I Am A Polar Bear

Because I had four days’ annual leave to use, a spa to visit and some mistakes to fix, I found myself in Romania over the autumn half term last week. Brașov was on my list of things to do and because it’s in Transylvania, it made sense to leave it as late as possible to be there as close to Halloween as possible. Spoiler: Romania’s not particularly big on Halloween and while you’ll get a bit more Dracula in Brașov than Bucharest, it’s actually a lovely autumnal medieval town among the mountains rather than a perfect spooky destination. It seems they do a Halloween market but only on the 31st, so of you’re there on the 29th, that’s just Wednesday.

I wanted to go to Brașov specifically because I tried to go there on my first trip to Romania in 2009 and failed. Jumped off the train 20 miles early. So in 2025, my main objective was just to get to Brașov. I took the train from Bucharest North, having bought my ticket online in advance. The train itself has been upgraded in the last sixteen years from the kind with six-seat compartments to open carriages where you sit in fours around a table and the doors are electric, rather than the “stick your hand out the window to get at the door handle” kind I travelled on in 2009.

Brașov is a little over two and a half hours from Bucharest on the IR train. I saw a regional train that did it a little quicker by cutting out a lot of the stops between Ploiești and Brașov but that’s the most spectacular part of the journey and I didn’t at all object to stopping for a minute or two every ten to fifteen minutes. This is when you cut through the Southern Carpathian Mountains and as well as rolling mountains covered in golden-orange trees, there are bare sheer cliffs looming over the landscape, some of them touched with snow. I thought about Castle Dracula (which is actually a lot further north, somewhere in the Eastern Carpathians, in the vicinity of the Tihuța Pass) which is on the edge of a similar precipice. For a while, I almost didn’t care that I was fixing an old mistake by going to Brașov and wished I could just jump off – again, but thus time deliberately – in this gorgeous mountainous countryside.

You can’t really mistake Brașov. After nearly two hours of mountains, you start to move through the outskirts of a city, and at a much slower speed. Then the station itself has platforms long enough for the whole train, and plenty of them, and my train took a 20-minute break there during which the locomotive departed, despite that not being the end of the line.

The station is in the Tractor District, along with a large shopping centre but if you’re only doing a day trip, you’re probably going to want to head for the Old Town. You can walk but it’s easier to hop on bus 4 or 1A from the bus station next to the railway station. Don’t mess around buying a day pass from the ticket office; you won’t get that much use out of it and I never figured out how to validate the thing – it didn’t respond to the contactless reader and didn’t fit in the stamp slot. Just scan your bank card or phone on the reader to pay for a single journey. Those two buses will take you to Livada Poștei, a little bus hub on a corner just down the road from the main square.

My first stop was at Piața Sfatului, Council Square, to get my bearings and to realise how different Brașov is to Bucharest. It feels a lot more like Poland. Everything feels light – by which I mean that the touristy parts of Bucharest are filled with heavy oversized Brutalist-style buildings and Brașov’s architecture feels like there’s breathable air. The square is lined with cafes and outdoor seating – and yes, there’s Dracula’s Restaurant and the Stoker pop-up wine bar with Dracula’s coach and undead horse but mostly it didn’t feel hugely different to Stary Rynek in Poznań. Except for that mountain looming over the city, so big and so close that you could see it from the square. It’s covered in trees, more of the gold and orange I’d seen from the train but with a Hollywood-style BRAȘOV sign at the top and a panoramic restaurant accessed by a short cable car journey.

But I’m not a Gilmore Girl and while the autumn foliage is pretty, if there’s a Gothic church spire, that’s what I’m heading for. Old Town Brașov is dominated by the Black Church. It was probably built in the late 14th century and gets its name from a fire in the 17th century that almost destroyed Brașov and coated the Black Church in soot. Wikipedia says that never happened and the blackening was a consequence of the pollution from the Industrial Revolution. However, the fire seems real enough and if the church was two or three hundred years old at the time and is still standing, then it seems entirely plausible that it at least got dirty as the city burned around it.

You buy an entry ticket from the souvenir shop opposite and then you can explore the Black Church at your leisure. I have to say, the 25 lei fee isn’t really worth it if you’re expecting Gothic glory inside to match the outside but it’s probably worth it to save myself sixteen years of “I wish I’d gone inside, I need to go back one day so I can do that”. The organ, as usual, is magnificent enough but there’s no stained glass, the floor is wooden planks resembling the kind you put down to protect the real floor while you do renovations and it’s just not Gothic enough. However, every inch of space where a rug can be put, it has been put. These are a 17th & 18th century addition to the church, meant to decorate it after the fire and come from Turkey. They were high value trade items or honoured gifts from the days when Brașov was part of an important trading area between the East and the West before industry took over. The rugs in the church today would have been donated by the local wealthy and guilds and there are now around 200 of these “Transylvanian rugs”, one of the biggest collections in Europe.

Much of this area of town is interesting streets and alleys but one is a fairly standard high street, with the usual array of shops for everyday life, albeit many of them set in more decorative buildings than is standard. I walked down to the end and decided to come back up to the square via that cable car.

If I’d realised the amazing view from the top could only be seen from the landing platform of the cable car – ie the area you immediately clear on disembarking – or the few coveted seats at the very front of the restaurant, I’m not sure I’d have queued for 45-60 minutes at the bottom.  The hold-up was actually caused by only having one person selling tickets; the cable cars were going up only three-quarters full because she couldn’t take the payments any quicker. But I spent my teenage years in Austria and whatever else there may or may not have been at the top of any mountain lift, there was always somewhere to see the view. There’s a viewing platform in the pictures on Google Maps but whether temporarily or not, there’s nowhere you can indulge in that view without crowding in around the cable car doors. It’s a great view from there, straight onto the red tiled roofs of the Old Town below and the hills and mountains around Brașov but you’re very much in the way of people arriving and departing. Bonus points, however, for the toilets and the vending machines, if you’re not up for sampling the panoramic restaurant.

Back down in the valley, there’s the remains of a defensive wall between Brașov and the mountain, with some surviving bastions in various states of repair, some housing museums. There are also at least two city gates worth stopping by – the Catherine Gate is especially decorative – and an assortment of towers scattered around.

I only had a few hours, what with the long train journey from and to Bucharest so my highlights were fairly quick and supplemented with just enjoying the atmosphere. I think next time I’m in Romania, I’d like to spend a few days in Brașov, with at least one of those days spent in the mountainous villages to the south. I’d like to have had the time to sit in one of those pavement cafes and explore a couple of museums and maybe walk down from the cable car (yes, you can skip the lime by just hiking to and/or from the restaurant) and have space in my luggage for a couple of souvenirs – I particularly fancy a Romanian-language copy of Dracula bought from actual Transylvania but I’ll settle for textiles or jewellery or pottery.

An hour before my train was due, I took the bus back to the station (still couldn’t figure out validating my day pass but a very nice young man assured me that it was fine – and don’t I feel elderly calling him a “very nice young man”?), only to discover that my train was over an hour late. That was no massive surprise. My train home from Predeal in 2009 was also pretty late. I’d brought extra clothes in case it was cold in the evening and I mostly paced back and forth on the platform watching my phone and my fellow travellers and although when the train arrived – on the wrong platform because there were two trains already on platform 5 an hour later – I was reasonably confident I was on the right train, it was very comforting to get my ticket scanned and the beep confirm that I was where I was supposed to be.

It was a long day, the best part of 13 hours from hotel door to hotel door but I was glad to make it to Brașov and find it had been worth the sixteen year wait.