While wandering around the Carpathian Mountains on a recent trip through Romania, I spent a lot of time asking people for insight on facets of Transylvania more interesting than the Dracula tomfoolery. I was hoping that I would talk to a stranger who could tell me where I would find the gypsy camp where the best most exotic acrobats are manufactured, or something just as hypothetically awesome like a Romanian warship factory or a peasant curling league, but no one was really giving me answers. Then, as I was eating supper in what seemed like the Romanian equivalent to The Cracker Barrel, a dodgy looking Irish expat started talking to me about medieval citadels.
At first I was unenthusiastic about what he had to say, and a little frightened by the man himself, but he caught my attention when he started talking about a place called Viscri. He said this particular citadel was special, snuggled between gypsy camps in a small German town that you could only get to it by following a long, unmarked dirt road. In order to enter the citadel, which, like the town, is nearly unchanged since the 12th century, you must find the one person who has the key.
According the Irishman, this person is a very old woman who has been the key-bearer for several decades. This wasn’t exactly the shady local industry that I was hoping to look at, but it sounded about as close as I was ever going to get to actually living inside Zelda. So, the next morning I hitchhiked in vaguely the right direction, and hoped I would find someone who spoke some English.
My first ride dropped me off in a small town halfway in the wrong direction, which was a good start considering I was alone in Romania and I didn’t speak the language. I’d seen worse scenarios in the easiest of Zelda levels though, so it seemed hardly discouraging. Fortunately, my second attempt yielded better results as a pair of young punk rock chicks picked me up on their way through the Faragas Mountains.
I told them where I was trying to go, and they decided that they would accompany me for the entire trip. I tried to make it clear that I didn’t know where we were going or even if the place truly existed, but was immediately drowned out by Romanian ska music, which in the US would be unacceptable but here was totally OK by me.
Romanian roads are miserable, a giant’s asphalt acne scars, completely un-drivable. Had there been food in my stomach, I would have vomited all over my new friends’ car. However, Natalia was clearly a level-nine wizard, because she managed the road effortlessly while simultaneously switching the music over to the native version of Millencolin.
As is the standard in Romania, in order to get from one city to the next, you must pass through several small towns that often look like they were beaten with a very large club. In reality, sadly, the towns were probably beaten with corrupt politics and communism-induced poverty.
We passed through one in particular that looked as close as I may ever see to the final result of a 14th-century Nordic pillaging. Everything in the entire town was burned to ashes except for some of the original wooden structural supports of the buildings. Literally the entire city was decimated. It very likely could’ve been the local government. Or else it was some of the finest works of evil of a black wizard witch.
We had to stop on more than one occasion to get directions. At this point, we still weren’t entirely sure if this place existed or not. The only information that we had came from a stuttering Irishman in a dingy bar in Brasov, an obviously trustworthy source. Up to this point, the bulk of the work came from the two girls. Other than some small talk about skateboarding and mariachi music, I had contributed very little to the trip. I could’ve been the token naive supporting character who walks into his murder early in the story. I was waiting for the moment Natalia would take off her punk rock girl face mask, and reveal that she was actually a one-eyed Romanian Peasant who was leading me to Viscri to steal my money, passport, and soul.
Just as we were about to pull the plug on the adventure, we saw a sign for Viscri. As if I hadn’t already had enough proof with the Cinder village and the communist highways, I was immediately reminded that I was on a road trip in Romania when we were caught in traffic behind stray horses and wooden carts of agriculture. The looks on the village inhabitants’ faces as they carried buckets of grain and water were a potent combo of confusion and disdain. I felt arrogant driving an automobile through their town as they loaded up their horses for a day of hard manual labor. Then again, I can sort of understand—we were in a 2001 KIA compact, a wild new form of transportation from the future.
We eventually saw the Citadel on the hill and started working our way towards the beacon. Natalia parallel parked between a tree stump and a stray dog, and we headed up the hill to get the key from the gatekeeper.
As we approached the door, we noticed that the old woman was asleep on a chair in front of the door, defending the entry far less scrupulously than I had imagined. The three of us looked at each other, wondering what might be the best method for waking this Cerberus. Before we could say anything, she, demon witch and defender of the citadel, got up, opened the door, and asked for a four Lei entry fee. Fucking shit. Entry fees were what I was trying to avoid in the first place. Touché, old witch.
As we entered the tattered old building, I was eager to call the trip ineffectual. We hadn’t been threatened by demons and all that was required to defeat the old witch was the power of capitalism. Needless to say, this was hardly the quest I was looking for. It was nothing more than a field trip with strangers. I followed the girls through the rubble.
