15/08/2026
Days 8 & 9 — Salt, crowns, kings, wine and one very elegant goodbye to Romania 🇷🇴
Day 8 started in Bazna, heading towards Alba Iulia, with the kind of road that makes you forgive every single kilometre driven. Villages slipped past the windows, green hills rolled into vineyards, and Transylvania once again reminded us that beauty here is rarely in a hurry.
We were passing through the land of Jidvei, one of Romania’s most famous wine regions. Vineyards have been part of this landscape for centuries, and today Jidvei is synonymous with Transylvanian wine. So naturally, we admired the vines very seriously. 🍷
Purely from a cultural perspective, of course.
Then came Alba Iulia.
If Romanian cities were women, Alba Iulia would be the elegant one who has lived several lives, remembers every one of them and has absolutely no intention of telling you everything at once.
The story begins with Apulum, the great Roman settlement that grew here after the conquest of Dacia. Centuries later, Alba Iulia became one of the most important political and religious centres of Transylvania. And then came the Habsburgs, who gave the city its magnificent star-shaped fortress — enormous, perfectly planned and rather difficult to ignore.
Our first encounter was with St Michael’s Cathedral, standing quietly inside the fortress and looking as though it has seen enough history to write several novels.
Inside rests John Hunyadi, one of the great military leaders of medieval Hungary and one of the most important figures in the struggle against the Ottoman Empire.
And then there is a lovely Polish connection.
Here is buried Isabella Jagiellon, Queen of Hungary, daughter of the Polish king Sigismund I the Old and Bona Sforza. She married John Zápolya and became queen at a time when Central Europe was basically one enormous family drama involving crowns, dynasties, alliances and an alarming number of ambitious men.
History, as usual, was complicated.
The family tree even more so.
We wandered through the fortress, passing the monumental gates, statues, palaces and buildings that have witnessed the making of modern Romania. The statue of Michael the Brave is particularly significant — in 1600 he became the first ruler to unite, even briefly, Wallachia, Transylvania and Moldavia under his authority.
And then there is the Batthyaneum Library, a little paradise for anyone who believes that old books are more beautiful than most modern things. Manuscripts, incunabula and centuries of accumulated knowledge — the sort of place where you instinctively lower your voice, even when nobody asks you to.
We ended our walk at the Coronation Cathedral.
And this was not simply another church.
It was built specifically for the coronation of King Ferdinand I and Queen Marie in 1922, after the creation of Greater Romania. The ceremony was held in Alba Iulia because of the city’s immense historical symbolism — Michael the Brave had made the city the political centre of his brief union more than three centuries earlier.
Standing there, you could almost feel history breathing through the walls.
And then, naturally, after all that history…
we went underground.
Because apparently one cannot visit Transylvania without eventually disappearing into a mountain.
Turda Salt Mine.
Salt has been extracted here for centuries, and the underground world left behind is astonishing. Great chambers carved by generations of miners suddenly open before you like some subterranean cathedral.
There is the Rudolf Hall, enormous and dramatic.
The Terezia Hall, with its underground lake.
The old Crivac, a beautifully preserved wooden mechanism once powered by horses to lift salt from the depths.
And yes, there is an elevator.
This deserves emphasis.
Because there are two types of travellers:
those who say, “Of course, we are taking the stairs!”
and those who quietly look at the elevator and think, “I have already made enough sacrifices for culture today.”
I shall not reveal which category I belonged to. 😌
Down there, the air is cool, clean and rich in salt aerosols, and the atmosphere is wonderfully peaceful. We breathed deeply, rested, wandered, laughed and enjoyed some free time.
Then we surfaced, collected ourselves and headed to Oradea.
Dinner first.
Civilisation restored.
Day 9 — Oradea, and the grand finale
If Alba Iulia is history in stone, Oradea is history dressed beautifully for dinner.
What a city.
Oradea is one of Romania’s great Art Nouveau treasures, and the photographs simply do not prepare you for it. They show the buildings.
They do not show the feeling.
The city centre is a delicious mixture of colour, curves, balconies, domes, stained glass and façades that clearly had no interest whatsoever in minimalism.
The star, of course, is the magnificent Black Eagle Palace.
Built at the beginning of the 20th century, it wraps itself around a famous glass-covered passage, with the black eagle in its stained-glass window watching over the whole ensemble.
Then come the palaces — Stern, Moskovits, Apollo, Adorján, Rimanóczy — each one with its own personality.
And suddenly you realise that Oradea has an architectural problem:
there are simply too many beautiful buildings to look at simultaneously.
You turn left and miss something on the right.
You look up and nearly walk into something on the pavement.
You stop to photograph one façade and discover another behind you.
It is exhausting.
In the best possible way.
We visited churches, including the extraordinary Moon Church, famous for its mechanism showing the phases of the moon, and synagogues that tell another, quieter part of Oradea’s story.
The Neolog Synagogue is particularly striking — magnificent, Moorish-inspired and deeply connected with the city’s Jewish heritage. Its beauty carries both celebration and memory.
And perhaps this is what I loved most about Oradea.
It does not simply show you beauty.
It reminds you that cities are made by people — Romanians, Hungarians, Jews, Austrians and many others — who built, worshipped, traded, loved, argued, dreamed and left something behind.
Two days earlier we had been standing among Roman ruins and Habsburg fortifications.
Now we were surrounded by Art Nouveau extravagance.
And somewhere between the vineyards of Jidvei, the silence of St Michael’s Cathedral, the underground salt chambers of Turda and the impossible elegance of Oradea, Romania had quietly done what the best journeys do:
it gave us stories.
Not just photographs.
Not just places to tick off a list.
Stories.
And as we came to the end of our journey, I realised that the photographs we took — beautiful as they are — still fail to capture the Romania we experienced.
Because some places have to be breathed in.
Some have to be walked through.
Some have to be tasted.
And some, like Romania, simply have to be felt.
And that is where our journey ends.
For now. ❤️🇷🇴
Eliza Anna
