Visiting Vlad [part 1] - Sighisoara

My friend. Welcome to the Carpathians. I am anxiously expecting you. I trust your journey from London has been a happy one, and that you will enjoy your stay in my beautiful land. Your friend, D. April 14th, Romania. I arrived through the city of Tirgu Mures, surrounded by the Carpathians. It's a farming town, of simple, small houses. Nothing bigger than the cathedral downtown or the governor's palace and such. Several monuments, a historical city, it seems. The people, on the other hand, are something else. Well dressed, pretty, well groomed. So far, I've been very interested in their language. It's a language that, when read, will give you a notion of what they're talking about. Because it has a similar origin to Italian. So it's understandable, it's a latin origin. However, it seems like our Portuguese went one way and their language went the other. Spoken language is chaos, I can't make heads or tails of it. But anyway, it'll be my first challenge around here. For the firts time, I'm spending a while in a country where I can't speak a single word of the native language. We'll see how it goes. Well, tomorrow I leave for Sighisoara, the city where Dracula was born. Let's see what I manage to find there. April 15th, Sighisoara. The city begins to get that classic aspect you'd expect from vampire movies. It sits on the base of the Carpathians, so you start getting the mountains on the horizon, and the influence of the Orthodox Curch. Sighisoara is, I am told, the birthplace of the historical Count Dracula, Vlad Tepes. He was born somewhere in there, inside the burg. The city is comprised of this burg, this center of town, which is a walled part, and even has much of the old city walls, and other historical buildings. It was listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site. Let's see if I can find the place where Dracula was born in there. Were it not for the price of the inn, I would have stayed close to one of the city's landmarks. Which is in fact a very apropriate place for what I came to do here, because it brings back fond memories of my childhood. That place is the Clock Tower. On the games of the Castlevania series, the approach to Castle Dracula always went through a clock tower. On one of them, that tower included a character you could play with from that momento on, who went by the last name Danesty. Danesty was one of the families that rivaled Dracula's. I'm at the top of the Clock Tower. From up here you can see the entire city, And the distances to several interesting places in the world, like the South Pole, for example. Check out this view. Beautiful, isn't it? From up here we can see a few other interesting places we'll visit. Guys, I found it! Check this out... Right next to the Clock Tower, a familiar figure showed me the way. It's a very simple house, which works as a restaurant nowadays. But they have place a sign on the wall. It reads along the lines of: "in this house, in this site, between the years of 1431 and 1435, lived the Romanian prince Vlad Dracul, son of Mircea, the Elder" I feel right at home! At the time Dracula was born, Romania was the stage for several power struggles. It had been taken over by the Roman Empire, was being fought over by the Turkish Empire, and Dracula - specifically his father's order, the Order of the Dragon - had sworn to protect the Church from the Turkish invasion... And Muslim invasion overall. That mix of several people trying to take over the place, including the races that were already tehre, the Magyars, Vlachs, Szekelys and such, created an area where real historical fact was very hard to find. So, this is where Dracula was born. What I know is that, in that house down below... Well, at least the version I got... was that he lived in that house down below until he was 4 years old, give or take. After that, something very odd happened. As a form of... truce, let's say, his father, Vlad II, made a deal with the Turks, a peace treaty. As a consequence of this treaty, Vlad and one of his brothers were sent as hostages, let's say, honorable hostages, to live with the Turks for a few years. It was there that his brother, I believe it was Radu, got along very well with the Turks and eventually became one of their generals, even fighting Dracula later on. Dracula, on the other hand, never got along with the Turks. He took the time he spent there, where he was constantly mistreated, to learn Turkish culture, including their methods of execution and torture. Among them, the impalement, which would earn him the name of Vlad Tepes: Vlad, the Impaler. Sighisoara was surrounded by this 14th century wall. You can see from the windows where archers would shoot arrows at the comming invaders. The wall should have 14 towers, like the one back there. Each of them defended by one of the city's guilds, The Blacksmiths Guild, the Carpenter's Guild, the Butcher's Guild... Some of these towers were demolished over the years, fell during wars, that kind of thing... They also had 5 artillery bastions, of which only 2 remain nowadays, I think. Well, we can see one of the government's buildings on the top of the hill. Behind it is what they call the Church on the Hill. You can get there going through the "covered stairway", as they call it, which has approximately about 200 steps. At the bottom of the covered stairway, I found the group of actors that walks through Sighisoara in medieval costumes, telling tourist curious facts about the city. In Romanian, unfortunately. I took the covered stairway, with its 172 steps inside a dark wooden tunnel, through which faint sunlight still reminded me of the cloudy day. The church rose before me, with thick walls to withstand the attacks. Behind it, the German cemetery. With good planning, Sighisoara can be seen in a day. On Sunday, the 17th, I crossed the Carpathians, heading for Brasov.