ANOTHER DAY IN TRANSYLVANIA

On the hill above Sinaia – you don’t actually go out of the town, are two real treasures. The biggest is Peles Castle (pronounced Pelesh) and it was the home of the last king of Romania, who at 91 is still alive and apparently looked on favorably by Romanians, even though he is no longer king. He donated this palace to the state, probably because he couldn’t afford the upkeep. It’s made in the German style, with lots of ornately carved wood and lots of really over the top décor. There was an Italian room, a Moorish room, a music room with a piano, an Erard harp, and a 1771 French harpsichord, though no maker was named. Most of the harpsichord was covered with a cloth and it was closed up, so we couldn’t see the case decoration or soundboard. This was the best picture-taking indoor place on the whole trip, but they wouldn’t let us take pictures. The grounds were gorgeous, and we got a lot of pictures of the grounds. Although the grounds were lovely, I have chosen to show you silly pictures of us on the grounds.

We also went to Brasov which is a relativly large city near Sinaia and a very lovely old city center. We had a very short city tour -- basically driving us around enough that we could be trusted to walk around and show up at the bus again in time to go home. We went to the old city square and were given a whole two hours of free time to walk around. This is the most unsupervised time we've had on the whole trip, I think.
. We also went to the synagogue in Brasov, which was an orthodox synagogue in the moorish style with a very light interior. I think I now know that the difference between an orthodox and a reform or something synagogue is that the “altar” is in the middle of the room in the orthodox. This was also a town that had a gate to keep the Jews in the ghetto, I guess. Though of course they don’t say that now. This city had a thriving Jewish population before the war, now it’s only a hundred or so.
. The city square in Brasov is very charming in the way all European squares are. It is probably no longer the center of the city, which is quite large and modern, but simply the “Old town”. Near the square is the old Black Church, which is very large and only modestly interesting. They seemed to be having a display of turkish rugs there, but the signs only said “do not touch” and unless you’re an aficionado of Turkish rugs, they all looked more or less alike. The church is called the Black Church because it’s black outside and kind of dominates the area. It’s a Roman Catholic church. It has a single manual organ built in the early 1770s refurbished in 1777 and probably again later. I couldn’t see much of it, but I saw a list of stops and there were only about 15 and it said it was a single manual organ. I wonder if it was a poor church at the time, or if they just didn’t want to spend a lot of money on the organ?