of him in front of the railway station, in a heroic pose with his sword pointing to the sky. In 2016, the town was renamed Podilsk, in line with a Ukrainian law forbidding place names or monuments commemorating communist figures.

Although Kotovsky was from Bessarabia, in today’s Moldova, he was of mixed Polish-Russian parentage, typical of the multi-ethnic makeup of the region. Like Odessa to the south, Chişinău had a significant Jewish population, nearly 50 per cent by the end of the 19^th century. And like Odessa, the city’s Jews experienced murderous pogroms in the first years of the 20^th century. During World War II, the Romanian regime of Ion Antonescu carried out the holocaust against the Jewish population in the territories it annexed from the Soviet Union, including Bessarabia.

In the early period of Soviet rule, Moldovans suffered the same trauma as other territories newly incorporated into the Soviet Union, in the Baltic states and western Ukraine, of mass executions and deportations. Despite that, and despite three decades of independence and the ongoing Russian occupation of a part of Moldova’s territory, Transnistria, a part of the population has maintained a pro-Russian stance, voting for pro-Russian parties. Moldova’s Soviet rulers attempted to separate a Moldovan identity from Romania, with its own language written in Cyrillic, unlike Romanian, which is written in the Latin script. Following independence, the country reverted to the Latin alphabet, and the declaration of independence referred to the country’s language as Romanian. However, the question of the country’s identity and language continued to be contentious. The 1994 constitution referred to the official language as Moldovan, while in 2013 the Constitutional Court ruled that the independence declaration took precedence, and that the country’s language was thus Romanian. My confusion during this, my first visit to Moldova, was compounded by the fact that Russian continued to be spoken by many in Chişinău. In the family-run hotel where I stayed, my hostess spoke Russian with her family members, although she informed me that she was Moldovan and could speak Moldovan.

Away from the avenues and squares, the park with its well-tended flower beds, Chişinău is a scrappy, uncared for city. The minibus I arrived on dropped me in the central market area, a mess of dirty streets, rubbish, greasy, broken pavements and evident poverty. By early evening these streets were largely deserted. Chişinău is certainly a far less impressive capital than Iaşi.

Moldova has had more than its share of troubles in recent years. Its development stunted by persistent meddling from Russia. Abused as a money-laundering centre by corrupt Russian and Ukrainian state officials and organised crime groups, a banking scandal in 2014 underlined the corruption and dysfunction of a state that has singly failed to meet the expectations of its citizens since independence. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has had a big impact on Moldova. Whether it can find a way to shake off the debilitating burden of Russian interference and affirm its identity as a European country, either independently, or reunified with Romania, remains to be seen. The opportunity is surely there.

Ceausescu's Bucharest

I had briefly visited Bucharest 20 years before, for an academic conference. On that occasion, there was hardly time to see very much, but with some companions I had a short tour in a taxi. While Bucharest has many attractions, including fine old churches and a beautiful neoclassical concert hall, it was the buildings associated with Romania’s communist dictator, Nicolae Ceauşescu, which were particularly fascinating to me then, as now. The monstrous Palace of the Republic, now the Palace of Parliament, became notorious as an enormous folly, one of the largest buildings in the world, a colossal monument to the megalomania of Ceauşescu and his wife, Elena. The destruction of a large part of Bucharest’s old city, the levelling of a hill, and the forced displacement of some 40,000 people to make way for Ceauşescu’s vanity project brought wide condemnation as an act of wanton vandalism. Apart from the palace itself, a whole new district was constructed, including a broad avenue that was deliberately designed to outdo the Champs-Elysée in Paris, in scale, although not in style.

The Palace of Parliament, Bucharest

Before visiting the Palace of Parliament, I walked to the Piața Revoluției, Revolution Square, to the former headquarters of the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party. Now government offices, it was on the balcony of this building that in December 1989 Ceauşescu made a speech to a huge crowd denouncing the uprising that had unfolded in Timişoara over the preceding days. The shock and disbelief on the ruling couple’s faces as the crowd jeered and whistled at them, and chanted “Timişoara, Timişoara”, was one of the defining moments of the revolution. Worse for Ceauşescu, it was broadcast live on national television, so that the whole country witnessed the mass defiance. The convergence of demonstrators on to the square, and the violence of security forces which turned it into a battle ground, was followed by the flight by helicopter of the ruling couple, and their trial by a kangaroo court and execution on 25 December.