The only proof that the citadel had actually been touched by modernity since it became a historic relic was a small orthodox sanctuary that you had to walk through to get to the steps of the tower. According to the old key witch, the people of the village still have church service in the base of the tower every Sunday, all in German, the language of the founders of the village in the 12th century.
In the back of my mind, I still held hope that once we reached the apex of the tower, we’d find a black wizard levitating, or maybe the oldest man on earth holding a ruby the size of my head, but there was only a really nice view of Romanian countryside and the peasant town below. As we walked across rotten planks of wood, some of which probably had broken on the weight of pigeons, I realized I had just hitchhiked five hours into a medieval Romanian village just so that I could walk around the remnants of an old watchtower.
The view from the citadel was worth it though. I could easily imagine Hungarian armies approaching over the hill.
Three stray dogs and two dirty children followed us to our car. I wasn’t convinced that the children wouldn’t try to steal my shoes, so we hustled out of there. It was more of the same as the way in on the way out. As we veered away from another horse-guided wagon of corn and we pulled onto the broken highway, I asked my friends if they had ever actually played Zelda. Neither of them knew what I was talking about. They asked what it was, but I didn’t feel like explaining. It didn’t really matter at this point.
I just looked out the window and savored my revelation. Just as I glanced out, I saw a sign for Viscri; one I had apparently failed to see when we were searching for the place earlier. Immediately beside it, two adults were wearing tattered capes and fighting with a sword and a staff in what looked like a poorly choreographed show at Medieval Times. “There are those two dudes again,” Natalia said. “What nerds.” Andreea responded. If this were the videogame I had been imagining, this would be the point where the console exploded.
Tags: old witch with the key, Photography, Romania, Travel, Zelda
i want one of those pews for my house. or i could move into sanctuary. i get the feeling there isn’t much in the way of night life though.
The balcony seats look skeeeeeeeeetchy.
i also secretly wish every place i went had some sort of adventure i had to go through
Nice job biff. But what about the Romanian cemeteries?
Imagine what you could have found if you had your boomerang and a bag full of bombs…
Boomerang? You can’t do shit with the boomerang and it won’t get you anywhere. You need red potion.
Dude, two minutes of googling would have told you that Viscri is a Luthern chapel, not Orthodox, something you should have figured out when they said the service was in German.
http://www.onehandlaughing.com/viscri/fortifiedchurch.html
this kind of talk:
“but was immediately drowned out by Romanian ska music, which in the US would be unacceptable but here was totally OK by me.”
Is so pretensious,
This web page is world wide and we should try to get over the nationalistic comments !
Im trying to say this as nice as I can !
And im not rumanian by the way !
As I am from Romania, as I am an avid hitchhiker, as I know Viscri (Weisskirch), as I know those who take care of the fortified church in Viscri (UNESCO patrimony, by the way), as I know Natalia and as I know Vice magazine, I have to say that this article has benefitted from rather mediocre research, to say the least. There is a lot of information in here that could’ve been more accurate if the author used his good friend Google. Duh! I don’t give a rat’s ass if this article counts as another hit to our already not-to-fair image to the western world, but I think it is at least incomplete. I mean, come on, you want to get away with this? In fucking Vice magazine?! I know Vice can do better than that! Sometimes americans wonder why the rest of the world perceives them as ignorants. Well, this piece of text over here is a good example of how not to do things and what attitude not to bring along. To those who don’t have a clue about the subject I guess it seems well written, well researched and even carries that Zelda scent all over it, but to us over here who actually have a clue of what we are talking about it’s just a level shy of bullshit. So Ben, how about you move that f*cking ass of yours back here again and you get the chance to do another proper article about whatever you wish and whatever fits Vice’s next theme best? I actually promise to be helpful about this one. If you need any support, I am volunteering. Honestly. Oh, and I hope you don’t take yourself to serious!
Mx
Oh, and by the way, f*ck your U.S.-legit ska! Don’t you know ska-revival isn’t true ans ska sucks?
Listen bro, just because Romanians don’t have the same cultural reference as you nerds do, that doesn’t mean we’re a people of retards. You, my friend are an ignorant and I understand that you write for your other fellow ignorants. God I wish I knew one American that wasn’t this shallow!!! Alrighty, off the top of your head what’s the capital of Romania? Budapest? Guess again!
With this article you are upseting a nation, and it’s really really really hard for me, personally to understand how in the name of God your nation got to rule the Earth…
The author should at least have the decency to reply to what we say. Do you ever read readers’ comments? Or are you that self-sufficient that you simply don’t care?
