Săpânţa to Sibiu
Distance travelled = 387 kilometres driving by road and 5.55 kilometres walking (7,430 steps).
Knowing that I had a long, slow drive ahead of me today along narrow, winding mountain roads in the rain, I was hoping to have an early start this morning. It was not to be. The guesthouse where I was staying in Sapânţa only started serving breakfasts at 8:00am, and the service was so slow that I didn’t receive anything (including any acknowledgement of my presence) for 40 minutes. Eventually the first elements of my breakfast arrived – five slices of stale bread and a glass jug of what turned out to be green tea, but no cup – and the last components of breakfast finally landed on my table at 9:15am. In the end the breakfast was good, but the consequence was that it was almost 10:00am before I could begin my drive, a drive that took eight and a half hours; an average speed of just under 50 kilometres per hour when my brief stops are considered.
Although the mountain scenery was beautiful, stopping was largely impossible for reasons of safety and impractical for photography because of the wet, foggy conditions. I did make a five-minute stop mid-morning during one period of reduced rainfall intensity in a town named Telciu where an interesting war memorial had been erected.
I didn’t stop again until 4:00pm when a 10-minute-long period of sunshine (the only one I encountered all day) coincided with driving through one of the prettiest Transylvanian settlements I have seen, a town named Dumbrăveni. There was nothing especially remarkable about Dumbrăveni; for me, the appeal lay in its typicality.
Fifteen minutes later I reached Biertan, by which time the sun had disappeared and the overcast skies had returned. Unlike Telciu and Dumbrăveni, which were accidental discoveries, my visit to Biertan was intentional. The attraction was a large Lutheran church known as the Fortified Church. Situated on a steeply sided hill immediately to the east of the town square (which is beautifully encircled by pastel-coloured Saxon-style shops and houses), the late Gothic church, which is ringed by concentric walls and flanked by defensive towers, was constructed between 1493 and 1522.
I was well and truly ready to get out of the car and stretch my legs after the long, almost unbroken drive, so I parked the car and climbed the long flight of covered stairs to inspect the building. Like other Lutheran churches I have seen in Romania, the interior was fairly dark and basic to the point of being spartan. Perhaps more interesting (for me) were the excellent views across the town and the surrounding countryside from the grounds, looking out over the fortified walls. While I’m glad I stopped to look inside, the real impact of the church is its situation, looming high above the small town beneath it.
I finally arrived at my hotel in Sibiu, the Continental Forum, at about 6:30pm. For the record, Sibiu is one of the easier Romanian place names to pronounce – it is fairly simple; if you say “C.B.U.” fairly quickly without emphasising any of the syllabues, you will be saying the name correctly. I chose this hotel because of its location right on the edge of Sibiu’s historic centre combined with the fact that it provides parking for its guests – important as I noticed a sign this evening that was similar (maybe even identical) to one I had seen entering Sibiu in 1987, pointing out in English as well as Romanian that any illegally parked car would be towed away.
Having a hotel room just a few hundred metres away from one of the most historic town centres in Transylvania meant I couldn’t not go for an evening look, especially given how little walking I been able to do during the day.
Having visited the historic centre on my previous trip to Romania in 1987, the area was immediately familiar, although clearly renovated and more commercialised during the subsequent 35 years. I decided to try and get comparative photos, and unlike my experience a few days earlier in Braşov, finding the places where photos were taken in 1987 was comparatively easy. You can see the results below, unfortunately with today’s photos taken in overcast conditions (the 1987 photos having red borders). I have some other 1987 images of Brasov, and I’ll try to locate those places tomorrow.
As dusk fell upon the old town square, the façades of many of the buildings began to be illuminated, creating a lovely atmosphere. It was a surprisingly relaxing feeling wandering around the town square as the sky darkened into nightfall, although the tempting aromas from the many restaurants surrounding the square were difficult to resist.
If you would like to see a short (less than one minute) video showing the old square as dusk approached this evening, you can view it HERE.
Footnote: the map on the index page doesn’t show the actual route I took today. I drove through Bistriţa and Targu Mureş, not through Cluj-Napoca.
