The home of Vlad Tepes

After our very early start, we all slept a lot on the trains on the way to Sighisoara and arrived in the early afternoon. Most of the sights are in the citadel which is naturally on the top of a hill in the town. We thankfully caught cabs up to our hostel which was in the middle of town as it is quite a steep hotel on the train station side. The hostel was a lot nicer than we had been lead to believe and other than the lack of a shower curtain the bathroom was fine. The rooms were warm and reasonably big which was also a bonus. We dropped off our bags and headed out for an orientation walk of the town. Five minute later we were finished!

Well, not quite but it isn't the biggest of towns and most of the things to see are crammed into a very small area. We grabbed some maps at the information office and then headed off to explore the town by ourselves. The easiest way to see things is to get onto the street that follows around the wall and pretty much follow it. Most of the fortifications are intact and there are nine of the towers remaining. You can't go into most of them but you can have a good stickybeak around the outside. It doesn't take long to go around and see the towers, the church in town and the town hall. In one of the squares is the house where Vlad Tepes (the Impaler) was born. It looks in really good nick given that it is nearly 600 years old. You can go there for dinner and have lots of tacky Dracula themed food.

Then we walked up the covered stairway (think set of stairs covered by a really large crate) to the aptly named church on the hill. It is next to the school on the hill. The church is mostly gothic but you can see some of the Romanesque ruins in the crypt. The inside of the church is well worth paying to see and has small sections of the original wall paintings as well as a couple of 15th century gothic altars. Unfortunately, the nicest of these was butchered a bit during the reformation and some of the statues removed or remodelled. The crypt is easily accessible and while the crypts aren't all that intersting, you can still peek inside some of them and see skeletons. At the far end of the corridor is the original section of rotunda which was used as foundations for the current church.

Inside the church, there is a collection of valuable headstones from the cemetary which include those of nobles, the mayor and church seniors. Some are quite elaborate. They also have a collection of gothic dowry chests which were made using no glue or nails. They clearly had got very good at this for them to survive this long.

The graveyard behind the church is also worth visiting. It is quite large and extends quite a way down the hill. The older graves are mixed in with the newer ones as they have run out of space. You can see from the graves how large the German population of the area was and still is. There are mostly German names on the headstones. The Saxons came to the area in the 12th century to protect the eastern border from invasion and to teach farming methods to the locals and they have pretty much stayed since then. Many people still speak a form of German dialect as well as Romanian and lots of the foods and customs are more like Germany than the rest of Romania. Some of the really old headstones have been used by the people to prop up the sides of the hill and it's worth pulling back the grass and having a look at some of them.

From the graveyard, I headed back down the hill and into town again coming back to my starting point at the clock tower. The museums were closed for the afternoon, so I killed an hour or two before dinner in the one and only internet cafe in the citadel (which is below Hostel Burg). For dinner we headed into the town outside the citadel and went to a Romanian restaurant there. It wasn't bad food but wasn't great either. I had some very unusual potatoes which were like potato rosti that hadn't been fried. They didn't taste bad, just strange.

The next morning was very pleasant as we could lie in for the first morning in ages. I don't think many people were out of bed before 9am. After breakfast, a small group of us headed to the History Museum which is in the town clock tower and is an interesting collection. It is quite random really. It is displayed in the old rooms in the clock tower and they are joined by some really dodgy staircases. The exhibits are a bit of all sorts of things. The first room as about Hermann Oberst who was somehow involved in the space program and who had lived in Sighisoara as a child. The next room had some old roman artifacts from the original settlement in the valley. Then there was a room with old dental and medical equipment and some pharmacy bottles. Then there were some things that had been made by the guilds in the town in mostly the 16th century. They had boxes, metal ware, hats, shoes, that sort of thing. There was a room where you could see the workings of the tower clock and we stayed for 12 pm so that we could see it do something. Don't bother, it really doesn't do much other than move a couple of cogs around and chime a little. I've seen grandfather clocks that do more. The final floor of the museum is a walkway around the top of the tower that does have really good views of the whole of the old town. There are some weather information graphs on the walls and a collection of really creepy local dolls (they make Chucky look friendly) up here as well.

