Romania - Corvinesti Castle and Turda

Nagyobb térképre váltás

Armed with a passport for Iago, signed and approved by a local vet (we had to book ourselves in between the local cattle injections), we headed off towards the Romanian border. It's always a bit nerve racking going through any border control, or indeed any situation that involves negotiating with heavily armed gunmen who don't speak our language, but especially when we've got a room booked and we were turned away last time we attempted a crossing. But surely enough, the gruff wielder of the 9mm semi automatic smiled at the picture of Iago and said "Nice dog" then spent 15 minutes pawing over my passport before crediting it with an additional two stamps.

So by 9am Tuesday we were into Romania and on our way towards Hunedoara. I'd read that there was a quite impressive castle that has been around since the 14th century (and even then it was built on old Roman fortifications) and also quite impressively it seems that Vlad the Impaler (read: Dracula) was imprisoned there for 7 years. It seemed to be quite far on Google Maps (5 hours or so) so we were going to stay the night then come back the next day.

The only issue was that when our GPS did its min(speed limit x distance) calculations it decided that it would be best to send us straight over the Bihor Massif, a proud member of the Western Carpathian Mountains. Which although we were technically allowed to go 100km/h at night, during a miniature blizzard, up a 1.8km elevation mountain we were only ballsy enough to go 30-40km/h max. This seemed to cause much distress to the local drivers who seemed to think that they'd lived a good life and it was about time to die in a horrific head on car crash trying to overtake terrified Australians. Needless to say we arrived at our destination at around 9 o'clock instead of the expected 3 o'clock that we were hoping for.

We decided to steel our nerves by going out for dinner at a local restaurant, but that was pretty hairy too. I don't know if we've mentioned that there are a lot of stray dogs in Hungary, but there are /sooo/ many more in Romania. They wander around the streets in packs, scrounging for food and barking at anyone seeking to enter their territory. They actually seemed relatively friendly as kids seemed happy enough to pat them, but they went pretty wild at Iago. Anyway, we all survived the experience, even if it did result in Iago's new found habit of whining pathetically at any dogs or aggressive looking sheep that we came across.

The next morning we set off to visit the Corvinesti Castle.

It was awesome. This was everything any budding castle lover could want. It had a moat, a massively long bridge that you had to cross to even get close to the walls, it had all the murder holes that you can imagine and a mess of rooms, spiral staircases, knights' halls, towers, guard rooms and courtyards.

The walls were at least 10 metres to the cliff face which dropped another 10 or so to the river. The whole castle had the feel of having been in consistant repair and renovation for the last 600 years. In one case, four levels of stairs and floors were missing such that it was now a cavernous shell. Outside we were reminded of a legend that says that in the 15th century there were three Turkish prisoners who were told that they would be freed if they dug a well. It took them 15 years to dig 28 metres to find water, but they were never freed. It is said that the inscription on the well says "You have water, but no heart". But it later was discovered that it is more closely translated as "Hassan, prisoner to the giaours in the fortress next to the church, dug here" or in the modern vernacular "I waz 'ere, infidels sux". Maybe related to this slur, not too far from the well is what is charmingly called the bear pit into which truculent prisoners were thrown.

Having spent two hours wandering around the castle, exploring this and that, we finally pulled ourselves away, flagged down some helpful Romanians to jump start our car as we'd left the lights on (again), then headed off to our next destination. We'd decided that it was going to take too long to get all the way back to Máriapócs the same day so we booked another night's accommodation halfway between Hunedoara and home.

It was again quite late by the time we got to our hotel 10km out of Turda. It was also snowing, foggy and -10degC. But we did end up finding the right place without too many tears and settled in pretty happily. It was a nice, if a touch tacky hotel from which we set off to see some local salt mines the next morning. This place was maybe even more impressive than the castle. It was a gusty -12degC outside when we arrived, but very quickly after entering the mines the temperature rose to a balmy 15 degC. I won't spend much time on it as I'm already pushing my reader friendship, but I'll let this video do my speaking for me.

- Daniel