These were heady times. As a student at London’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies at the time, I watched with rapt attention. The previous month, I had been attending a regular weekly seminar on East-central Europe at the London School of Economics. During the seminar, a lady slipped in and whispered something in the ear of the seminar’s chair. He paused, took a breath, and announced that the East German government had resigned. It seemed extraordinarily dramatic, one among a whole series of momentous changes that autumn, as the geopolitical map of Europe was redrawn in a matter of weeks, and long subject peoples reclaimed their freedom from communist oppression. And what seemed particularly remarkable after the decades of Cold War confrontation, was that it happened mostly peacefully. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the crowds that thronged central Prague during the Velvet Revolution. It was all overwhelmingly joyful. And then came the violence in Romania, as Ceauşescu’s dreaded security forces fought back. Such dramas playing out before our eyes on our television screens were quite a novelty in 1989. Excitement and awe at the courage of the revolutionaries waving their flags, with holes in the middle where the symbol of the communist regime had been, mixed with nail-biting horror at the violence, and the shocking end of the Ceauşescu couple.

Ceauşescu’s speech had been intended as a reprise of an earlier speech he had made from the same balcony in 1968, condemning the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia to quash the Prague spring. That speech asserted Romania’s independent line from Moscow, which Ceauşescu pursued for the rest of his rule, and it won him genuine support in Romania at the time. But those days were over, and by 1989, in the brave new world ushered in by Mikhail Gorbachev, Ceauşescu was out of step not only with the region, but with his own people.

A collection of memorials in front of the building includes a rather shabby marble-clad monument inscribed with the words “Glory to the Martyrs”. Some of the marble panels were cracked, and weeds grew up between them. Nearby is a tall column, with what looks like a metallic bird’s nest attached near the top. The monument sparked controversy when it was inaugurated in 2005, with many artists saying its symbolism was unclear. Next to it is a semi-circular wall bearing the names of those who fell. On the corner of the square is perhaps the most striking monument, the brick shell of a ruined building that once housed the headquarters of Ceauşescu’s feared security service, the Securitate, now with a glass and steel tower emerging out of it.

Approaching the enormous Palace of Parliament, I was most struck by how dead and soulless the surrounding area was. None of the bustle of what remains of the old city after Ceauşescu’s destruction, just a short distance away. The tree-lined Bulevardul Uniri, Boulevard of Unity, that connects the palace with the Piața Uniri, has fountains, but it lacks the shops or cafes that might have given it life. There were few pedestrians. There was nothing for anyone to do there. It was all built on a grand scale, but without people in mind. At the end of the boulevard, in front of the palace itself, there is a big open space. A few cars were parked on it, and a handful of tourists were taking pictures of the late dictator’s monstrous edifice. Almost entirely empty, a great big hole in the heart of the city. There was nothing alive about this place. Nothing that would draw people there other than to gawp at the grotesque pile. A curiosity to be looked at, but not a place to linger. I wondered whether there would be anything that could improve this, that could bring life to a place whose origins were so flawed?

At the time of the Ceauşescus’ demise, the building was not yet completed. So much had been destroyed in its making. But however grotesque, it had been built at great cost, and it could hardly be abandoned. Uses had to be found for it. So it became the seat of the two houses of parliament, a venue for international conferences, as well as a museum. The scale and extravagance of the interior is as striking as that of the exterior of the building. Vast quantities of marble were used, as well as enormous numbers of chandeliers. Different rooms were designed in different styles, with different materials and different colours. The megalomania of the ruling couple is as striking inside as out. Two sweeping marble staircases descend into an expansive entrance hall. Apparently it was intended that the Ceauşescu couple would descend from both sides to greet visiting dignitaries. At either end of one large and opulent reception room are two spaces which were apparently intended to be filled with large portraits of the couple.

Inside the Palace of Parliament

I had been prepared for the scale of the place. I had expected a palace of kitsch. But touring the building, I found myself surprised by the quality of the craftsmanship. The materials used were mostly sourced in Romania, and they are of the highest quality. The details are all finely worked. I have visited many state buildings from the communist era in several east European countries that were shabby, with a veneer of quality that had quickly faded and deteriorated. This one in Bucharest was not like that. Its halls, its galleries are genuinely impressive.

