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Curtea de Arges, Romania — October 2006
For a couple of years before this trip, I'd been reading articles online about how to find Dracula's castle (Castle Poenari) and how to get there. Most descriptions mention Curtea de Arges as the nearest big town, and that it's pretty much necessary to go through there to get to the castle. Strangely, Curtea de Arges is barely mentioned in most of the books or websites I've seen about Romania; it's not a very touristic city, and nearby Castle Poenari isn't very touristic either. The town is a little isolated; it's not on the path of big historic Transylvanian towns that most tourists pass through. It was also hard to get to from the north; we began up in Sibiu, and we had to go way out of our way to the south and approach from the town of Pitesti. But it ultimately wasn't too difficult to get there (merely time-consuming), and we were surprised to see that Curtea de Arges, which I'd expected to be a small, uninteresting village because it's not a popular destination, is actually a very comfortable, modern, pretty town, even moreso in some ways than some of the touristy towns we'd visited before.
In Sibiu, we were extremely lucky to meet a nice Romanian guy who's been living in the US for sixteen years and was traveling in Romania just to visit and see the old sights. It turned out he actually grew up in Curtea de Arges, and when we mentioned that's exactly where we were trying to go but didn't have much information about it, he drew us an incredibly detailed map of the town, and pointed out all the cool stuff to find there! The biggest attraction there is the Curtea de Arges Cathedral and the beautiful old monastary next to it, at the north edge of the town, and our friend told us to walk East away from the monastary and church into the woods and we'd find his favorite semi-hidden thing in Curtea de Arges; a big stone cross in an ornate wooden structure, kind of in the middle of nowhere. We felt like we were following a treasure map into the littled wooded area, and sure enough, there was a the secret cross!
The cross was incredibly detailed. I'm also sparing you the photo of the dead smooshed mouse on the ground right next to it.
This is the front of the monastary next to the Curtea de Arges Cathedral.
Candles for the dead, in front of the monastary.
This is the entrance to the amazing 16th-century church in front of the monastary. Unfortunately, the place was undergoing rennovation while we were there and most of the building was covered with ugly scaffolding, so this was the only nice picture I could get. You can see some other folks' pictures of the place here and here. The exterior of the church is covered in intricate repeating patterns, reflecting the heavy Ottoman influence on the area at the time. Our friend who drew us the map told us that the church was designed and built by a famous Romanian architect, commissioned by the local prince who was vain and wanted to possess the most beautiful church in the world. When the architect was almost done and had climbed the scaffolding to put some finishing touches on the roof, the prince came by and said, hey, now that you're done, do you think you could make an even more beautiful one? And the guy said, sure, totally... And then the prince told his soldiers to pull the scaffolding away so the architect would fall to his death, so there would never be a church more beautiful than his. Wow. The Wikipedia article gives a different and crazier version of this story, but I like this one too, since we heard it ourselves from a guy who grew up there.
The inside of the church is absolutely breathtakingly gorgeous; spooky and solemn and dead quiet. I took a million pictures in there. Here are a few of the ones that came out okay in the dim candlelight.
Later, I happened upon another newer church in the middle of town, and noticed this painting of Saint George killing a dragon above the entrance.
I realized this picture of the tv in our hotel room would come out terrible, but I knew nobody in the world would believe me if I didn't have proof of this... After the church and monastary stuff above, we did our big daytrip to Dracula's castle (pictures coming up next). And when we returned from the castle to our hotel in Curtea de Arges, there was a show on the National Geographic Network about vampire bats.
We passed by this little park on our last morning in Curtea de Arges as we trudged out of town with our packs. Our aim was to either hitchhike out of town or find the bus station, whichever came first. We happened across the desolate bus station totally by accident and a few short minutes later we were on a minibus to Pitesti and watching that movie where Cuba Gooding Jr and Horatio Sans are pretending to be gay. Talk about surreal.
There was no easy way to get from Curtea de Arges, which is pretty isolated, to our next destination, a city called Cluj-Napoca up in the northwest, not far from Hungary. We had to take the bus down to Pitesti in the south of Transylvania, then catch another bus north all the way to Cluj-Napoca. I think we got on the first bus around 10 in the morning and arrived in Cluj-Napoca around 10 at night. Those pictures are next...
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