A finalist in our Pilgrimages competition rides the train from Bucharest to Sighișoara, tracing the shadow of the Vlad the Impaler back to his birthplace, on a journey through the snow that connects legendary history with a modern Romania.
The train shudders. Metal groans against metal. The seat beneath me shakes with the weight of motion, the fabric coarse against my fingertips. A faint scent coils through the air: cold iron, damp wool. The ghost of yesterday’s coffee. We are moving.
Quiet exhilaration, like a current waiting to spark, hums between us. I see it in my daughter’s eager grip on her father’s hand; in the bright gleam of my son’s eyes. In the way the other passengers sit a little straighter, their gazes more alert. It is the steady rhythm of wheels against tracks, the pulse of motion beneath our feet, like riding a steel horse into the unknown. My heart rides along.
Outside, a middle-of-winter night still clings to the land, broken only by flickering streetlamps and the ghostly reflection of passengers in the window. Somewhere beyond the glass, hidden beneath centuries of snow and silence, lies the path Vlad once traveled. Not by rail, but on horseback, through shadowed forests and treacherous mountain passes. We are bound for Sighișoara, his birthplace, yet this journey will carry us further than plotted routes. The past lingers all around, threading through the present like a rider’s breath through cold air.
I press my ear to history the way Vlad would have pressed his against the cold earth to hear if his distant pursuers were anyway near. I press my ear and listen. Past the clack-clack, clack-clack of the train. Past the ripple of words. And I wonder, is the land still whispering his name?
Bucharest, Romania’s capital, sleeps as we leave, yet the train rushes forward eager to break away from the city’s hush like a forgotten clock chiming the hour. My husband and children settle in, the warmth of their seats a welcome contrast to the raw winter chill we braved on the platform.
I watch the window. The snow appears only where the streetlamps touch it, a patchwork of light and shadow. The train’s motion turns the scene into a rhythmic dance — light, dark, light, dark. A flickering memory of this land that has known both splendor and sorrow.
My own reflection stares back and I search beyond it. An old woman unwraps a paper parcel and breaks a salty pretzel in two. She offers half with the effortless grace of someone who has done this many times before—an offering for a safe journey. The old tradition called for bread and salt, a quiet ritual of goodwill. Her simple gesture binds us in unspoken companionship. I break my piece into four, and it is, by far, tastier than the fresh pastries we bought at the station. I spy next a young couple; unsaid words have carved a space between them. I wonder if the journey will mend what has cracked.
Bucharest falls behind and I close my eyes. Once, the Vlăsiei Forest stretched here, thick and impenetrable. The Turks feared it. Feared its darkness, its silence. The secrets whooshed among its towering oaks. I can almost hear hooves crushing leaves, the hurried breath of riders slipping through its cover. Vlad would have known this place well; the refuge it offered, the threats it concealed. But when I open my eyes my heart sinks. The forest is gone. In its place, metal trees rise — the chimneys of a petrol refinery, their smoke shooting upward like dark spirits.
Further along, the air changes. It carries something raw and clean, a sharpness that clears the mind. Breaza. They say the purest ozone in Romania gathers here, funneled down from the mountains, untouched by the hands of man or time. I smile. Maybe not all has been lost. Maybe some places still breathe as they once did.
Sinaia comes next and the royal train station still stands proud, its architecture proof of a bygone time when Romanian kings and courtiers traveled these same tracks wrapped in furs, in purpose and ceremony. Our train pauses long enough for us to spot the old engine resting in the Railroad Museum. Its red and black iron frame, weathered but unbowed, still carries the breath of long-faded journeys. And there, it appears, a tree, growing from what was once a train chimney, its roots finding purchase where only coals, and soot and steam once reigned. A defiance of nature, or perhaps a tribute to it.
The mountain passes begin to rise in the distance, their peaks shrouded in the mist of winter and of time.