But to be truly grand, a palace should have a soul. The grandeur of Versailles is inextricably linked in our minds with the glory of Louis XIV, the sun king. Blenheim Palace near Oxford reflects the great victories of the Duke of Marlborough. The Palace of Parliament, by contrast, is associated with one of the most absurd little dictators of the 20th century. It was intended to project the grandeur of a couple who were as small and petty as they were nasty and vicious. Their rule was a tragedy for Romania, and it is hard to see how their building can ever escape from such awful origins. Perhaps future architects and town planners may find a way to reshape the palace and its surrounding area that allows it to escape the legacy of its appalling creators. More than 30 years after they were swept away, it hasn’t happened yet.

Histories and Legends in Transylvania

Criss-crossed by migrations over millennia, settled by successive waves of nations and tribes, many regions of Europe have been the subject of conflict among different claimants, each advancing their own historical assertions to ownership. Few lands in modern times have been the subject of such intense competition as Transylvania. Dominated for centuries by Hungarians, many of its towns islands of German settlement and culture, and, until its incorporation in Romania in 1918, with a downtrodden Romanian majority, Transylvania’s history has been a battlefield in the clash of national claims.

My journey through Transylvania in the summer of 2022 began in Cluj, known as Kolozsvár in Hungarian and Klausenburg in German. Settled in the Middle Ages by German “Saxons”, the city became the centre of the Hungarian landed aristocracy in Transylvania, and of Hungarian national and cultural life in the region. The city retained its ethnic-Hungarian majority well after Transylvania’s unification with Romania after the First World War. However, industrialisation under the post-1945 Communist regime, which transformed Cluj into one of Romania’s largest cities, led to an expansion of its Romanian population and the steady dilution of its Hungarian character. For many Hungarians this process of Romanianization has been deeply painful.

As a student in 1989, I attended a conference on Romania at Cambridge University. We didn’t know at the time that the violent end of the regime of the communist dictator, Nicolae Ceauşescu, was only a few weeks away. As we arrived at the lecture hall, men at the entrance photographed every one of the participants. We supposed they were officers of Ceauşescu’s dreaded Securitate secret police, sent by the Romanian embassy. The affect for any Romanians attending must surely have been intimidating. A large part of the audience was made up of Hungarians, mostly emigres. For these Hungarians, the overwhelmingly important issue of the day was Ceauşescu’s rural systematization programme, which had got under way the previous year. Under this programme, thousands of villages were to be razed, and their inhabitants resettled in agro-industrial towns. Hungarians saw this as an attack on Hungarian communities, aimed at their assimilation into the wider Romanian society. At that conference in Cambridge, their anger was boiling over. Some of the British speakers, specialists on Romania, reacted with irritation, pointing out that the problems facing Romania went beyond the tribulations of its Hungarian population. One of them gave a presentation on the ideological motivation of the programme, to eliminate the differences between rural and urban societies. But this cut little ice with the Hungarians. What they could see was that Hungarians in Transylvania were under attack. As I walked towards Cluj’s city centre that morning, this history was on my mind.

St Michael's church, Cluj

While Cluj expanded in the 20^th century, its historic centre has nevertheless retained its charm. The central square is dominated by the 15^th century Gothic church of St Michael. Built when the city was under Saxon control, it became a protestant church for a time following the reformation, firstly Lutheran and then Unitarian. Cluj was a centre of Unitarianism. However, the church was later returned to Catholicism with the support of Hungary’s, and Austria’s Hapsburg rulers. Next to the church stands an equestrian statue of the great 15^th century Hungarian King Matthias Corvinus, which was erected at the beginning of the 20^th century, when Transylvania was still part of Hungary.

Outside the house in Cluj where Matthias Corvinus is thought to have been born is a plaque put there during the tenure of the controversial city mayor, Gheorghe Funar. It states that Matthias Corvinus, Hungary’s greatest King, the son of the great Voivode (military leader) of Transylvania, Iancu de Hunedoara (János Hunyadi in Hungarian), was in fact Romanian. This assertion is based on the Wallachian ancestry of Hunyadi’s family, although an improbable legend has it that Hunyadi was actually the illegitimate son of King Sigismund of Hungary. Funar, who was mayor from 1992-2004, was an extreme nationalist who took a petty delight in baiting the city’s Hungarian minority. He was famous for having objects such as park benches, pavements and rubbish bins painted in the colours of the Romanian flag. Funar was also responsible for the rather grotesque statue of Avram Iancu, a leader of the Romanian revolution against Hungarian rule in 1848, that towers above the square in front of the city’s Orthodox cathedral, an archetypal example of nationalist kitsch. The Orthodox cathedral itself, built between 1923-33, after Transylvania’s incorporation into Romania, was a triumphal statement in the centre of Hungarian life in the province, that this was now Romania.

