The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
‘Sometimes, going forward is best served by going back’
A mother and son’s restoration project is putting Transylvania on the luxury travel map, says Mary Lussiana
Europe’s north does remoteness well, but head east and so too does Transylvania – along with culture, history, castles, churches, brown bears and dense forests.
Despite its size (after being tossed between its neighbours like a political football, it now takes up one third of Romania) Transylvania is a region many people know little about. In a wordassociation game, Dracula would be the first answer, though mention might be made of Prince Charles, whose affection for its rural beauty (he has bought a house there) and help in preserving its old Saxon churches is well documented.
But now Transylvania has arrived on the luxury traveller’s map. The tiny village of Cris, which sits in the shadow of the Carpathian Mountains – one of Europe’s great remaining wildernesses – has this year become one of the continent’s most desirable remote destinations thanks to an intriguing new hotel.
The village was founded some 800 years ago by the Counts Bethlen, a family of Hungarian aristocrats (Transylvania was part of the Kingdom of Hungary at the time). The castle they built, first documented in 1305, was considered the finest example of a renaissance building in Transylvania and an unbroken line of Bethlens lived there, enjoying views across the green valleys from their colonnaded loggia on the first floor. Meanwhile, Saxon settlers, brought in to defend Hungary’s borders against waves of invading Tartars, added fortified churches and two-storeyed, limewashed, pastel-coloured houses to the landscape. The fortressed Saxon town of Sighisoara, with its medieval citadel, is a 20-minute drive from the village.
In 1948, Romania’s communist government nationalised castles such as Bethlen. Arriving in large trucks, officials either took what they could or, as in the case of the precious library, threw the contents into the courtyard and burned them. The resident Count Bálint Bethlen was arrested as a class enemy and the family were forced to flee to Austria. The castle was left to crumble.
In the intervening years, Bethlen’s youngest son Miklós, who had spent his childhood in the castle, returned as regularly as possible to his homeland, supporting the communities that remained there and fundraising to help preserve the village, but he died in 2001 before restoration of Cris could get under way.
Instead, his wife Gladys and their son Nikolaus took on that mantle, acquiring and renovating abandoned, derelict buildings around their ancestral village (the majority of resident Saxons returned to Germany in 1989 when they were offered citizenship following the collapse of the Ceausescu regime), including an old family manor house and a school building. The couple hope one day to be able to restore the castle to its former glory, too.
The renovated manor house swung open its doors earlier this year. Formerly the home of the castle’s caretaker, its white walls are topped by a red roof featuring the traditional lidded dormer windows that seem to give houses in the area “eyes”. The four bedrooms inside come with tiled stoves and beds clad in the softest of linens. Downstairs a log fire in the drawing room offers a place to curl up with a book on the region and a glass from the well-stocked honesty bar. There is a kitchen if you fancy cooking and a dining room in which to enjoy the tasty ham-hock soup staff can whip up for you if you don’t.
A walk along the narrow country road past the ancient granary takes you to Depner House, the second property to open. Behind the blue lime-washed facade lie two bedrooms, bathrooms and a library; the interiors an artful mix of the skill of local artisans and the flawless taste of designers Stefanie de Castelbajac and Melanie Etten-Rüppell.
Both properties are for exclusive use only, but across the road, between walnut and mulberry trees, is the soon-to-be finished four-bedroom Corner Barn, in which rooms can be rented individually.
In between Depner House and the Corner Barn is the cosy Kitchen Barn, with a central glassed-in log fire. Here, talented chef Robert Tordai delivers pitch-perfect dishes drawing on local ingredients, from suckling pig with truffles to wild river crab with celeriac dumplings in a crab bisque.
As I enjoyed the latter at a dinner with Gladys Bethlen, some of the family’s Hungarian cousins from nearby and the writer William Blacker (fresh from helping to rescue a tiny steam train for preservation), I made a wish that one day soon the happy voices of these Transylvania stalwarts would also ring out in the castle on the hill. Sometimes, going forward is best served by going back.
The interiors mix the skill of local artisans and the flawless taste of the designers