Day 31 ROMANIA Sighisoara

We had an easy rest day today. We walked around the Farmers Market and has breakfast of tripe soup, bread, and migees (small skinless sausages) at the local canteen. This local market was in the new town. Sighisoara mediaeval town on top of the hill is small. In 3 hrs, we had meandered through most of the mediaeval cobblestone streets.

Sighisoara is one of the best-preserved medieval towns in Europe and is famously known as the birthplace of Vlad the Impaler (the inspiration for Dracula). Founded in the 12th century by German settlers known as the Transylvanian Saxons, it served as a strategic frontier fortress for the Kingdom of Hungary. Today, its historic center is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and remains one of the few medieval citadels in Eastern Europe that is still inhabited.
The town's most striking feature is its fortification system, originally consisting of a 930-meter wall and 14 towers. Each tower was built, maintained, and defended by a specific craft guild.
The Clock Tower was the biggest of the nine defense towers of the Sighișoara fortress that have survived to the present day. The building was used in the Middle Ages as the headquarters of the town hall and the city council, and from 1648 , by installing a clock, it received the character of a clock tower . The other towers we saw were the Tinsmith and Shoemaker's towers.

The Scholar Staircase had 176 steps that led to The Evangelical Church on the Hill and Hilltop School. The Church was built between 1480 to 1500, and was the most important monument of religious architecture in Sighisoara.

Sighisoara is also known to be the birth place of Dracula. Dracul came from his membership in the Order of the Dragon, but in Romanian, dracul also means "the devil," fueling the dark legends that follow. This was not helped by Vlad earning his nickname Vlad the Impaler as he would leave impaled heads of his enemies outside the city walls to intimidate the Ottomans. His political enemies (particularly Saxon merchants) disseminated accounts of his extreme cruelty to blacken his reputation. These tales of horror eventually reached BramStoker in the 1890s. While the modern vampire is a Western invention, Romania has long had legends of Strigoi—troubled spirits that rise from the grave to plague the living. Stoker blended these local superstitions with the historical figure of Vlad III to create Count Dracula.

We met the owner of the apartment when we came back from our walkabout, and he said that the apartment building was a 300 years old building. He had slowly acquired each apartment over 35 years as he was born in the apartment in the ground floor.
Walked 6.6kmRead more