The nationalist agenda can be seen even in the name of the city, which, since 1974, is officially Cluj-Napoca. The addition of Napoca by Ceauşescu was intended to draw a link with the pre-Roman Dacian settlement of that name on the site of modern-day Cluj. In the competing narratives about Transylvania, Romanian nationalists claim a continuity between ancient Romano-Dacian civilisation and modern Romanians, as opposed to a counter-claim preferred by some Hungarians that modern Romanians are descended from Vlachs who migrated northwards from the Balkans at a later date.

Excavations of Roman remains in Cluj, some of which can be seen covered by glass on the central square, did not escape from this modern competition over history. For Romanian nationalists the finds bolstered their claim to have preceded Hungarians in the region, while some Hungarians retorted unconvincingly that the remains were fake. In any case, the whole debate is sterile. Our knowledge of the historical ethnic-make-up of this and other regions is limited. What can be said with certainty is that numerous peoples have settled in the region, including Goths, Huns, Avars and Slavs, as well as both Romanians and Hungarians. Both nations have been present in Transylvania for centuries, and Romanians were in a clear majority well before the region’s unification with Romania.

From Cluj, I travelled to Sighişoara (Segesvár in Hungarian, Schässburg in German), and then on to Braşov (Brassó in Hungarian, Kronstadt in German). Along with a number of other Transylvanian towns, Sighişoara and Braşov were settled by the German Saxons in the Middle Ages. The Saxon elite enjoyed a privileged position in Transylvania, as one of the three estates recognised in the 15^th century Unio Trium Nationum (“Union of the Three Nations”) together with the largely Hungarian nobility and the free military Székeleys, a Hungarian sub-group mainly residing in eastern Transylvania. Thus the Romanian population, as well as the Hungarian peasantry, were excluded from political life.

Clock tower, Sighişoara

Sighişoara and Braşov were both fortified towns, with city walls and defensive towers at regular intervals. Each of these towers was assigned to one of the city’s craft guilds, which were responsible for their upkeep and defence. Sighişoara’s beautifully preserved hilltop citadel, with its cobbled streets and brightly coloured buildings, is a UNESCO World Heritage site. Nine of the fourteen defensive towers remain, as well as the imposing clock tower at the citadel entrance. I particularly liked the tinsmiths’ tower, perched on a steep bank on the edge of the citadel, which still carries traces of shots fired during the last siege of the town, at the start of the 18^th century. Inside the clock tower, there is a museum which includes many of the instruments associated with the crafts of the various guilds that were so central to the town’s life.

Tinsmith's tower, Sighişoara

A steep covered wooden staircase, the Scholars’ Stairs, dating from the 17^th century. leads up a hill to the Bergschule (School on the Hill), and the Saxon Church on the Hill, another of Transylvania’s impressive Gothic churches. A graveyard slopes down the other side of the hill. Most of the German Saxons have left Transylvania. Having already declined in numbers during the 20^th century, most of those who had remained left after the fall of the Ceauşescu regime. Sighişoara is now a mainly Romanian town, with a sizeable Hungarian minority, a smaller number of Roma, and very few Germans. But the graveyard bears witness to the town’s Saxon past, almost all the graves bearing German names, testament to a bygone age.

Sighişoara’s most famous son was Vlad the Impaler, who is thought to have been born in a house close to the town’s main square. Vlad’s bloody career as ruler of Wallachia, and his notorious brutality, may have inspired Bram Stoker’s famous novel, Dracula. Vlad’s family name was Dracul, derived from the chivalric Order of Dragons, of which his father had been a member. But although Romania and the wider region had a long tradition of belief in vampires, there is no evidence that Vlad was ever believed to have been one. That has not stopped Transylvania’s tourism industry from milking the connection for all it is worth.

