Saxon cities

After our quick visit to Bucharest, we headed for the Saxon cities, located in the centre of Romania, in Transsylvania. It's an interesting bunch of cities, with very strong German influence. This can be very clearly seen in both the architecture, culture and even language (these cities also have German names, and it seems to be quite widely spoken).



Our 1st stop was Brasov, which is the 2nd city of Bulgaria. It's a very nice city, with a very pleasant old centre. It reminded me a lot of cities like Krakow, Heidelberg and Tubingen, with its old guild house in the middle of a big town square. The main cathedral here is also a catholic one (which is kind of unusual since Romania is predominantly Orthodox).

After our unfortunately short visit in Brasov we made the tactical decision to rent a car, since it seemed unrealistic to get the most out of Romania (especially the countryside) by using public transport, as we had initially reckoned on. It turned out to be a wise decision, even though driving in Romania is quite an interesting (and at times very scary!) experience. Let's just say that the road network is in sore need of funding, which it is getting from the EU at the moment, which unfortunately also means that every road seems to be under repair (so a lot of temporary traffic lights, which Romanians don't seem to pay much heed to...).



From Brasov we went to Sibiu, which has the honour of being the Europian capital of culture for this year. A well-deserved honour - Sibiu was even prettier than Brasov, with its 3 well-preserved medieval squares. The only gripe I would have is that although the locals have obviously put a lot of effort by putting up temporary exhibitions and informative information points - it's all in German and Romanian only!




The other problem we came up against was the fact that all the hotels in town were booked, so we had to stay in a small spa town called Ocna Sibilui. Which wasn't actually such a bad thing - the hotel we were staying in was a really great family-run place, in a very nice building. Also we were treated to the unusual sight (well, not in Romania, as it turned out...) of the cattle being brought back into town. So you could say we got stuck in a bit of a traffic jam...





The next morning we visited the Astra museuem (after accidentally entering a military area, as we were sternly informed by a grim Man In Uniform), which is a very impressive open-air museum, a bit like Seurasaari in Helsinki. Basically it's a plot of land where they have reconstructed/moved various rural buildings (farms, churches, workshops) from different parts of Romania.



The next stop was Cluj-Napoca, where we spent the night. The city is definitely not as nice as Brasov or Sibiu, but it is interesting in addition to a strong German influence, there is also a very noticeable Hungarian presence here. For example, the university offers teach in both Romanian, German and Hungarian. But we didn't linger long - there didn't seem to be much of interest apart from the large gothic cathedral and some interesting old buildings (the old buildings are in a lot worse shape than in Sibiu and Brasov - with a bit of investment this place could be a lot nicer).