Transylvania With The Kids

We left Romania yesterday and we are still talking about what a good time we had there and what a beautiful place it is. As we said before, Romania really surprised us in a positive way. Sometimes, you simply feel a connection with a place and we definitely felt one with Romania!

After our time in Cluj-Napoca, we headed south into the Transylvanian countryside, to a little village called Curciu. There we stayed at a guesthouse that had a shared bathroom and kitchen, a great wood-fire grill, and a wonderful outdoor space for the kids to play and for us to relax. The owner of the guesthouse was a friendly woman who is well-known in her community for her activism and community leadership. She was a welcoming hostess, and she gifted us fresh produce from her garden and arranged a ride on a horse-drawn carriage (more on that below!).

We were happy to have stayed in the countryside of Romania because it showed us a different side of the country that you wouldn’t see if you were just visiting cities. During our time there, we saw people hanging out outside their homes in the evenings, horse-drawn carriages being used for farming, and kids playing outside at all times, from running around to riding their bikes to walking to the little town store by themselves.

A quick historical note: much of Transylvania was settled by Saxon (i.e., German) people in the 1200s onwards. The Ottoman Empire took Bulgaria in the late 1300s and started pressing north into Romania. So starting in the early 1400s, all the villages fortified their churches and the guilds in the larger towns built many towers and walls, as people feared invasion by the Turks. As a result, when you travel through Transylvania, many churches have towers and arrow slits and castle-looking walls and the larger cities are full of interesting fortified towers and medieval walls. The place where we stayed was a traditional Saxon farmhouse.

This is what we did during our time in Curciu:

• We visited the nearby town of Medias, the second biggest city in the Sibiu province. Medias is not even mentioned in our guidebook and there is hardly anything online about it, but Medias had some of the most beautiful and colorful houses and doors we saw in Romania! The town had a beautiful main square that was perfect for the kids to run around, In the old center there was also a nice fortified church with a very ornate tower. We toured the inside of the church but, apparently, the tower is not open to the public.

• We went on a horse-drawn carriage ride tour of our village and the nearby fields. Our Airbnb hostess arranged for a man in the village to take us for a ride while she joined to tell us more about the area. The man, Honore, brought his daughter Antonia with him, so we had a packed carriage to ride on! Honore’s two small dogs also joined us for the entire ride, running next to us and keeping up with the horse! 

• After the ride, Honore invited us to his house. At his house, his wife Dana was waiting for us with a bag full of tomatoes from their garden, and she invited us inside to have some coffee, pound cake, and ice cream! She gave Paola a tour of their huge hillside garden where they picked another bag full of peaches for us to take home. While we hung out, Hugo and Valentina played with Antonia and her toys, and had a fun time interacting with the sheep, chickens, and pigs that lived there. We were so humbled by their hospitality!

• We visited the town of Sighisoara, which is best known for its vampire legends and for being the place where Vlad “The Impaler” Tepes was born. Vlad was a brutal ruler (we’ll spare you the stories, but you can google him if you want to learn more—for Game of Thrones followers, he’s basically Ramsey Bolton) and he is credited as having been the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula. In Sighisoara we had lunch at the house were Vlad was born, which was very cool for the kids, especially Hugo!

• We drove to Biertan to see its fortified church, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Unfortunately, we got there too early and the church wasn’t going to open for another 2 hours. Instead of waiting, we decided to walk around the church—which was very interesting from the outside—and check out the town before heading back to Medias for lunch.

• On our way from Curciu to Brasov, we spent the morning in Sibiu, a beautiful and lively Transylvanian town that is only starting to be discovered by tourists. While we were there, they were having a medieval festival with sword fighting, medieval dances, weaponry displays and food. The kids LOVED it and Hugo was invited to hold swords, shields, and interact with “knights.” While in Sibiu, we also went up the church tower’s 200 steps. Us parents took turns to go up because, after going up the initial spiral staircase, we realized that the rest of the stairways were too steep for little kids to go on. It was a vertiginous climb on stairs that didn’t look overly secure and many people turned around before getting to the top. Paola described the way up as making her legs feel like jelly. Once at the top, the views were gorgeous!

• We went for a walk around town every afternoon, and Hugo played with a lot of the kids we met playing outside. One day he built rock stacks with some kids, another day we played digging in the dirt and throwing rocks into the creek with another kid. The town kids were very friendly to Hugo and Valentina! 

We are really happy we spent a few days in a tiny Transylvanian village in central Romania. It definitely was an experience we would recommend to anyone traveling in Romania!

In our next post we’ll write about our time in Brasov, out last stop in Romania.