EUROPE – PART 6 – ROMANIA AND BULGARIA

We left our comfort zone, donned packpacks, and boarded bus 100E near our hotel in Budapest, bound for Liszt Ferenc (Franz Liszt) Airport to pick up our Avis rental.  After firing up Agnès, we headed due east across the Great Hungarian Plain.  Like our own Prairies, it’s the breadbasket of this part of Europe; vast fields stretching as far as the eye can see and soil as black as charcoal.

Our first destination was Eger, a city about the size of Charlottetown with the usual features — castle, basilica, baroque buildings — and one rather unusual one, a minaret, apparently the northernmost Ottoman minaret, and a reminder that the Turks once ruled this part of Hungary.  In truth, our principle motivation was lunch, so we dined on wraps at McDonalds!  We stayed in Debrecen that night, not a place I’d recommend, but we did have one of our best $45-dollar meals ever at the John Bull Pub.

Next morning, we hit the road bright and early, bound for Romania.  After cooling our heels at the crossing for a half hour or so while a covey of make-work border control officers played with their computers, we set sail for Sapanta.  Along the way, we came across this crusty shepherd, his trusty dog, and his flock of sheep, a very common sight in Romania, as it turned out.

Sapanta is home to a couple of world-class tourist attractions and the most unusual cemetery you’ll ever see, dubbed the Merry Cemetery.  We’d seen it on a Rick Steves episode and couldn’t pass up the opportunity.  Although the day was rainy, we thoroughly enjoyed wandering around the churchyard, examining the unique grave markers, wishing we understood the stories written on each one.  Apparently, some of them are hilarious.  Certainly, the people of Sapanta have a much different take on death than most.

A short drive away is the Peri Monastery Church, said to be the tallest wooden structure in the world at 78 m, one of several distinctive Eastern Orthodox churches that together make up the Wooden Churches of Maramures UNESCO World Heritage Site.  These Sapanta attractions could easily be ruined by too many visitors.  There just isn’t the infrastructure to support the travelling hordes.

After a long day on the road, we pulled in to Pensiuna Maramures, our lodging for the night, located in the tiny hamlet of Hoteni.  The owner spoke not a word of English but did his best to make us feel welcome.  Thanks to Google Translate, our iPhone saved us, and we learned that the common Latin root of French and Romanian even gave us a bit of a head start.

Romania is a land of contrasts where the old world and the new co-exist; where horse-drawn coffin-shaped carts share the road with semis, BMWs and Mercedes; where women wear kerchiefs, woolen skirts, and rubber boots, while holding cellphones to their ears; and where Communist-era buildings are distinguished by their sheer butt-ugliness.

With a land area about the same as Saskatchewan’s, Romania is home to 20 million people.  Its economy may be one of the fastest-growing in the European Union but, judging by what we saw during our travels, it has a long way to go.  There is poverty, subsistence agriculture is quite common, and infrastructure needs are great.  Still, Romania’s roads are not nearly as bad as Ireland’s!

After a brief stop at the magnificent Barsana Monastery, home to a religious community of nuns, we drove through the Carpathian foothills.  Traditional, ornate hand-carved wooden gates guard the entrances to many houses.  Villages in this part of the country run into one another in one continuous string of houses, outbuildings, public buildings, and, of course, many, many churches.  Kind of like Caraquet or Chéticamp.

To avoid the threat of snow, we turned south and headed for Sighisoara, a town in central Romania.  Agnès (our Google Maps smartphone app), so reliable the previous two days, suffered a serious brain fart.  Has it not been for Hortense (our Apple Maps app), we’d have gotten hopelessly lost.  It’s always good to have a back-up.  Eager to redeem herself, Agnès came to the rescue when Hortense got us lost in Sighisoara.

One of Sighisoara’s claims to fame is that it’s the birthplace of Vlad III, aka Vlad the Impaler, real-life Prince of Wallachia, and the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s fictional vampire Count Dracula.  The other is that its fortified old town is yet another UNESCO World Heritage Site.  We settled in for a couple of nights at the venerable Casa Georgius Krauss Hotel, circa 1513, and walked past aging but well-preserved medieval buildings.  It was quite a contrast from old towns in other European cities we’d visited where extensive renovations alter the allure of the place.

Our agenda for Day 2 in Sighisoara focused on the fortified churches which make up yet another UNESCO World Heritage Site.  They were built by German immigrants over 500 years ago.  We picked three and mapped out our route.  The first, Viscri, we reached over a road that would make the Cannontown look like the Trans-Canada Highway.  Unfortunately, it was closed, tourist season having come and gone, as was the third we visited, Biertan.