People out there! Know that Romania may not be the most powerful country in the world, but it is a decent country where one finds decent people. All that’s written about and everything that u see in this article (except for the church) are pictures taken from gipsy villages. Translate it this way: it’s like everything we’d see on TV about the states would be black neighbourhoods and nothing else. Strictly nothing else.
Romania is a beautiful place, with a history, with a culture, with people like yourselves that are in no way lower than any other human being on this earth. So please cut this bullshit.
Sincerely yours….
For the sake of clarity, this piece isn’t supposed to be representative of Romania as a whole. It is quite literally supposed to be about a trip that I made with new friends to a place that some random dude told me about. It reminded me of Zelda so I went for it. We don’t have cool shit like this in the states, so I don’t get to have Zelda-esque trips often. Despite the Romanian readership’s apparent assumptions, I actually like Romania quite a bit.
-Ben
A lot has been said about this article…mostly bad things…The only thing that I can point out is that the moment that I first met Ben was a happy one. Usually when I’m aproached by foreigners, I can’t say that I praise my country’s assets when I’m talkin’ bout Romania. That doesn’t mean that I don’t love or that I’m not proud of my country. When I met Ben he knew already a lot of things about Romania, altough it was the first visit here. He was very interested in discovering special places in Romania, he didn’t limit himself to visiting only the most famous places here (Like Bran’s Castle for example). He told me that he wanted to write an article about Viscri so we went on this trip. Altough the outcome (the article )wasn’t as expected, I can’t say that I am dissapointed. I know that some things in the article aren’t very well written or pointed out but I know what Ben’s intention really was. In Viscri Ben was like a little kid in a candy store. If I were to write an article on a place in Romania I would probably approach it in another way than Ben did but still everybody has he’s own style and opinion. The only thing that trully matters is to keep you’re own thoughts and opinions. Don’t let some words (that in this case weren’t meant to be offending) get in the way of what’s trully important. An article is just an article…you’re the one that has to decide if to believe the info or the story and how much to take in.
I’m really glad that I waited half a day before I wrote a comment. Firstly, because the words might have needed many ****s and secondly because now I can see that you, Ben, don’t even have the guts to stand by your oh so superior assertions! Now I can’t decide what is more pathetic: the fact that you obviously don’t have a clue of Romania, it’s people or it’s culture, not even trying to understand it OR that you withdrew your position half way, still hitting on that Zelda-esque experience.
I have met many (!!) people from all over the world who came to visit Viscri. I was born and raised there and I used to be a guide in that citadel for a while but never have I encountered one person that came to the village with such strong prejudices and left with just as many, deliberately not willing to learn or perceive anything. I guess those “miserable, a giant’s asphalt acne scars, completely un-drivable” roads are a good filter!
and by the way, that “capitalist old key-bearer witch” is my grandmother!
@Not: why are you defending this guy? Seriously, Faragas mountains? And putting on just pictures of gipsies and talking about Romania as if we were some 3rd world country… If this were just some random blog I wouldn’t be surprised.
I know living in Romania isn’t quite a bliss, but I’m in love with what we are, this wonderful mixture of slavic and romance/latin, a bit Italian and Russians at the same time, the fact that on such a small area (a 3rd of France for instance) we have any geographical form you can think of, from deltas and seas to sand dunes and mountains! So, is Romania a magical place, yes? Is Romania a place still in the Middle Ages, no!
I know Europe is starting to let go of this stupid prejudice, when are the States going to follow? It’s unbelieveable that in the age of information there are still so many ignorants out there.
