Day 5: Stepping Back in Time in Viscri

There's no crying in baseball and there's no sleeping in on a Lucas vacation, so we were out the door at sunrise for Sighisoara. I can't say I was too sad to leave Brasov--I'm glad we saw it and the fortified churches we visited were amazing, but I don't think the glowing reviews of the town itself were entirely warranted, especially given how painfully congested traffic was in the area to get to the equally painfully crowded attractions. If I ever came to Romania again, I'd come in through Timisoara and skip the southern half of the country.

Anyway, the road to Sighisoara was another two-lane affair, through mountains and countryside; we passed through valleys with lakes where the fog was so heavy you could barely see the road, and then up into thick trees. And the fun Romanian driving fact I learned today is that if you leave absolutely any space between yourself and the car in front of you, the car behind you will leapfrog you and squeeze in even at great personal risk to their own bumpers. Romanian roads are a relentless race to be in the front of the line.

Sighisoara is only about an hour and a half from Brasov, but we left so early to visit two other  fortified Saxon villages--Viscri and Saschiz. Viscri was about 15 very slow kilometers off the main road and required the dodging of some pretty massive potholes. In fact, Taylor refused to believe there was a village at the end of the road at all, since he doesn't have any faith in my map-reading abilities. To quote him, "We are going to get a flat tire and die out here and no one will ever find us."

However, Viscri WAS at the end of the road, as we saw when we pulled down a gravel lane flanked by bright blue, avocado green, and cream houses, among which wandered a gaggle of very vocal geese. We even saw a fox dart by in a flash of red.

 

 

Viscri was settled by Saxons in the 12th century, and its fortified church is unique in that they took it over from another group of settlers rather than building it themselves. However, it still served as a center of military, cultural, and religious life like the other churches the area. It's a much smaller church than the other two we saw yesterday, but it had a great museum inside with a lot of facts about village life. For instance, schoolboys would carve a little wheel (called a wharve) for a girl they liked and present it to her as a token of affection; her family would then put it in her shoe and hide the dhow. She would then hop around the yard on one foot looking for it while the young man enjoyed cake with the family. When she found the shoe, she would give the wharve back to the young man in exchange for a kiss. Love is strange, I guess.

There was also a small and ancient cemetery in front of the fortress, as well as a flock of turkeys. Apparently there was a grave inscription in the cemetery from 1100 AD, but I didn't find it. (Admittedly, it was weedy and wet and I wasn't looking very hard.)

Though it's slightly difficult to reach and very small, Viscri is actually a popular tourist destination because of the work of Prince Charles to preserve Romanian culture and nature--he loves the country and owns a few guesthouses in Viscri and another village as well. It really does feel like stepping back to a time where the village provided all of the residents' needs throughout the communal work of its people, and I don't think I've ever been somewhere so rural, though that might change when we go to Breb in a few days.

After Viscri, we drove to Saschiz, where I hoped to buy some of their indigo-blue pottery (the method to replicate it exactly has been lost but a workshop is in place to recover the technique); however, we didn't see any place that looked likely to sell pottery, so we kept driving.

Sighisoara is about twenty minutes from Saschiz, and I already love it here--it's a medieval walled city, though its origins go back to Roman times, and it's well-preserved, quiet, and beautiful. Also, our hotel (the Binderbubi) is amazing--we have a large and comfortable suite, and the hotel is only about a five-minute walk from the old town. 

For lunch, we walked a few minutes to Hotel Central Park to eat, where Taylor had duck and sour cabbage and I had Asian chicken (I know, I know--but I'm tired of Romanian food and I can't pretend). I also ended the meal with a Romanian donut, which is a pastry filled with sweetened blackberries and drizzled with cream.

I'll write more about Sighisoara tomorrow when we explore more thoroughly--for now I'll leave you with this picture of a dog on a roof  in Brasov. (The number of stray dogs here is staggering--we've seen everything from huge mutts to tiny chihuahuas jaunting around streets like they own the country.)