The Beyond Journal

Story by Warren Singh-Bartlett Alien spaceships crashing at Roswell. The Holy Grail buried under a Scottish chapel. Lost cities of gold in the Amazon rainforest. A valley inhabited by immortals in the Himalayas. Everyone loves a tale, the taller the better. Romania, no slouch in supernatural stakes itself, has one of the tallest: it was […]

Story by Warren Singh-Bartlett One of the most visually distinctive features of Transylvania’s Siebenbürgen (Seven Fortresses) are the guild towers that line their citadel walls. Sighișoara originally had 14, nine of which remain today while Sibiu, the centre of Saxon Transylvania and the region’s most important citadel, had a whopping 40 towers, each built, manned […]

Story by Warren Singh-Bartlett Romania’s shepherds, or ciobani, are a ubiquitous sight and if you’re lucky, you’ll come across one wearing a cojoc, a yeti-esque ankle-length sheepskin coats that doubles as bedding at night. Unlike their counterparts elsewhere in Europe, Romanian shepherds are still semi-nomadic and live out in the wild, herding their flock between […]

Story by Warren Singh-Bartlett Some of Romania’s more remote villages can feel like living museums, looking much as they have for centuries, save for an occasional intrusion from the modern age and the odd coat of paint. This is particularly true out in the farmlands of Transylvania, where in the old Saxon villages, it’s still […]

Story by Warren Singh-Bartlett Wander along the busy boulevards of Bucharest and you’ll be forgiven for thinking that with the exception of the historic core and a few graceful older buildings, the entire city is shiny new glass towers and crumbling old Communist concrete blocks. Take the time to wander its backstreets, though, and you’ll […]

By Warren Singh-Bartlett If Transylvania’s Saxon churches, with their thick walls topped by towers, look a little like fortresses, that’s because in part, they were. Subjected to repeated invasion by the Mongols and later, the Ottomans, Saxon villagers fortified their churches, making them defensible and the larger ones even had rooms set aside for villagers […]