Transylvania, beyond the castle that sells the Dracula story

When Bram Stoker wrote Dracula, published in 1897, he never went to Transylvania. He took the name of his vampire from Vlad III, a fifteenth-century prince of Wallachia, the region to the south, who was known as Vlad Dracula, son of the Dragon, and later as Vlad the Impaler, for his favourite method of executing enemies. Stoker read about him in a book in a library and placed his count's castle in the mountains of Transylvania, which he chose as a suitably remote and mysterious setting.

Romania has since made the most of the connection. Bran Castle, perched on a rock above a mountain pass between Transylvania and Wallachia, is sold as Dracula's castle, and its shops sell vampire souvenirs. The castle fits the description in the novel well enough, but there is little evidence that Vlad ever spent much time there. It is a fine castle in its own right, and was a favourite home of Queen Marie of Romania in the twentieth century.

The real prince

Vlad the Impaler was born in Transylvania, in the town of Sighişoara, and he ruled Wallachia in several short and bloody reigns in the mid-fifteenth century, fighting the Ottoman Turks to the south and the Saxon towns to the north. His reputation for cruelty was spread by German pamphlets of the time, but in Romania he is often remembered as a defender of the country against the Ottomans. His house in Sighişoara is now a restaurant.

The Saxon towns

Transylvania's character owes a great deal to the Saxons, German settlers invited by the kings of Hungary in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to defend the frontier and develop the region. They built a series of walled towns and hundreds of villages, each with a fortified church in which the villagers could shelter from raids. Several of these churches, such as the one at Biertan, are UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

Sighişoara is the most complete of the Saxon towns, a medieval citadel on a hill, with towers named after the guilds that defended them, and a covered wooden staircase climbing to the church at the top. Braşov, in a valley beneath the mountains, has a large old town around a square and the Black Church, the biggest Gothic church in Romania, named after the soot that blackened its walls in a great fire. Sibiu, further west, has broad squares and houses with dormer windows in their roofs that look like half-closed eyes, which locals call the eyes of the city.

Sinaia, and the far north

Sibiu has also made a point of its past. It was European Capital of Culture in 2007, the first in Romania, and its old town was restored for the occasion. Just outside it, the ASTRA museum is one of the largest open-air museums in Europe, a collection of hundreds of houses, mills, churches and workshops brought from villages across Romania and set up around a lake in a forest.

On the other side of the pass from Braşov, in the Prahova valley, is Sinaia, a mountain resort with Peleş Castle, a fairytale palace of turrets and wood-panelled rooms built for the first king of Romania, Carol I, in the late nineteenth century. It is more spectacular inside than Bran.

North of Transylvania, Maramureş is one of the most traditional regions of Europe, with wooden churches with tall, thin spires, villages of carved wooden gates, and the Merry Cemetery at Săpânţa, where the grave markers are painted in bright blue and carry humorous verses about the lives of the dead.

The tours

Explore Worldwide's Best of Romania and the Danube Delta, eleven nights, starts in Bucharest and travels to Sinaia, Bran Castle, Moieciu, Braşov and Sighişoara, then north through Bistriţa to Maramureş, with Săpânţa, the Bârsana monastery and Vişeu de Sus, home of a narrow-gauge forestry steam railway. It runs from May to September.

Explore's Transylvanian Long Weekend, four nights, is a short introduction: Bucharest, Sinaia, Bran, Braşov and walking in the Bucegi mountains.

Explore's Grand Tour of Romania, Serbia & Bulgaria, fifteen nights, combines Sinaia, Bran, Braşov, Sibiu and the Corvin Castle at Hunedoara, a great Gothic castle that looks more like Dracula's than Bran does, with the Danube gorges and Serbia and Bulgaria.

Transylvania is at its best from late spring to early autumn, when the hills are green and the mountain walks are open. Autumn, when the beech forests turn, is particularly fine.