At first I can’t figure out why everyone in Transylvania is glaring at me.

It’s a bright August morning, and I’ve just begun driving around this achingly scenic part of central Romania, where the green hills are dotted with giant conical haystacks. As I make my way from one hamlet to another, occasionally stopping to peek inside magnificent 13th-century churches that once doubled as citadels, the welcome is not exactly warm. Pretty much everyone I pass—farmers weeding their fields by hand, groups of kids playing by the roadside, stooped women in head scarves carrying bags of tomatoes—sizes me up with a severe, wary look that seems to be some kind of Transylvanian Death Stare. Granted, whenever I pause to speak with anyone, the stern facade crumbles quickly; one young guy in a tracksuit cheerfully shows me how to scale a stone wall so that I can look around an abandoned medieval rectory. But in the next village, the intense glowers begin anew.

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By lunchtime I’ve realized the main reason for the gawking: I’m in a car. This region is one of the last in Europe where preindustrial customs endure, where many farmers still get around by horse and cart and cut their hay with scythes, so my rented Ford is not making it easy to blend in. There’s also the fact that Transylvania, a region roughly the size of Kentucky that’s bordered on two sides by the Carpathian Mountains, has over the centuries been conquered by just about every foreign leader with an imperialist streak. If your hometown had been ruled by Huns, Mongols, Tatars, Turks, Habsburgs, and Ottomans, among others, maybe you’d be suspicious of strangers, too.

Soon enough, however, the many upsides to Transylvania’s complicated history become clear. By the time I’ve followed some buffalo into the courtyard of a small farmhouse, where a smiley great-grandmother offers me a pair of ducks as a gift, I understand why more and more plugged-in travelers have been falling under the spell of this place. Although Transylvania’s historical ups and downs have left it with an unfathomably rich and complex culture (and the fabulous architecture that goes with it), in many villages day-to-day life remains about as simple as it gets, with everything synced to the rhythms of nature. Little wonder that Transylvania’s fan base comprises a number of privileged Western Europeans—including Prince Charles himself—whose weekend homes in the British or French countryside boast all the outward trappings of old-world pastoralism but likely none of its agricultural bona fides.

Photo by Bill Phelps Photo by Bill Phelps

“Transylvania is one of the few places left where you can still find the way of life of hundreds of years ago, when nature and human beings were so much more in harmony,” says Jessica Douglas-Home, a Londoner whose foundation, the Mihai Eminescu Trust (MET), has led the push to protect these villages from abandonment or overzealous modernization. The nonprofit MET also operates a growing number of simple, comfortable guesthouses that travelers can rent for about $50 a day.

I spend my first night in one of them, in a village called Mălâncrav, where my two-bedroom converted farmhouse is directly across the street from the town well. (Nope, it’s not a prop: Villagers drop by all day long to fill their cisterns with hand-pumped water.) Andrea Rost, who works with MET and is showing me around town, explains that Mălâncrav’s population of 1,000 or so includes about 200 descendants of the so-called Saxons, who settled this area beginning in 1143. At the time, Transylvania was part of Hungary, and King Géza II invited thousands of Germans (actually not from Saxony, but from the Rhineland) to colonize the area and protect it from invading Turks. Largely autonomous, with no feudal lords to control them, the Saxons established their own legal system and built hundreds of extraordinary fortified churches, marvels of Gothic vernacular architecture. More than 150 of them remain, and several are UNESCO-listed. With 12-foot-thick walls and mazelike layouts that often included communal living areas and underground pantries, the churches served as refuges during frequent sieges. “The entire village could survive inside them for weeks at a time,” Rost says.

Most of the Saxons left the area around 1990, when Germany invited them to return to the fatherland after the fall of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, but at Mălâncrav’s Lutheran church, weekly services are still held in the local Germanic dialect. Covering the central nave are superb 14th-century frescoes whose delicacy is all the more striking because of the rugged battlements surrounding them. In the sacristy there’s some medieval graffiti carved into the walls, including one note signed in 1405 by a priest named Niklaus, who declares that he has to leave town, without explaining why.

The highlight of most summer days in Mălâncrav is a kind of unofficial cow parade that takes place shortly before sunset, when two whip-cracking herdsmen, who’ve spent the afternoon with the livestock on the communal grazing fields up in the hills, lead the animals back to the village. The main road is lined on both sides with narrow houses just like the one I’m staying in, with courtyards and stables and vegetable gardens in back; as each animal recognizes its own front gate, it peels off from the herd to pass through it. Rost and I trail the aforementioned buffalo onto the property of Marioara and Ioan Baiaz, a couple in their 60s, who invite us to stick around for the milking. Midway through, Ioan passes me a tin cup of warm buffalo milk straight from the udder, and I panic for a second but then gulp it down in all its creamy sweetness. That’s when Marioara’s mother, sitting in the garden stripping sage leaves from their stems, insists that I take two of the family’s ducks home to California with me. When I mention that they might not be allowed onto the plane, she says, “Oh, don’t worry, I’m sure you can talk the pilot into it.”

Photo by Bill Phelps Photo by Bill Phelps

Back at the guesthouse, dinner is waiting: Nicoleta Jeler, the villager who runs the house for MET, has prepared a chicken dumpling soup along with rolls of sarmale—cabbage leaves stuffed with beef and pork. Rich and satisfying in the inimitable way of food that’s eaten a few yards from where it was grown, the sarmale and other dishes here are simple and hearty and, in many cases, organic by default.

