The Citadel Still Has People In It
Sighișoara is a fortified Saxon hill town where 350 residents live inside the medieval walls — not a preserved site but an inhabited one. Notes from the last stop before autumn.
Seven hundred years ago, German-speaking settlers were invited into Transylvania by a Hungarian king to hold the Carpathian passes, and they built fortified towns and fortified churches across a landscape of low green hills. The Saxons are mostly gone now — emigration through the twentieth century, then almost entirely after 1990 — but the towns are still standing, and Sighișoara's is still lived in.
That last part is what makes it different from every other walled town I have visited on this trip. The citadel on the hill is not a monument with a gate and a ticket desk. About 350 people have their homes inside it. There is a school. There is a shop that sells washing powder and SIM cards.
What an inhabited monument looks like
It looks slightly untidy. Satellite dishes on fifteenth-century walls. A parked Dacia in a courtyard. Wheelie bins. Nine of the original fourteen defensive towers survive, each one built and maintained by a different craft guild — the Tailors' Tower is the main gate, the Tinsmiths' and Butchers' and Ropemakers' towers hold the corners — and the Ropemakers' Tower is now the cemetery caretaker's house.
The clock tower at the top has a set of wooden figures that rotate at midnight, and a small museum inside with an uneven floor and hand-typed labels. €4.60. The view from its gallery is the whole point: pastel houses on the hill, the covered stairway, and beyond the town, the Târnava valley going soft and green in every direction.
There is a version of heritage protection that empties a place to save it. Sighișoara has taken the harder route, and it is worth more for the inconvenience.
The Covered Stairway
To reach the church at the top of the hill you climb 175 wooden steps under a pitched roof, built in 1642 so that schoolchildren could get to lessons in winter without the climb becoming lethal. The roof is still there. The children still use it. It smells of old timber and rain and is one of the quietest places I have been all year.
The church at the top — Biserica din Deal — is Gothic, cold, and largely bare, with fragments of medieval fresco surviving on the pillars where later whitewash has been carefully taken off. Behind it is the Saxon cemetery, on the hillside under enormous beeches, with headstones in German that stop, almost uniformly, in the 1980s and 90s.
Trains through Transylvania
Romanian rail gets a bad write-up and my experience over nine days of day trips was: slow, cheap, mostly punctual, and extraordinary out of the window. Sighișoara to Brașov is two and a half hours for about 42 lei — roughly €8.40 — through hill country, sunflower fields going over, hay stacked in the shape the region has always stacked it, and horse carts on the level crossings.
The fortified churches are the day trips worth making. Biertan and Viscri need a taxi or a bike from the nearest station; Saschiz you can nearly see from the train. Each one is a village church wrapped in defensive walls because the village had to survive raids inside it, with a fortification tower and stores for bacon and grain.
Where this leaves the year
Eight stops, 6,412 kilometres by rail, 31 trains, 2 ferries, 1 very long bus, 78 nights in beds that were not mine, and no aircraft. The rule held. What I did not expect is that the rule stopped being the interesting part somewhere around Switzerland; what replaced it was the slowness itself.
Autumn is coming to the Carpathians in about three weeks. There is a night train from Bucharest to Istanbul, which would take me off this continent, and a line north through Ukraine's western neighbours that would not. I have not decided.
The next dispatch will be from wherever the timetable makes most sense.