Fortified Transylvania

We're up to our third city in Transylvania – Brasov, Sibiu and now Cluj-Napolica. They're all reasonably big, but I'd barely heard of them, despite the occasional dip into Romanian history.

Whereas Bulgaria surprised for the amount of Roman stuff, Transylvania has surprised for the huge amount of military architecture. We've seen a Dacian hillfort, some medieval castles, several walled towns and early and late star forts. Alison puts up with it, but I've absolutely been in my element!

However, much as I enjoy Iron age forts, castles and bastion fortresses, the unique feature of the area is the "fortified churches". Actually the churches themselves are standard Lutheran churches, although some of the bell towers doubled with a military use, but they are surrounded by defensive walls.

The simplest ones are a church surrounded by a high stone wall with ramparts.

A fairly standard one. On Sibiu to Sigisoara Road

Some of them are veritable castles, with two rings of high walls and regular towers. A few are virtual Disney efforts.

Biertan

There are 150 left, out of perhaps 300. Basically virtually every village in eastern Transylvania had one.

They are all Lutheran, because the villages (and towns) were "Saxon", which means in this context ethnic Germans. (There are a couple of ethnic Hungarian Szekely churches too, but they are also Reform.) German settlers were imported into Transylvania to help build its economy in the Middle Ages, and because they had to defend themselves against the Turks they were permitted to build these fortifications. The village folk, when threatened, moved themselves and their movables into the church for safety.

The towns were walled on the same basis, often with individual guilds building separate towers, which leads to every tower in the defensive scheme being different.

Oddly there aren't many actual castles here. Those there are were mostly lordly residences, with only secondary defensive features. We went to Bran castle – which is sold as Dracula's but is no such thing. It was both expensive (in local terms) and not that good – we saw many similar in Switzerland.

The fortified churches, however, have been fascinating, even though we haven't been able to visit more than three (although we have walked around a few more).

We've had two weeks here, looking at this and that. A fan of fortifications might want a month though, there is so much to see. 

Some thoughts on Bulgaria

Bulgaria is a nice place to visit and we're glad we went – there were lots of interesting places we didn't have time to get to and a person could spend a month there (you'd probably need a car though).

We found reading the Bulgarian language not too bad. I recognise the letters and the technical words tend to be the same as other European languages. A lot of people didn't speak any, but we were never stymied (except the day we had to order random burgers because the waiter didn't know how to translate the ingredients).

While the feel is basically that of a modern European town, with the same sorts of shops and people looking mostly similar, still a lot remains from the Communist era. Bulgaria simply doesn't have the money to go round knocking down things unless it needs to.

The most political of the statues, like Lenin and Dimitrov (the first leader of Communist Bulgaria and a hard-line Stalinist) were removed (a few were collected in a special museum we visited). However loads of stuff remains which isn't too obviously Soviet – until you examine the style, in which case they're very obviously Soviet Realist.

And one of the reasons they remain is that they are huge. Far too large to dismantle easily. 

Here's Alison at the base of the one above, to show just how stupidly big it is.

They also still have most of the main Communist administration buildings, which are now government offices. They did blow up the Dimitrov mausoleum (similar to the Lenin one in Red Square) but had nothing to put in its place, so there sits a flat bit of concrete in the middle of Sofia.

Another great building civilisation, but this time in a good way, was the Romans. Bulgaria is largely the ancient province of Thrace and had been linked to the Greek world for 500 years before the Romans got there, so was heavily colonised. All the sizable towns are ex-Roman (and most ex-Thracian before that).

Plovdiv had the partial remains of the wall, a theatre, an ancient stadium (for chariot-racing) and an aqueduct – which in typical Roman fashion shifted water 30 odd kilometres to a town which was built on a river. The coastline around Varna had only bits and pieces because the modern parts are built on the ancient ones, but a clear history from Thracian times through to the Byzantines.

The surprise was Sofia, which has much of the ancient town excavated, literally two levels down from the modern city, so you find bits of it on show as you wander around the Metro.

What seriously impressed me though was the road the Romans built south of Plovdiv, from Asenovgrad down to the Greek coast. There are large sections still clearly visible, which we walked.

Alison on the Roman road, with cliffs above and below.

It ran through the hills for some 150 kilometres, much of it carved out of cliff faces to cart width. Because the river bed area is prone to flooding the road runs several hundred metres higher than the river. It had been a trade route for centuries, but only the Romans went the full way and built a proper road – they certainly built things once, to last.