After visiting the ruins of a Saxon fortress called Bauernberg, we lucked out at the nearby village of Saschiz.  The young attendant unlocked the basilica for us and explained a bit about the site.  She said the people of the parish would hide in the church when the village was attacked.  “Where?”, I asked.  “In the attic”, she replied.  “You can go up if you want.”  So Elva and I crawled up a treacherous brick spiral staircase in the pitch black with only an iPhone light to guide us.  Once at the top, I couldn’t believe my eyes.  There we were, standing between the church’s vaulted ceiling and the roof, on a boarded floor where people would have sought refuge while soldiers defended them.  Not only that, there were other floors above us in the “attic”, spacious enough to hold several more families.  I tried to imagine having to sit out periodic raids by Turkish Ottoman hordes, hiding in a church attic.

Romania’s capital is Bucharest, a city of 2 million located 60 km north of the Danube and the Bulgarian border.  We managed to drive into and out of Bucharest, an experience I’d not recommend to anyone.  Traffic is total chaos.  The receptionist at the Hotel Monaco advised us on places to visit.  We strolled through the pedestrian Old Town, looking for something of interest.  We didn’t find much, except a few nice buildings in the Parisian style.  But most are in bad shape and graffiti is everywhere.

The one thing I really wanted to see was the Palace of Parliament, built in the late 1980s during the reign of the megalomaniacal leader of Romania’s Communist Government, Nicolae Ceausescu.  To prepare the site, 50,000 people were displaced, whole neighbourhoods were destroyed, and churches and monasteries were levelled.  The result is one of the biggest administrative buildings in the world, second only to the Pentagon!  And one of the ugliest.  It took us the better part of an hour just to walk around the fence!

We took a guided tour of the massive and ornate palace and were bombarded with statistics.  The one that registered with me is that there are 200,000 square meters of carpet in the building.  That’s about 50 acres worth!  Oh, and the fact that 3,000 people died building it!  The House of Representatives and the Senate occupy the former palace, as well as some 3,000 public servants in more than 1,000 offices.  The attitude of today's Romanians is: "We're stuck with it.  Might as well use it."  As for Ceausescu, he was shot to death by his own people during the 1989 revolution that brought an end to Communist rule.  So was his wife, Elena; both of them on Christmas Day.

Romanians may not enjoy the standard of living of many Europeans, but they’re the nicest, most accommodating people we met on this trip, excepting maybe the Irish.  Rural Romania is an exceptional place; one we’re glad to have experienced before it's discovered by the rest of the world.

After a very long drive from Bucharest to Budapest, we returned our rented Suzuki and gave Agnès and Hortense the rest of the year off.  Next morning, we flew to Sofia, capital of Bulgaria, tenth and last country of our European adventure.  Nicolai, a driver sent from the hotel, picked us up and provided live commentary along the way.  We booked a tour for the next day, got some local currency, mailed postcards, and checked in at the local tourism office.

Next morning, we drove about two hours south toward the border with Macedonia and visited Rila Monastery, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, named for Saint Ivan, one of the most venerated saints of the Eastern Orthodox Church.  Parts of the monastery date back to the fourteenth century.  The frescoes are incredible.  Our guide also took us on a hike to Ivan the Hermit’s cave.  It sits on a hill high above the monastery where he is believed to have lived and where his remains are buried.  A walk through a beautiful mature hardwood forest on a sunny day, what could be better?

 

On the way back to Sofia, we stopped at Boyana Church, another UNESCO site, the oldest part of which dates from the tenth century.  The building is less than impressive from the outside but the frescoes that decorate the interior are a treasure.  They depict scenes from the life of Saint Nicholas.  According to many leading experts, the world-famous frescoes in the Boyana Church played an important role in the development of medieval Bulgarian and European painting.  In other words, they were ahead of their time. 

On our last full day in Sofia, we did as many locals do, and went to the mountain, Mount Vitosha.  It towers over the city and is protected as a national park.  We loved watching children play in the winter’s first snow.  Sofia was a pleasant surprise — clean, quiet, spacious, and green — and a great way to end our journey in this part of Europe. 

We learned so much from our visits to four former communist countries: Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria.  Culturally, they are as different from one another as Canada and the US.  All transitioned from communism to democracy at about the same time, in 1989, but each is at a different stage in its development.  While they’ve yet to adopt the Euro, all four benefit from being members of the European Union.  Having suffered the terrible consequences of two World Wars and four and a half decades of authoritarian rule, it’s a wonder they’ve come as far as they have.

We ended our European adventure with a couple of R&R days in Vienna.  Elva enjoyed the Christmas market and we attended a concert.  After ten countries, thirty-one different beds, and 5,000 km on the road, a third of that on the wrong side, it's time to go home.  We’re excited to see our loved ones over the next month or so, beginning with the newest member of the clan, Estelle Melinda Arsenault.  We’ll spend five days with her family in Edmonton and three days in Toronto visiting Jacques, Isabelle, and Lucie.  On the Island, we’ll catch up with friends — assuming they still remember us — and spend Christmas with Sylvie, Ghislain, Samuel, and Natalie.  Life is good!