UNESCO TOUR

This excursion through Romania, entitled UNESCO TUR, is our best seller. Its story is a very interesting one because I created it at the beginning when we needed a tour through Romania that would reach all the important tourist areas. Therefore, we chose Transylvania, Maramureș, and the northern part of Moldova called Bucovina, on which occasion we realized that most of the tourist attractions we chose are part of the UNESCO World Heritage. So we called it the UNESCO TOUR.

The first option started from Bucharest and stopped at Brașov, from where we went to Sighisoara to visit the beautiful medieval city, one of the few of its kind in Europe that is still inhabited. Here we find the house where Vlad Țepeș, known as Dracula, was born, but also one of the most surprising church monuments in Europe, the Church of the Hill, which has unique frescoes and a pictorial theme that has long disappeared from our area.

From Sighișoara, we were heading towards the Tihuța Pass, or as it is known by fans of Bram Stocker's vampire films, the Borgo Pass because it seemed natural to us that after reaching Dracula's Castle in Bran, near Brașov, and the house where he was born, to reach the famous mountain pass where the Irish writer placed his castle. That day we stopped at Gura Humorului in the north of Moldova, commonly known as Bucovina. When I write Moldova, I mean the western half of the medieval Romanian state of Moldova, because the eastern half was occupied twice by the Russians and is now known as the Republic of Moldova.

Well, here I have to make a little parenthesis and tell you that this route has been changed about 5 times since its inception until now in 2024 when it turns 17 years old. The second option no longer went from Brașov to Sighisoara but started via Pasul Oituz, then via Bacău and Piatra Neamț, stopping in the same Gura Humorului. I still remember that on the first tour of this kind, when a real campaign had started in Romania to rebuild all the important national roads, I covered the distance between Brașov and Voronet with two Australian tourists in 8 hours instead of 5, because of the numerous portions where the road was being rebuilt from the ground up and was running on a single line, which caused huge queues of cars.

This is how we arrived at our destination extremely tired, at night around 8 pm, in a heavy rain, which left us an indelible memory. The next day, when we were going to see the monasteries in the area, part of the UNESCO World Heritage, we found that the wooden bridge over water on our route had been washed away by the flood created by the rain of the previous night, so we had to detour to get where we wanted.

The monasteries in this area have churches covered with frescoes not only on the inside but also on the outside, thus lasting for more than 500 years. Voronet, Moldovita, Sucevita, Humor, Arbore are the best-known and most beautiful of them. From Gura Humorului, where we moved with the accommodation from Voroneț, we left for Maramureș, also in the north of the country but further west. I consider this area a real open-air museum because the villages and people here have remained almost the same as they were 200-300 years ago through the architecture of the houses, the wooden gates, the wooden churches, and the folk costumes or customs that they are still worn as of old. It is an ancient Romanian civilization charming in all that it has preserved and now shares with its visitors.

We stay in Maramureș for two days. Initially in Sighetu Marmației, then we discovered a charming guesthouse hidden among the hills of the old village of Botiza where the main activity of tourists is to "listen to the silence" eat delicious food, and sip Plums Horinca. We visit the charming wooden churches and the wooden gates decorated with old Romanian insignia, we arrive at the Vesel Cemetery and we stop at the craftsmen who created Romanian folklore and civilization to see them using old machines to wash wool, make cloth, separate gold ore, or to manufacture Horinca of 45%.

From Maramureș, we gently descend the valleys of the Eastern Carpathians towards Cluj Napoca, the largest university city in Romania, an old colony of the Romanians and the unofficial capital of Transylvania. Here we stayed one night to visit St. Michael's Church, the statuary group of the famous Hungarian king with Romanian roots Matei Corvinus, and the city center, a real symphony dedicated to the Baroque. The road to Bucharest from where the plane would return our tourists to their homes passed through the Oltului Valley, one of the most spectacular mountain passes in our country.

Well, over time we realized that the shortest way between two points is a straight line so we would change the route and instead of going from Sighisoara to Gura Humorului in Bucovina, we would go straight north in Maramureș to Botiza. From here I was coming the other way, through Bucovina to see we visited the painted monasteries from here, we crossed the Eastern Carpathians by the Red Lake through the Bicazului Gorge, a much more spectacular place even than the Borgo Pass located further north, and then we returned to Bucharest.

Some time ago, we realized that by doing this, we were avoiding Cluj, an important city, but also Alba Iulia, Sibiu, and Hunedoara, cities with extremely important monuments in Romania, so we changed the route again, to have its best version that we now offer to you who will want to try it. Therefore, we invite you to book this fantastic tour of ours whose story you have just read and find out the other untold stories here.