Of course we learned quite a lot more about Bulgaria, too much to relate here. There were oddball things – at all the restaurants we went to they served the dishes at random times, so we didn't get to eat together. There were solutions to things that had bothered me – I had always wondered how Alexander the Great and his father had conquered such a hilly country so quickly, but it turns out that the Thracians were a lot more civilised than I had thought and had sizable towns to conquer and that most of the country isn't that hilly. And so many churches with so many icons!

So now we are in ancient Dacia, modern Romania, and it's intriguing the similarities and the differences. More of that later.  

Wombling around Bulgaria

So far we're having a great time in Bulgaria, even if the locals don't seem to know the first thing about Wombles.

Varna and Plovdiv both have lovely pedestrian zones with photogenic old buildings, and lots and lots of slightly less photogenic soviet-era and more recent apartment buildings. They both also have LOTS of casinos - we haven't ventured into any them though they might be interesting spots to watch the mafia pass by.  All the people we've seen are perfectly nice and non-gangster-looking, but apparently the Plovdiv Lokomotiv football club lost 5 managers in 12 years by assassination, so it does sound as if there are some tough types out there.
 

 

Plovdiv will be the 2019 European City of Culture, and is in the middle of branding and merchandising for it. One effort is Plovediv - printed on mugs, t-shirts etc - which does seem to be risking retaliation in the form of Plovdive (which wouldn't be fair at all).

Yesterday we decided to leave town and head for the nearest hills, the Rhodopi mountains. It's only 20 km by (slow) train from Plovdiv to Asenovgrad, so that's where we started. About 2 km out of Asenovgrad there is a ruined fortress and church perched dramatically atop a rather steep hill, so we set out to walk there.

Up until now Google Maps has largely been my friend, but lately it's been acting like the sort of friend who promises to give you a ride home from a party but then has too much to drink and falls asleep in the corner. GM assured us that the way to walk to the fortress was to walk along the main road ... and GM was wrong (unless we wanted to stand on the main road and admire the fortress from below, or scramble up a couple of hundred metres of scree). Luckily we followed the road signs instead (sorry, GM) and made it to the fortress with no problems at all other than a bit of robust discussion.

I'd read that from the fortress it's possible to walk to the next village, Bachkovo, where there's a famous monastery. All I could find on the internet was one brief mention of a roman road that would take about three and a half hours to walk (with an even briefer mention of a steep cart track at some point), and GM was just baffling. I know it's not always wise to walk along main roads ("main" being a relative term here), but GM seemed to have a serious snitch against walking on the local road.

  

In a spirit of "what could possibly go wrong" we set out anyway, along a lovely smooth portion of old Roman road that led to a nearby chapel. From there the track clearly continued, but with no signpost to say where it was heading. We figured it would be easy enough to scramble down to the main road if the track turned out to be heading away from the village (ha!), and carried on. All we knew was that there would be the steep bit, and a ruined Roman bridge, and that at parts the track might be a bit hard to find. All of that was certainly true. We saw no other people at all on the trail, though the occasional cigarette butt and pile of donkey dung reassured us that other people do occasionally pass along it. After a while we realised that there actually were trail markers, white and green stripes painted on trees and rocks, and the occasional arrow where the trail forked. And about halfway to the village there was even a sign saying Bachkovo, which was definitely a Good Sign.

The Roman road portions of the track were lovely easy walking - flat and wide with stone walls supporting the edges. Other bits were pure bush track. And the "steep cart track" was slabs of concrete and then stone set into dried mud at about a 25 degree incline ... almost bearable up to what appeared to be the crest of the hill, but of course there was more, and then more, and I made the mistake of using some of my breath to curse out loud at the sight of more climb to come. Luckily that was in the first hour of the walk, so there was plenty of time to recover and enjoy the walk after that.

Cyprus

[Yes, I’ve been very quiet lately. Blame my laptop for quitting on me just when I’d entrusted it with all my travel planning. Also, we’ve been busy doing stuff, which makes for tired people and no time to write.]

 It’s just a one-hour flight from Amman to Paphos in Cyprus, so of course it took us close on ten hours to get from our apartment there to our new base in Nicosia – an hour to get to the airport, just in case, three hours at the airport like the obedient citizens that we are, an hour flying, 2 ½ hours waiting for the shuttle bus, 1 ½ hours on the shuttle etc.

 We were driven to the airport by one of Jordan’s finest taxi drivers: he told Mark not to worry about putting the seatbelt on because it’s Jordan and nobody worries about that [I was in the back seat, where there simply was no seatbelt], then drank his coffee, smoked cigarettes and talked on his phone while weaving from lane to lane on the motorway, every few minutes choosing a new music video on YouTube on the second phone mounted on his dashboard and braking viciously for speed cameras. To make it a truly memorable ride he also insisted we pay him an extra couple of dinars for parking at the airport.

