Sunday, September 24, 2006


Sighişoara.

So, Sighişoara is included in the UNESCO World Heritage site because it is a beautiful, fortified medieval town built by the Saxons.

Nowadays, outside the city center it is rather poor and bucolic, like most of the Romania I have so far seen, and inside the city center it is a billboard for Dracula souvenirs, also because this was Vlad Ţepeş' birthplace (Did you know, by the way, that Bram Stoker never visited Romania? And that his famous novel--I'm talking about Dracula, of course, which is a rather neat book to read, especially when you're alone at home and it is dark and rainy outside, really!--was originally to be set somewhere not in Transylvania, but in Austria? Cool, huh?).

However, there are some neat things that make Sighişoara kind of eerie:

1. It is very silent.

2. Today the weather was very cloudy (therefore dark) and cold.

3. The only sounds I could hear were the rooster crowing and the dogs barking ("Listen to them, the children of the night. What music they make!").

4. No, that was inaccurate, I am walking by an old 1800's cementery, with mostly German and some (few) Hungarian names, at the top of the hill behind the town, right by a church, whose bells are tolling solemnly, and the doleful sounds of the Orthodox chorus creeps over the tombstones like the overgrown moss and ivy with which they're covered.

You know, the little I've heard of Romanian (folk?) music is very sad: all in minor tones with lamenting melodies. I wonder, how much Romanian classical music took from that. Mental note: I should listen to some Enescou, one of these days.

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