Winter in Transylvania
Snowy hike reveals hints of toothy creatures in fairytale-like land
While trekking through a snowy, shadow-filled forest in Transylvania, I begin worrying about being bitten — but not by who you might think.
“The wolves here are quite small,” says Thomas Oyntzen, a local Saxon-Romanian guide and hiking expert who’s taking our 10-person party along a trail at the base of the Carpathian Mountains in central Romania.
For the past hour, we’ve been sharing the path with a single track of fresh-that-morning wolf prints. The 38-year-old former army officer and rugby player puts my mind at ease.
“I’m not afraid of one wolf,” says Oyntzen, who has been expertly guiding our group through the region on an eight-day Exodus Travels’ tour titled Winter in Transylvania. “I could take it on.”
Yet, as he points out the slightly smaller and more sporadic fox prints and the triangular form of rabbit prints in the deeper drifts, he raises the spectre of another toothy predator — no, it’s not a vampire.
“I often see bears 20 or 30 metres away,” says Oyntzen, who regularly leads groups up these spectacular, unspoiled peaks that stretch up to 2,500 metres.
Suddenly, a pair of tiny roe deer streak across our path, as if fleeing a predator. No wolves or bears follow their frantic footsteps, but Oyntzen does start sending a warning whistle echoing down the slopes every few minutes.
This mountain range gives Transylvania — a name derived from Medieval Latin, meaning “the land beyond the forest” — a natural border inside Romania and a unique cultural identity. Saxons settled the region in the 12th century, bringing with them the German language, universal education and the construction of iconic “fairytale” towns, each built around a fortified church.
Prior to joining Romania after the First World War, Transylvania was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and quietly went about its business of blending German, Hungarian, Turkish, Ukrainian and Roma cultures and trades — including back-shed moonshine-making and yearround sheepherding — into everyday modern life.
We’d tasted the delicious results of this cultural continuity earlier in the week, while sitting around the welcoming dinner table at the Pensiunea Andrei Sibiel guest house in Sibiel, a charming village where people’s fortunes are based on the size of their flocks.
The guest house is run by Andrei Gheorghe Danut, 62, whose own grandfather used to move his 3,000 sheep all over this mountainous region.
“There have been shepherds here for 2,000 years,” said Danut, through Oyntzen’s translation, as he and his wife served up slices of salty sheep cheese, piping-hot pork cabbage rolls and jugs of fortified wine (all homegrown, all homemade).
Danut pointed to an embroidered black-and-white felt jacket and a tightly woven wool throw hanging on the wall: “My father gave that to my mother when they got engaged — and she wove him the blanket to keep the rain off while out in the fields with the sheep.”
This was no spontaneous gift exchange; it’s one of many local traditions that go back centuries. Another takes place from May to September, when shepherds move their flocks (and massive Carpathian sheepdogs) into the mountains to graze.
The advent of cellphones has made tracking down each shepherd’s location much easier, but they still travel by horse and cart, since “horses are easier to fix.”
Danut introduced us to Ioan Rosia, 79, who’s been a shepherd since he was a little boy, back when boys of 10 or11were sent to neighbouring farms to learn the trade and receive an education. Rosia was wearing a cojoc, a thick, woolly coat constructed from five whole sheepskins that not only protects shepherds from snow, but also their sheep from predators.
“Shepherds sleep out with sheep, and bears will take the biggest sheep at night,” said Danut. “It will go for the shepherd (who looks like a juicy ewe), not the sheep . . . and they have a stick to fight them off, to make the animals scared.”
Rosia, no taller than five-foot-five, told us with a laugh that there are weekly wolf and bear attacks — but the wild boars are actually most dangerous. He then opened his cojoc, pulled out a 100-year-old rosewood pipe and played a lively set of traditional reels, all learned by ear over a lifetime of listening to his fellow shepherds.
Back on the mountain trail, as we descend towards the valley floor dotted with the outlines of grazing sheep, I discover the sharp whistles Oyntzen sends out into the snowy wilderness aren’t aimed at predators — they’re for the shepherds and their dogs.
“If the dogs come, stay close and let me sort them out,” says Oyntzen, weaving our flush-cheeked group in and out of the ice-speckled trunks of ancient oak, hazelnut and silver birch trees.
“They’re trained to protect the sheep from bears and wolves, but they can see us as a threat, too.”
Sure enough, three dogs spot us and start barking up a storm. Luckily, a loud send-off is all we get and we remain bite-free by the time we enter the medieval village of Vulcan — just in time for coffee, cake and shots of 60-per-cent moonshine with the local Saxon priest.
It turns out that in Transylvania, you need to be much more wary of a growing waistline than Dracula’s bite. Emma Yardley was hosted by Exodus Travels, which didn’t review or approve this story.