In the middle of Braşov’s beautiful central square is the Casa Sfatului, the old town hall, now a historical museum. The broad square is lined with what were once the houses of wealthy merchants, now lively cafes and restaurants spilling their terraces out on to the square. Braşov’s situation, close to the Carpathian passes, was important for defence and also for the trade between Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, which enriched the town’s Saxon merchants. As in Sighişoara, the town’s defensive towers were maintained by the craft guilds. Some of them remain, although less of the city’s walls are preserved than is the case in Sighişoara. Two of the city’s gates, the Şchei Gate and Catherine’s Gate, remain. Viewed from the surrounding hills, the old town is dominated by the huge bulk of the medieval Black Church (the name relates to its colour, which was at one time black, some say due to a seventeenth-century fire that destroyed much of Braşov). Built in the Gothic style, it is now a Lutheran church, the faith of the dwindling numbers of Saxons.

Braşov

Braşov holds an important place in the history of Romanians in Transylvania. As a lady at the town tourism office explained to me, in the past Romanians had not been allowed to reside within the city walls. They could enter the city at certain times to sell their wares, but only through Catherine’s Gate. Romanians, as well as Bulgarians, lived outside the city walls, in the Şchei district, although by the 19^th century the Bulgarians had been Romanianised. There, in the grounds of the 15^th century Orthodox Church, the first school to teach in the Romanian language was established. Built at the end of the 15^th century, it had switched to Romanian-language teaching a century later, from the Church Slavonic that had hitherto been used. It was also in Braşov that Transylvania’s first Romanian-language newspaper was established, in 1838.

Today the square at the heart of the Şchei district is a pleasant, quiet refuge from the much more touristy centre of the old walled city. I enjoyed a supper in a very good traditional Romanian restaurant. In the 19^th century, Braşov was a centre of the Romanian national movement in Transylvania. For many Hungarians, the loss of Transylvania continues to be painful. In Hungary, one can still see maps of pre-1918 Greater Hungary, and hear people lamenting how the country lost two-thirds of its territory. Yet in an age of nation states it would surely have been anomalous if the Romanian majority, which had for centuries suffered an inferior status in Transylvania, would not have been able to assert its right to unite with Romania. To have continued to maintain that this was Hungarian land would have meant disregarding the Romanian population. That they simply did not count. To be sure, having been subjected to Magyarization pressure during the 19^th century, Romania was far from a model of respect for the rights of national minorities, including Hungarians, during the 20th, including under Ceauşescu and afterwards, as exemplified by the Funar period in Cluj. During my travels, I was told more than once that relations between Romanians and Hungarians are now much more comfortable than had previously been the case. Hopefully that will continue.

On the other side of the old town from the Şchei district are signs of more recent strife. At the end of 1989, I watched with mixed excitement and horror as the drama of Romania’s uprising against the Ceauşescu regime played out on our television screens. The media focused largely on events in Timişoara, where the revolution started, and in Bucharest. But the violence afflicted many other towns, including Braşov. On the side of a building not far from the city centre, a scattering of bullet holes have been framed, with a plaque commemorating the revolution. In a little park nearby, a row of graves commemorates those who died in the revolution in Braşov, including a six-year old girl caught in the crossfire.

A short distance from Braşov, in a pass linking Transylvania with Wallachia, is Bran Castle. The castle was built in the 14^th century by the Saxons of Braşov, to defend the pass. Perched high on a rocky crag, with its towers and ramparts it looks just the part to be a vampire’s castle, and indeed the tourism industry has made much of the Dracula story and the vampire legends of Transylvania. In fact it appears the castle was built purely as a fortification and a garrison for troops defending the pass. There is no evidence of any connection with either Bran Stoker or Vlad the Impaler, although Vlad did travel through the pass on many occasions. The description of Dracula’s castle in Stoker’s novel is quite different.

Bran Castle

The castle today looks much as it did in the 1930s, when it was a favourite residence of Queen Marie of Romania, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. Having been built for defence rather than luxury, a warren of small rooms and narrow staircases, the castle is perhaps an unusual residence for a Queen. But it has considerable charm, and it is easy to see why Marie loved it. Having spent her childhood largely in England and Germany, Marie became highly popular in Romania. Having persuaded her husband, King Ferdinand, a member of the German Hohenzollern family, to enter the First World War on the side of the western Triple Entente in 1916, she won admiration for her work as a nurse treating wounded soldiers. Following the war, she attended the Paris Peace Conference and, using her international connections, proved to be a highly effective lobbyist for recognition of Romania’s enlargement into neighbouring territories.