Transylvania
Forests, bears and manor estates in the Carpathians.
Transylvania is the land beyond the forest — that's what the name means — and the Carpathians take it seriously: beech and fir forests with more bears than the rest of Europe combined, meadows mown in June as they were a hundred years ago, and villages with fortified churches left behind by the Transylvanian Saxons.
The Székely Land in the east is Hungarian-speaking, Catholic, stubborn. Here lies Zăbala, a village at the edge of the mountains, and in it the Mikes family estate: six hundred years in the family, expropriated, returned, lived in again. A castle park, forests, a hunting lodge where you wait for bears in the evening.
Romania hasn't shaken off the Dracula image and doesn't need to. Whoever comes finds a Europe that hasn't existed in the west since 1950.
Transylvania is the last landscape on the continent still to be discovered.
We recommend Transylvania to people who want a week without a programme and, in return, a place where every day brings something different. Zabola Estate is a lived-in estate, not a hotel in the usual sense: you sleep in the New Castle, the Machine House or the Garden House, ride in the morning, eat what the garden gives in the evening, and sit afterwards in the hide at the forest edge. The family is there. That makes the difference. Come in June for the hay harvest or in September when the forests turn and the bears are well fed.
