The 'Land Beyond the Forest'
by Lucy Mallows
Last week, I landed at Bucharest's Henri Coanda airport before heading to Romania's Danube Delta. My head was immediately flooded with memories and images from 2007, as I had spent the entire year heading back and forth between Belgium and Romania while researching the new Bradt travel guide to Transylvania.
Transylvania has just been published and it is wonderful to see the result of months of exploring the region, rattling along some of the bumpiest roads in Europe, trekking across mountain crags and strolling through elegant Saxon town centres.
I first made the journey to Transylvania in 1997. I arrived by train in classic style through the King's Pass, leaving behind the endless, flat Hungarian plain and entering a magical world of mountains, rolling hills and rushing streams. It seemed like another, almost fairytale world – the 'land beyond the forest'.
Some people even wonder if Transylvania is a real place and not merely a location dreamed up by Bram Stoker and developed by Hollywood. However, the real Transylvania is more interesting and complex than the strangest work of fiction.
The Irish author Dervla Murphy called Transylvania a ‘one-word poem’ and I think that encapsulates this half-mythical region; a place filled with forest-covered hills, imposing castles on rocky crags, wolves, bears and eagles soaring over a meadows dotted with haystacks.
Transylvania is packed with romantic palaces, rocky ruins, imposing fortresses and forbidding citadels. Visitors can explore elegant Saxon merchant cities such as Sibiu and Braşov, dozens of Saxon fortified churches and lost-in-time Szekely villages where the only form of transport is a horse-drawn cart. Transylvania is the perfect escape from the hectic, stressed out western world. It's impossible to rush, the roads will see to that. You have to take your time, go with the flow and admire the awe-inspiring scenery. Transylvania has something to offer everyone – not just vampire hunters.