I think of Vlad. As a child, he must have traveled these very routes. Perhaps nestled in his mother’s carriage, watching the world blur past in shades of green and grey. Or perhaps he rode with his father, his small hands gripping the saddle horn with its dragon head, his heartbeat in rhythm with his father’s steady presence. Drawing strength. Unaware, yet, of how much he will rely on it. He would not have known, then, the weight of destiny pressing down upon him, the way these roads would shape his life. Later, when fate turned cruel and he lost his father to betrayal, these same passes must have carried him in exile. His horse’s hooves pounded the frozen earth as he fled Wallachia’s treacherous embrace. His Brave ones, his Vitejii at his side, those few loyal enough to follow him even into uncertainty. Vlad must have stared into these darkened forests forcing the sharp winds to remove the moisture from his eyes, knowing that one day he would return.
And return he did, slipping through these mountain veins like blood through old wounds. A prince without a throne, a warrior without a home, yet never without purpose. His men would have camped beneath those ridges, their fires flickering like the watchful eyes of spirits long past. Was this how the legend of the spring fires was born? Did he pause then, listening to the night, wondering if the land still remembered him? Or later still, leading an army, no longer the exiled son but the rightful ruler, the predator rather than the hunted, what did he feel when these mountain passes rose to meet him once more? Was there triumph in his heart, recognition, or only the quiet certainty that fate had merely brought him full circle?
The past escapes me as daylight claims the land. We spot an unusual, yet typical sight for rural Romania: a cart pulled by a horse. I point it out to my son and my heart swells with love. Vlad’s mother must have felt the same.
In the distance, Cantacuzino Castle in Bușteni looms, its silhouette sharp against the surrounding forest. The Nabab Prince built it as a display of wealth and power, but now it stands as a curiosity, a backdrop for films, a stage for stories.
What would Vlad think, I wonder? Of these castles turned into curiosities, of these forests no longer feared, but erased by industry, of this land that still holds its mysteries, but no longer fears the night? Would he see Romania as a kingdom tamed? Or would he, with a flicker of surprise, smile — knowing that history, like the mountains, does not yield so easily?
The young couple in our wagon shifts. Their hands, once distant, now rest together. A bridge rebuilt. Whatever words had been left unspoken, they seem to have found their way back, arrivin all the same.
In train stations across Romania maps ensure no journey is left to chance so large train diagrams, marking exactly where to wait on the platform based on your wagon number. A small certainty in the shifting rhythm of travel, especially when accompanied by children.
But Vlad had no such certainty when he journeyed. No maps fixed on wooden boards to tell him where he stood in the vastness of his land or in the depths of his forests. No numbered markers to reassure him that he was on the right path. He knew only where he had come from and where he needed to go. His past was imprinted in his blood: the dark forests that once shielded his ancestors, the fortress walls of Sighișoara where his first cries echoed, the stolen throne, his father’s brutal end. His future gave him no choice but that of duty, an unbroken line stretching ahead. His path was not one of convenience but of inevitability. And yet, did a man who had seen too much brutality still crave beauty? Did a prince shaped by war still hold onto fragments of who he was before the world demanded he become something else? Perhaps in the hush of the Vlăsiei Forest or beneath the towering citadel of his birth he, too, once longed for another fate.
The train slows. My daughter stirs beside me, stretching before pressing her face to the window. “Look, Mama,” she says, pointing to the flakes drifting past the glass. Snow, soft and silent, falls over Sighișoara.
The station is modest, unassuming, stone that carries the weight of time without pretense. Near the entrance, a vending machine offers books instead of snacks, literature for the traveler with a hungry mind. I smile at the thought. Some stories demand to be read in the places that birthed them.
We step into the biting air. Our breath curls in ghostly fingers that point the way before vanishing. A road paved by trees leads forward, their bare branches dusted with fresh snow. Our footsteps crunch in the hush of a forgotten afternoon. Where is everybody? Ahead, the citadel os Sighisoara rises on its hill. A dark belt of water still guards it, shimmering like an unbroken oath.
The past is here. Waiting. Watching.
Many citadels and castles whisper his name: Vlad the Impaler. Some still bear the echo of his footsteps, while others merely claim his legend. But this place, Sighișoara, is where it all began: his birthplace.
We walk to meet it. Behind us, the train laments a call breaking the hush of this day set outside of time as the past rises to meet us.
There are many citadels and castles spooked by his name, Vlad the Impaler, many where his foot echoed and some where it did not in truth. But this is where it all started, his birthplace.