Ah, Jordan.

On the shuttle bus from Paphos to Nicosia we were like wide-eyed kids. Did you see that? He indicated before he changed lanes! And that woman’s leaving enough room for two buses to fit between her and the car in front. In Nicosia our amazement continued. It was rush hour and traffic was moving slowly, and it was... quiet.

After the noise and dust of Amman, Cyprus was very peaceful, other than the church bells working overtime for Orthodox Holy Week. Lots of the locals speak good English, and they even drive on the left, just like home. There’s clearly still a bit of bitterness between north and south – from the balcony of our apartment we could see a huge and ostentatious Turkish flag lit up on the steep northern hills at night. We crossed between the two sides several times; on foot it’s simple, though the queues can be long if tour groups are going through, and I got the feeling they don’t see very many NZ passports. There are large signs warning about the penalties for crossing the border with counterfeit goods, possibly because of the shops on the northern side selling ‘genuine’ Rolexes for 40 euros and Nikes for 10.

Highlights of our six days in Cyprus:

Nicosia both south...

 and north

Famagusta (aka Gazimagusta).

   A cheap if somewhat bumpy bus trip from north Nicosia, with a bus driver who creepily chatted up any girls who got on. Famagusta has, um, ruins. Venetian stuff. Mark will probably explain. There’s an eerie ghost town of abandoned hotels in  the strip in between north and south – one day it was a thriving resort & the next it was abandoned. The Turkish Cypriot police have very little sense of humour, so I did decide to obey the signs and not take photos, but you can google Varosha to find pictures taken by tougher travellers.

 Kyrenia (aka Girne)

Another bus trip in the north. A gorgeous old harbour full of fishing boats. And a castle, of course.  

Kiti

Home of the creepiest Easter decorations I’ve ever seen.

Larnaca

Larnaca town is pretty much what you’d expect Palmerston North to be like if it turned into a beach resort. But there was a Good Friday evening parade right under our balcony, and lots of fireworks after midnight mass.

Limassol  

Can't decide whether to buy the superyacht or the villa on the waterfront... why not have both. (Thanks, little girl on the El Paso ad.)

And literacy
After less than a day in Cyprus I was able to read several words in Greek (boring stuff like exit and water). This was exciting for me because three months in Jordan had made me think the language part of my brain was broken – I never did get past three or four letters of the alphabet.

Varna

So now we're in Bulgaria. I know this because Google helpfully has decided that I can speak Bulgarian and is offering me the following

It turns out that  reading things in Bulgarian isn't so bad. I mostly know the alphabet from my Russian reading and a lot of the nouns for things we might want are in phonetic variants of English, French or German (the above адрес is just adres, so address). Plus I know a few of the common words from their very similar Russian versions.

We've been a bit affected today by Orthodox Easter Monday being a public holiday in Bulgaria (Orthodox Easter is after Western Easter because those churches still use the Julian calendar for liturgical purposes). Shops are open, but museums and the like are not, so we had a quiet day.

Just as well really since I'm already starting to lose track of time. We wandered past a building just now and I said to Alison that I remembered seeing it some time ago – which is hardly surprising because it was earlier that morning.

We didn't have that much time in Cyprus, so we charged around all over the country trying to get in the highest priority things. The weather was fabulous, which allowed us to do things, but the heat was quite tiring.

I like Castles (there follows quite a lot about castles)

If you are into castles – and I most definitely am fond a castle or twenty – then Jordan has some treats. Not so much in number, but in variety.

The river Jordan was about as far as the Crusaders were able to push eastwards, but from time to time they held land in what is now modern Jordan. Two important castles remain from that era – at Shobak and Kerak.

We went to Shobak on the day with the worst weather we had during our time in Jordan. We were staying in Petra, but that isn't a good visit in the rain, as it can flood quite dangerously, and is quite exposed. So we took a taxi to the castle down the road. The stop there wasn't as long as we would have liked, but it was too cold to hang around and we had agreed with the taxi driver that he would wait one hour.

Shobak is the modern name, for what was originally le Chateau de Montreal. It's in a relatively poor state, with earthquakes and local plundering of stone leaving it quite ruined, and in any case the original crusader castle had been built over by later owners. But it was definitely worth a visit.

I've never seen a castle where they attempted to put in as many defences in such a small space. It's a long site, but quite narrow and they put in three curtain walls. That left the outer and middle wall only about 3 metres apart, which is odd to say the least.