The torture museum we couldn't find and the armoury museum didn't seem worth the 4 ron entry fee so we decided to find somewhere to have some lunch instead. We headed off into the newer section of town and ended up at a pizzeria called Quatro Amicis. It was really good. Real pizza toppings (none of this corn rubbish) and huge serves. Four of us had lunch (and it was more than we could eat) plus eight soft drinks for $25. We sat around in the restaurant for ages as we didn't really have anything else to do until we met up with the rest of the group at 3.30. There isn't really a huge amount to do in Sighisoara and you can easily cover it in one day.

In the afternoon we headed out to a small village called Viscri which has a heritage listed fortified church. They are something that seems to be unique to this area of Romania and many villages have one. The one at Viscri is one of the best preserved though. On the way there, we stopped briefly at the ADEPT office. It is a program that is trying to preserve some of the traditional methods of farming and living in the villages in Romania. They help get funding for groups to develop products for sale and the proceeds got to the villages. They sell things like local jam (which is really good), woven products, books, postcards and art. They told us a bit about what they are doing at the moment and it seems to be working really well.

The road to Viscri really shows that the locals don't use cars very often and we didn't actually see any on the way in, just horses and carts. There isn't any public transport out here either and it is a good 90 minutes from Sighisoara. The village is really cute. It is shaped like a T with all of the houses built in a line and joined together. The fronts are just a continuous wall that is brightly coloured. They have painted most of them blue and green like the Russians do. In front of the houses are rows of trees with chickens under them. We turned up the main leg of the T and reached the bottom of the hill that the church is on. It's a bit of a walk up the hill and we met the woman who was going to let us in at the top. The entire church is surrounded by a fortified wall with four defensive towers on it. There are rooms in one section of the wall where people could live and there is now a museum. The church itself has a tower that could have been used for defense as well. It is a place that does not make you think of a God of love and forgiveness. Much more Old Testament!

The woman showed us the inside of the church. The original church on the site was built in the 13th century but the current one is gothic in style and was built in the 15th century at about the same time as the walls. The woman told us that if we wanted to go up the tower we should go straight away before the light faded too much. Once we got in the door we realised what she had meant. The first two flights of stone stairs were virtually in the dark already with just tiny slit windows to illuminate them. We slowly climbed up the very worn stairs and at the top of these the light improved but in some ways that was bad as it just meant that you could see how dodgy the rest of the stair were. Most of the inside of the tower had collapsed at some stage so they have built wooden floors and stairs to replace the old stone ones. Some new ones really wouldn't go to waste.

At the top of another three flights of stairs we reached the top of the tower and there is a walkway around the outside at this point. It is about as dodgy as the stairs and creaks and moves when you walk on it. Through the gaps, you can see the ground quite a way down. I wasn't enormously inclined to walk on it and tried to stay on the stone as much as possible as if it had stood for 500 years, I figured that it would last another 20 minutes. I did pop out briefly to take some photos and it is a really good view over the surrounding countryside and the rest of the fortifications.

Going back down the stairs was worse than going up them and I was very grateful to be back on solid ground with all my limbs attached and unbroken. The little museum is worth a look and has local items from mostly the 19th century. There are english labels for most of the things and little explanations about the history of the village. After the church we headed down into the village to look for the Sock people. The village has a sock knitting cooperative that is making money to help the community. The villages in the local area have been hit badly since the fall of Communism and are very isolated. Viscri decided to do something about it and started knitting socks, initially out of old jumpers but now out of locally grown and spun wool. The socks are sold to visitors but are also exported to Germany. The money raised which is about 40,000 euros a year is spent on buying things for the village like a car which can take people into town for medical appointments and a nurse to help look after people when they are sick.

The main shop was closed but the woman at the grocery shop had a small selection of socks and beanies for sale. After buying her out of almost all of her stock, we headed off to a local family for dinner. Walking down the main street we came across the cows coming back in from the fields. There are still wolves in this area so they have to lock up the livestock at night. There didn't seem to be anyone rounding them up. It was like the cows knew to come home at a certain time.

It was a bit cold so we had to eat in the cellar rather than out in the courtyard. We had bean soup (without sour cream for once) and then goose stew with dumplings, which was very rich and very filling. The others washed it down with the local liquor and some plum wine which must have been at least 20% alcohol. The locals live a fairly basic existance as most don't have toilets inside the house and this house didn't even have sewage. The outdoor pit toilet must be very hard in the middle of winter.

We headed back into town on the bumpy road and thankfully made it back without hitting anything. The next morning was another sleep in and we didn't have to be ready until 10.30 to head back down to the train station and on to Sibiu.