I arrived in a tiny village in Transylvania after a morning of hiking through oak and beech trees. Turning onto its only street, I greeted a sun-weathered man stepping out of a Saxon home with a traditional sleepy-eyed window. We walked and he spoke, in Romanian, with the enthusiasm of being understood. He wasn’t, but I could make out enough — “Maghiara,” “Otoman,” “Sovietic” — to know I was getting a history lesson.
It was my first day on the Via Transilvanica, a long-distance trail that stretches some 1,000 miles diagonally across Romania, starting in the northeastern region of Bukovina and ending where the Danube River reaches the Serbian border. As its name suggests, most of the route lies in the central region of Transylvania, where forests and farmland meet the Carpathian Mountains.
The Via Transilvanica stretches 1,000 miles diagonally across Romania, from the northeastern region of Bucovina to the Serbian border.
Before visiting, the region had seemed to me less of a real place and more of a universal symbol. Since the Irish novelist Bram Stoker published “Dracula” in 1897, our popular consciousness has turned Transylvania into the default setting for Gothic horror. The destination has seen a recent resurgence in Hollywood, providing inspiration for Robert Eggers’s 2024 film “Nosferatu” and a backdrop for some parts of the Netflix series “Wednesday.”
I was curious to see Transylvania’s true character. Because I have found that long-distance hikes tend to reveal the essence of a place, I combined a few days on the Via Transilvanica with some time in the region’s gateway cities of Cluj-Napoca and Brasov.
What I discovered — beneath the storybook vistas of spired castles, hilltop citadels and pastel-colored hamlets — is a culture shaped by the influences of Huns, Saxons, Ottomans, Hapsburgs, Hungarians and, of course, post-Communist redemption.