The coolest thing about the castle though was that it has two tunnels that run down a long way underground and reappear at the base of the (quite large) hill. We sadly didn't have time to go to the end of them, but a person with more time is able to. It's not for the claustrophobic.

The other major crusader castle at Kerak (or Karak) we visited in the second last day before we left. It is on a high point where the easiest route up from the Dead Sea goes up through the highlands.

Built by Crusaders, it was later slightly remodeled by the Mamluks, but large parts of the Frankish castle remain and the overall shape was not changed. It is in quite a ruined state, but some of what remains is spectacular.

The castle runs along a ridge, and the ends were the easiest to attach and got the most defensive works. Both ends still have extremely high walls (possibly the highest I have seen not over an actual cliff) over cut rock moats. The view from the top of these walls is vertiginous.

Northern end of Kerak, showing the original entrance

Quite a lot of the glacis remains, which is unusual.

But the best bit was the fact that much of it was underground and many of the vaulted passages and rooms are still there. I presume these underground works were because it was cooler in the heat.

There was also a part of the original double vaulting from the Frankish era. I know that many keeps were several layers vaulted this way, but not many have so much of it remaining from the earlier eras, due to remodeling or damage.

It must have been a very impressive work when it was first built.

We also went to Ajloun castle, which was built under the orders of Saladin to hold the route south from Damascus. It has suffered some damage from recent earthquakes, but is in a remarkably good state. It is also unusual in that it was largely built in a short period of time, so doesn't have the mix of later additions that can disguise the original medieval forms.

I have no idea if all Islamic castles of the time were like this, but it is quite different to the European equivalents. It was very squat, very high and was mostly enclosed internally, rather than having a keep and curtain walls. Only a few light wells penetrated from the top. It must have been very cool in summer and protected from the wind in winter.

Unusually for Jordan it was extremely well explained throughout the interior. Definitely one of the best castles I have ever been to.

We also did a day trip out to see some of the eastern "castles". It was as much to see the desert itself as the castles really.

The desert is flat and mostly pretty much lifeless for large expanses (the road takes the traditional route via the few oases, so is greener than most of it, and it's not green at all). Towards Iraq the land is covered in small black granite rocks on top of the ubiquitous yellowy limestone of Jordan, which gives it an extra dead look.

The castles out there were mostly really semi-fortified points for camel caravans to rest where there was some water, and as a somewhere for officials to meet locals and store any valuables. They had little military value, and the one at Azrak was like a castle built by someone who had seen a castle once but had never had it explained how they work, because it was militarily very dodgy. Lawrence of Arabia stayed there, and we cannot have been told that more than a dozen times by our guide.

Qasr Al Karaneh was very sweet though, and almost pristine.

It was a good day out. We did it with a car and a driver who had a bit of local knowledge, which help keep it cheap and fun. There are some outfits that do it in a bus, but they are much more expensive. 

Leaving Jordan

Well, we're on our way out of Jordan. The drive out to the airport seemed so normal, when three months ago the drive in seemed so odd.

The taxi ride was everything I'd expect. The seat-belts didn't work, the driver had is coffee, played on his phone to get his music sorted and drove rather faster than required. He did, however, offer Alison and me a cigarette when he started smoking (a couple of the others have done that too).

We hired a car the day before yesterday and did a loop past the Dead Sea (including the lowest inhabited point on earth) and Kerak, which got us a view of some of the southern hill country. The driving was every bit as hair-raising as I feared in town, but the countryside wasn't too bad, apart from the appalling quality of the road surface.

We got to see all the "must see" things in the country during our time. There's a few places we would have seen if we had more time (and access to a car) but nothing that I feel bad about missing. I would have liked to see the fields of dolmens and menhirs, of which Jordan has lots, but I've seen similar in Europe.

Sheep tied up outside the local butcher

I've been thinking of things I will miss about Jordan, and to be honest the list is pretty short. Some foods that I've enjoyed and I've enjoyed the call to prayer and minarets everywhere. The different things, like the sheep above, tied up on the street.

I would have liked to have learned to read Arabic a bit, but three months wasn't anywhere near enough time for that.

Then again, the list of things that I am glad to be leaving behind is also pretty short -- appalling plumbing, terrible roads (and footpaths) and the lack of quality bread really.

We didn't miss eating pork during our time, although Alison found that bacon formed quite a large part of her list of recipes, so missed it from that point of view. We're looking forward to cheap red Cypriot and Bulgarian wine, but it was only the price that prevented us having it in Jordan, not accessibility.

And so now to Cyprus.