@tron: I’m not judging who you are, for I don’t know you, not a bit. But what you wrote and the fact that you didn’t do the least amount of research on this (orthodox church…Faragas… as someone said, it would have taken you like 2 minutes to find out that that church is actually protestant and the mountains are called Fagaras) shows me that you are not really as cunning as you think you are. Yeah, okay, I get your point, this is a great place to be if you want to get into the Zelda mood, whatever, but through your words, as you have probably noticed you have hurt some people’s pride. Well, good for you man, there is no such thing as bad publicity, maybe you’ll end up a famous writer in Romania :))
It’s not that I’m defending anyone but it’s not the first and it’s not gonna be the last article written about Romania that trully offends us. We always judge the americans for being narrow minded when it comes to Romania and romanians. But when we say that all americans are stupid or small minded or whatever it pops first in our heads we’re being as narrow minded and shallow as we consider them to be. We all have to learn something from this…
Oh, screw our national pride, ‘cuz it doesn’t matter! Really. The point about this article is that it’s mediocre and there’s as good as no research concerning it, but we wouldn’t even know it if we weren’t in some connection with some of the people or the situations. As I said, I know Vice Magazine and I know they have excellent stuff inside the mag, but if I didn’t know all about this I’d assume it’s some good article. Except it isn’t! How would other people know, if this guy keeps up with this crappy style (including not taking responsibility) and the magazine keeps printing his mediocre stuff. This is a punch to the good name Vice has established. To me it’s the same as when National Geographic had a romanian translated special on mountainbiking. That piece of shit was bad in english in the first place, just imagine what the endproduct after an amateur-like translation was like! I don’t care who offends Romania or its inhabitants as long as he brings up arguments, is funny and stands by his text. Ben is a puss and that’s the worst attitude any journalist can come up with, period. If you want to read a good, proper Vice article, read the damn Lemmy interview! Lemmy would kick you in the balls, Ben! Oh wait a second… What balls?
Fuck nationalism!
Mx
Listen here you bunch of nutless monkeys,
you people have been conditioned to trip over yourselves trashing anybody that doesn’t have the most sparkling, shiny things to say about your country. So much so, that almost everyone here completely missed the point of what Ben tried to get across. Seeing a new country and allowing the scenery, people, landscape, architecture, and culture to transform your trip into something completely different - a rediscovering of your imagination, is a beautiful thing. Do you think Americans come visit Romania from towns with gold paved roads, with mansions on every street and servants, and subsequently laugh at little villages in eastern europe. Have any of you seen the midwest? Your villages aren’t THAT bad, and to get militant over every sentence is not nationalist pride, its the fastest way to reenforce the idea that maybe romania sucks balls, and is counterintuitive to a point where working at a McDonalds might require too much logic. Max, it takes a pretty big man to say Ben has no balls, so you must be pretty tough. Don’t get me wrong, I would use my sharpest knife to stab Ben 60 times in each leg if I ever saw him on the street. He really is a dirty rotten bastard. I once witnessed him kick a 7 year old girl in the face while wearing a steel toe boot, then spit on her before penetrating every orifice of her body with what can only be described as a gargantuan midget penis, but to accuse him of having no balls…in a blog?
Max, you truely are a nutless monkey. Or maybe just romanian.
Shygirl, you’re equally as guilty, but possibly hot. Holla.
This article won’t seem that bad anymore after you read this…. http://www.viceland.com/blogs/en/2009/11/12/martin-fengel%E2%80%99s-romanian-dichotomy/comment-page-1/
@Vladislav: Well, the difference here is that we, Romanians & Europeans in general, know much more about the States than Americans know about Romania/Europe. We know most of your good and bad stuff, you’ve been advertising it so well! :)) Starting with Hollywood cheesy movies and ending with the work of people like Michael Moore (it’s not that he’s a great man, but I do think there must be a grain of truth in what he says) or Zeitgeist. That is the problem… we do understand your culture and that is why we can allow ourselves to judge you as a nation. Romania is a small and quite insignificant coutnry in this world, ,but it’s my country nonetheless and it pisses me off when the truth is not shown as it is. Yeah, these places exist, yeah we have crappy roads, but not only that! And as you said
those things are likely to be found in your own country, so why write about it?
I’m attacking just that part of that nation that is concerned about my statement :)) No seriously now, Americans live in a cocoon, they really don’t have any idea about what is really going on in the world, or a small percentage bother to find out. Because it’s boring, it’s not entertaining, it’s not…Zelda, if I may 
And to be honest, should I have been born in the States I wouldn’t care either, it’s so much easier to get on with your life and not have any concerns whatsoever… it would be quite dreamy! But the world is ill, most people are beyond poverty, it’s called plain misery. Americans like rich European countries only come in contact with that side of the world through tear-squeezing adverts for fund collections…next to dead puppies and such. But the world is ill, something is going horribly wrong and we’re going so fast towards a ‘Globalia’-like world, or worse ‘Green soylent’-like…
This is the first time we get to have a voice and defend ourselves. French people are yelling all the time and they have a good image around the world. What if we started yelling and showing you what is really worth seing? And what if the world started to see what we’re really made of?
@Not: I’m not attacking the entire nation
So here’s some food for thought… small nations are getting up, Africa is next, and Africa is hungry. I think we’re on the verge of revolution, you can feel it in the air
Shygirl, that is BS. You think you know our culture from Hollywood movies and Michael Moore? You don’t know the half of it. Don’t be a hypocrite.