Sink your teeth into Transylvania
The 18 villages surrounding Sibiu are remarkable for their preservation of traditional crafts.
It wasn’t the occult that drew me to Transylvania. It was a cookbook.
I’ve never read any of the Twilight series, nor a single word of an Anne Rice novel (though a friend did persuade me to see the film version of Interview With the Vampire when it was released in 1994). Bela Lugosi’s Dracula is the only vampire I’m familiar with. But as a culinary historian, I’ve been intrigued by Transylvania since 1985 and the release of the unusual cookbook Paul Kovi’s Transylvanian Cuisine by the former owner and director of the Four Seasons in New York.
The book is unusual not only for its combination of history, folklore, poetry and sociology, but also for the cuisine of this melting pot in Central Europe, where Hungarians, Armenians, Saxon Germans, Romanians and Roma make their home. Kovi had combed through 17th-, 18th- and 19th-century treatises and called on 10 of Transylvania’s best writers to help him evoke the bountiful table of this corner of Eastern Europe.
As of late last summer, I’d been living in Bulgaria for three months, and although I’d travelled to many nooks and crannies of the Balkans, from the Black Sea to Macedonia, I hadn’t yet crossed the Danube into the land of Dracula.
But now I had a week to do just that, while my husband attended a conference. A part of Hungary and the Austro-hungarian empire for more than 1,000 years, Transylvania is now a largely isolated portion of north-central Romania. The surrounding regions — Moldavia, Maramures, Wallachia and the Banat — were even more unknown and mystifying to me.
I started in the historic city of Sibiu, which, like many places in Transylvania, is also called by its German name, Hermannstadt, and its Hungarian one, Nagyszeben. Bordered by the Carpathian Mountains to the south, Sibiu, with its multicultural history, was selected as a European Capital of Culture in 2007. Funds from the European Union poured in, and today the city, with its modern accommodations and restaurants and abundance of UNESCO World Heritage sites, is made for visitors.
Sibiu’s architecturally fascinating old town, situated on two levels, seems self-possessed, as though it were still the capital of Transylvania, as it was for100 years in the18th century. For most of the 18th and 19th centuries, the Habsburg emperors ruled in Transylvania, constructing, as they did in Vienna, grand public spaces and elaborate buildings meant to show the dynasty’s wealth and power. I’ve seen nothing as impressive as the city’s Piata Mare — the “large plaza” — in Bulgaria.
At the same time, the Saxons, a German-speaking group of northern Europeans who had settled in Transylvania beginning in the 12th century and built hilltop villages with fortified churches, also maintained their presence in Transylvania. Among the baroque Habsburg architecture in Sibiu, medieval Saxon homes sport eye-shaped dormer windows that seemed to follow me everywhere.
There are plenty of shops, museums, churches and cafés to duck into, as well as other squares, each lined with structures from different eras. A narrow passageway beneath the arcade of the Council Tower, originally built as part of the city’s second ring of forts in the 13th century, leads to Piata Mica, the handsome “small plaza.” There, the socalled Liars Bridge abuts the elegant, arcaded Hall of the Butchers’ Guild, which houses an ethnographic museum and a superb gift shop selling traditional handmade masks, carvings, fabrics and tableware. The cast-iron bridge, the first in Romania, was built in 1859 to replace a rickety wooden one that was said to collapse if you told a lie while standing on it; the name stuck.
From the bridge, I was drawn down to the Lower Town, wandering through the medieval streets, where everything isn’t quite as spruced up, past at least a dozen stores called Second Hand. I spent a couple of hours in the covered open-air market at Piata Cibin on the river of that name, using Italian to communicate with the delightful Magyar, Roma and Romanian ven- dors. As in Bulgaria, I saw plenty of turnips and beets, but spinach was the only leafy green vegetable other than lettuce. One Roma vendor, his hands black from shelling walnuts, wanted to sell me not only nuts but also parsley root, bright orange catina berries (sea buckthorn) and Cornelian cherries (the fruit of a dogwood tree). Unfortunately, I had no idea how to use them. Now that Romania is part of the European Union, the butchers and cheesemakers have been moved indoors to a sterile building outfitted with refrigerated cases filled with their wares. However, large hunks of each type of cheese, used for sam- ples, sat atop those coolers. A young woman from the neighbouring Saxon village of Rasinari sold me some of her parents’ lovely fresh sheep’s milk cheese. The 18 sheep-raising villages surrounding Sibiu — known as the Marginimea Sibiului — are remarkable for their preservation of the traditional crafts of weaving, woodcarving, icon painting, egg colouring and, naturally, cheesemaking. I drove to nearby Rasinari first, where gaily painted roadside shrines adorn country roads and the town square. Transylvanian kilims hung in the windows of the gingerbread-trimmed houses painted in pastel colors, like those of Bermuda or Charleston. Public wells provide water to the residents, who cart buckets back to their satellite-dish-embellished houses. In nearby Cristian, settled by Saxons in the 14th century, I counted 30 empty storks’ nests. Potatoes were being harvested in the surrounding fields, the hay was already stacked, and donkey carts were as common as automobiles. But the ethnographic museum was closed. On more than one occasion as I drove around this area, I turned around because the road turned to dirt and I didn’t feel comfortable, not speaking the language and without a cellphone. I probably should have joined some of the other conference-attendee spouses, who had hired a driver ($150 for the day) to take them on tours.
This thought struck me particularly on the treacherous, awe-inspiring Transfagarasan Highway, which, at nearly 7,000 feet, is the second highest roadway in Europe, a two-lane blacktop that hugs milehigh canyons and took five years to build. Many consider it to be the best motorcycle route in the world. Somehow overcoming my fear of heights, and white-knuckled all the way, I managed to reach the summit.
I was fortunate to have bright sun on the climb, but as soon as I reached the peak, chilling clouds moved in. A cluster of restaurants and roadside stands perched on the pinnacle. I walked into one of the restaurants and ordered restorative ciorba ardeleneasca, a traditional Transylvanian “sour” soup chock full of pork and potatoes. Chorbas are made sour by adding buttermilk, sour cream, lemon juice, vinegar or, in this case, sauerkraut juice.