So, we left Bucharest this morning and drove to our first stop, the "small" town (population 100,000) of Tirgoviste. Here we did a tour of the "Princely Court." This is a complex of buildings started by Vlad's grandfather and continuing on as the ruling place of the Princes through Vlad's days. But, while he was prince he moved the capitol city from Tirgoviste to Bucharest. Still, the court was used by the local princes for a couple of centuries.
It was quite beautiful, and much of it is preserved very well. We saw the church, the ruins of the palace, and the watchtower. In Vlad's day the buildings were all connected so he could go back and forth without being seen (aka "assassinated").
Next we drove about 90 minutes to a small town where we had lunch, which consisted of beef & vegetable soup, chicken cordon bleu, and pickled vegetables (the pickled vegetables are pretty much a winter staple of the Romanian diet, as you might have noticed). Dessert was a local favorite, a thick donut-cake, with a donut hole on top, covered in a sour cream sauce and blueberries.
We moved on to another drive. The drives showed us the Romanian countryside, which is quite beautiful. Busses and cars share the highways with horse-drawn carts, pedestrians, and stray dogs. We saw a few gypsy villages tucked into the Carpathian foothills. Our general driving direction is north, through the Carpathian mountains, into the modern region of Transylvania.
In the afternoon, our tour was of a church and monastery established in the 1500s. The church is reputed to be one of the most beautiful in all of Eastern Europe, and was used by Romanian princes when Curtea de Arges was the capitol city (just temporarily). The legend says that the architect was being paid by the prince to build this, but during the night everything that was constructed would fall down. Panicked, the architect prayed to god to see why the place was cursed. God sent the message that a human sacrifice was needed, in the form of the first wife of the construction crew who showed up the next day. Unfortunately for the architect, that was his own wife. So to satisfy god (and not get killed by the prince), he sacrificed her by bricking her into one of the church walls. After that, the church went up without a hitch.
The guide explained that there have been scans of the wall that show there's no body, but that the story is a metaphor to show how he put his "heart and soul" into the church. It could have also been a nice excuse to murder his wife. Either way, it resulted in a beautiful church. Too bad for the architect; the prince asked him if he could build an even more beautiful one, and he said yes. So the prince took away the scaffolding while the architect was still up in the highest part of the church to make him die there (so there couldn't be a more beautiful church built). The architect took wood from the church and fashioned wings to let him fly down to safety. But he crashed and died.
The monastery next door was also quite nice, but is still being used as an active monastery, church, and school, so I felt rude taking photos inside. There was also a woman standing outside of the church yelling at us in Romanian that we couldn't go inside unless we did the sign of the cross first.
There's a 12 year old girl's body enshrined in the church. The story here is that she was a local girl who was very generous, always giving her money to the poor and food to the dogs. Her step-father was upset with her doing this, and one night in a drunken rage he axed her to death. They buried her, and seven years later they dug her up to perform some typical Orthodox rituals with her bones. But, they were surprised to find that her body was perfectly preserved and smelled like flowers, so they made her into a saint.
The story sounded a lot like she was a vampire to me, so I couldn't figure out why they decided she was a saint instead of a vampire, except that she was a sweet little girl.
Finally, we've arrived at our hotel for the evening. We're in a small town of only about 50,000 tonight. The hotel owner knows we're college students from the US, and he was concerned that we wouldn't have anything to do tonight. So, he's arranged for a DJ to give us a "dance party" this evening. That was considerate! I hope Romanian pop music is good!
Below are some pictures from today. The first two are from inside the church outside of the monastery (the one with the architect's wife supposedly inside). The third is the outside of that same church. The last two are from the Princely Court, where Vlad lived for several years while he was ruling Wallachia.
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