Welcome to Transylvania

By Guy Trebay ( Travel and Leisure )

We were haring across the countryside, to swipe a phrase from Renata Adler's novel Pitch Dark, traveling cross-country along back roads threaded through rows of sentinel beech trees, past dromedary hillsides and fields whose freshly furrowed soil was so deliciously black and loamy you were tempted to leap out of the car and scoop up a bowl. Some friends and I were headed into Transylvania, a little-visited swath of continental Europe in the shadow of the Carpathian Mountains, terra incognita except, of course, as a fantasy place familiar to the legions of readers and moviegoers who make the obvious instant association with the invincible Prince of Darkness and box-office ka-ching!: Dracula.

Welcome to Transylvania

Talk about the undead! Not garlic or holy water or well-aimed stake can stop this revenant's franchises—Twilight, True Blood, the eroto-gothic Vampire Lestat. But forget Dracula. The residents of Transylvania certainly have. Except at his alleged birthplace and an unimpressive castle where the Muntenian prince who provided a historical armature for Bram Stoker's 1897 novel occasionally sojourned, hardly anyone there spares much thought for the midnight creeper. It's no cinch even finding the kitsch souvenir mugs depicting him with blood dripping from his ceramic fangs. I tried.

There is another Transylvania. Back and back I have returned to it, as though ineluctably, and lucky in every case. For my first time I arrived in the dead of a bone-chilling winter to report on a violent revolution. Sneaking a rented car illegally across the border from Hungary in 1989, a photographer colleague and I drove hundreds of miles through snowy monochrome landscapes so little altered by the incursions of industrial modernity we might as well have been figures in a faded kinescope.

Oddly well-paved highways stretched empty for miles before us. Though the Soviets kept their puppet states in abject conditions they, like every other conqueror to roll across this crucial bulwark linking Europe east and west, were fastidious about their roads. Instead of the expected tanks, we saw just the occasional cart hitched to stout draft horses, at the reins a farmer wearing a cloak of unshorn sheepskin and with a puppet-size trilby perched on his head. Steam from the horses' labored exhalations hung in the air like plumes of crystal. We barreled onward in search of the brave revolutionary dissenter Lázsló Tõkés, somewhere north of the city of Timișoara. We did eventually find him, holed up in a wooden church in the high Carpathians. What survives from that trip, though, is not a journalistic milestone but haunting recollections of the beauty of a region to which I vowed always to return.

Welcome to TransylvaniaRomania is a democracy now, albeit one run by leftover apparatchiks, and a remarkably easy place in which to strike out on itineraries that carry one over routes first traversed by the Dacians and thereafter by the Romans, Goths, Gepidae, Huns, Avars, Bulgars, Pechenegs, Magyars, and Saxons. On each of two successive trips there, I pointed myself toward the so-called Seven Cities, settlements established by a Saxon minority under an ancient agreement with Romania's Hungarian conquerors. Starting around the 12th century the Saxons built a series of what amounted to landlocked and fortified islands in the form of soberly refined cities like Sibiu, Sighișoara, and Alba Iulia, each linked to the others throughout the deeply pastoral landscape by scores of similarly structured villages.

Each, like an Escher drawing, has its own citadel church and perimeter palisade, each its characteristic concentric interior whorls of tidy dwellings. With rare exception, each still contains some little-known marvel—the Lutheran cathedral at Biertan, designated a World Heritage site as much for its squared-off toy-Gothic architecture as for its multi-panel altarpiece; the massive Black Church at Brașov, raided, torched, and sacked by everyone from the Mongols to the Ottomans and still towering reassu