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Tuesday 2 December 2008

Transylvania

Grin and bear it

For the moment, there are no budget flights straight to Transylvania — which, when you consider the plight of Prague or Zagreb, is no bad thing. In a few years, I imagine, word of its natural beauty and wildness will spread, and visitors will descend in great numbers. For the moment, though, the flipside of having the place to yourself is that there isn’t a great choice of places to stay outside towns like Târgu Mures or Cluj. A good base is the guesthouse on the Count Mikes Estate in Zabola, nestling at the foot of the Carpathians (www.zabola.com). Gregor and Alexander Roy-Chowdhury, its owners, are scions of the ancient Hungarian Mikes family and of a Bengali prince. Romania’s communist regime seized the family’s property and used the buildings in Zabola to house a camp for communist youth and a hospital for tuberculosis, but Gregor abandoned his career in investment banking to reclaim the family property through restitution, and now has six guest rooms in a converted outbuilding, though the estate’s two castles remain uninhabitable.

It’s not too difficult to get to the estate — I was picked up from Brasov station by Árpi, one of the estate retainers, a chap recognisable from the Cotswolds to the Urals: gumboots, canvas trousers, moustache and roll-up cigarettes. And the food is good and traditional. Transylvanian food is, like the land itself, a mixture of Hungarian, Romanian and Saxon and, as I witnessed, the farming methods are entirely traditional. ‘We cook partly according to 18th- and 19th-century aristocratic Transylvanian cookbooks,’ said Zsolna, Gregor’s wife. ‘We have lots of trout from the river and game like wild boar.’ That night I dined off Hungarian pörkölt (often called goulash elsewhere) with Romanian mamaliga (polenta), a perfect Transylvanian concoction. Homemade plum pálinka proved a welcome improvement on industrial alcohol, cumin or no cumin.

After supper I ventured across the ‘volcanoes’ to a boozer in the singular village of Kommando. As the name suggests, Kommando was a military frontier post of the Austro-Hungarian empire, perched in a lonely spot high above Zabola. I must have seemed quite exotic to these stout mountaineers, whose favourite food in the depths of winter seems to be ice cream, and whose tolerance of the Bontempi organ is superhuman. But they proved, like everyone that we encountered, astoundingly friendly.

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