Places I'd Love to Visit: Sighisoara, Romania

In Los Angeles, everything has a sort of depressed sameness. Unlike even east coast cities, everything is relatively new and sprawls out in every direction without any semblance of a plan. I’ve always wanted to travel more (so far I’ve only been out of the country once) and when sitting on the 405 in hour two of a twenty mile trip it’s easy to start fantasizing about better places to be.

I’m sure I first heard about Sighisoara in reading about Vlad the Impaler years ago, but I’ve only recently come across some photos. You can almost picture the dirty medieval streets filled with assorted craftspeople ambling about in the shadow of the clock tower, or a horseman riding through the dark Transylvanian forest at night towards the imposing citadel. Being the birthplace of Dracula sure doesn’t hurt the coolness factor, either.
Most of the town is essentially unchanged since the 15^th century, and like any good medieval town Sighisoara has its origins in a Roman fort that originally stood on the site. There’s a lot of great medieval German and Eastern European architecture here, which gives it a slight feeling of otherness that even similar Western European towns lack. So few sites in America have anywhere near the history of your average European town (especially on the west coast), and there are probably at least twenty I hope I can get to sometime in my life. There are countless other Dracula-related or otherwise interesting sights just in Romania alone.
The Middle Ages is an easy era to romanticize (in reality, things were probably pretty gross), but looking at some of these photos it’s not hard to imagine that life without endless traffic and a Starbucks every block might be a nice change of pace.