All this bucolic charm inevitably comes packaged with a few less-than-magical realities. Transylvanian farmers use horse-drawn carts and plows not because they’re picturesque but because they’re less expensive than tractors. Romania, having joined the European Union only 11 years ago, remains one of the poorest nations in the union and one of the most corrupt; grant money allocated for a new school might somehow end up financing a villa for the mayor’s cousin, creating a thorny set of challenges for preservationist groups like MET. Another issue is the surge of newly flush Bucharest natives, some of whom have found work in Western Europe and returned home to buy or build vacation homes in rural areas. Since many locals still associate the rustic look with hardscrabble rural poverty, their design preferences often veer toward the new and shiny. Strict building codes have been implemented in historic zones, but enforcement is lax. Sometimes, Douglas-Home says, MET has a matter of hours to intervene before a new homeowner tears out a dozen antique hand-carved window frames to make room for cheap plastic replacements.

“We try to catch it before it’s spoiled,” she says, “and to help people understand that if they want a village that continues to be beautiful and visited and lived in, it would be a terrible mistake to alter these houses with glass and steel additions.” MET also helped quash a proposed Dracula theme park—a project of the Romanian Ministry of Tourism hungry for tourist dollars. Plans called for a high-altitude zip line that ended in an ancient cemetery. (For the record: Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula was partly inspired by Vlad the Impaler, who was indeed born in Transylvania, but the story is pure fiction, and the character’s legacy is evident mainly in souvenir shops.) Douglas-Home, well aware of how tricky it can be for a foreigner to orchestrate preservation efforts from afar, works with a mostly Romanian crew led by the trust’s director, Caroline Fernolend, and plans to eventually turn over MET to an all-local team.

For a visitor, both the pros and the cons of tourist-friendly preservation are on view in the pretty village of Viscri (population: 467), an hour east of Mălâncrav. After the Saxon exodus in the early ’90s, Viscri sat mostly empty until its gabled, pastel-colored houses began to attract Roma families along with Romanians and, more recently, a smattering of Western European home buyers. MET’s restoration work on the buildings and its initiatives for the low-income residents—there are workshops on traditional farming methods and instruction in weaving, embroidery, and jam-making—have brought Viscri back to life, and at its best, the place brings to mind a 3-D Corot painting: Small flocks of sheep serve as the town’s de facto lawn mowers, roaming from one patch of grass to the next. But this minuscule village now contains more than two dozen restored guesthouses—many listed on Airbnb—and in high summer, visitors often throng the rickety wooden lofts of its 13th-century church.

Photo by Bill Phelps Photo by Bill Phelps

The time-warp ambience seems less studied and self-conscious in nearby Richis, where Rost introduces me to a wisecracking 85-year-old named Hans Schaas. After we chat under the gnarled peach tree in his garden, chewing on raw honeycomb from one of his beehives, Hans invites me into his kitchen and, with his wife, Hanni, serves shots of schnapps they’ve made from the tree’s abundant fruit. It turns out Hans and Hanni are the only original Saxon couple left in town, which they still call by its German name, Reichesdorf. When I ask about how things have changed since the 1930s, Hans laughs and begins a riff about the long wooden benches that you see in front of every house. “In the old days it would have been shameful to have a bench, because everybody was always working!” he says. “Now everybody has one, and they spend the whole day sitting on it.” But the slow pace in Richis is irresistibly seductive for the few visitors who make it here. Right in town is MET’s latest guesthouse, newly redone with the help of the renowned British decorator (and Friend of Charles) David Mlinaric. He also oversaw the interior redesign of MET’s Apafi Manor, an 18th-century nobleman’s house in Mălâncrav. “It’s remarkable to me that Transylvania still has so many extraordinary houses and churches and buildings that few of us in Western Europe have ever heard about,” Mlinaric says.

As I drive east from Richis and Viscri, there are subtle changes in the scenery: Forests become denser, roads become narrower, and the men are more likely to be wearing narrow-brimmed felt hats. This is Székely Land, populated by ethnic Hungarians who, like the Saxons, essentially governed themselves for centuries as the area was claimed by various foreign empires; most still speak Hungarian and retain strong cultural ties to Hungary. (Romania annexed Székely Land in 1920 when the Treaty of Trianon took effect.) There are some fetching rural lodgings here, too, particularly those run by Count Tibor Kálnoky, a tall and gracious 51-year-old from a clan of Hungarian nobles that was exiled during the Communist years.

As we sip beers in the village of Miklósvár (MicloÇoara, in Romanian), Kálnoky tells me that his family’s 16th-century hunting manor here, along with several outbuildings and cottages, was seized by the state in the 1950s. Kálnoky grew up mostly in France and Germany, but in the late 1990s he moved to Bucharest, learned Romanian, reclaimed some of the dilapidated ancestral properties, and began transforming them into guest lodgings. Determined to use only traditional construction methods, he got off to a bad start with a concrete-happy local contractor, but eventually, he recalls, “I just asked the workers, ‘How did your grandfathers build walls when there was no cement available?’ ” The answer was a mortar of local lime, sand, and water, which became their main material. Meanwhile, Kálnoky hired craftsmen to restore the heirloom furniture in the homes and scoured the region for other family pieces, which he bought back from locals.

With their tasteful blend of antique clocks, good linens, and hand-painted dressers, these rooms are more refined than my digs at Mălâncrav, but Kálnoky makes a point of keeping everything low-key and low-tech. A few Eastern European guests have complained to him about the lack of televisions and Wi-Fi in the bedrooms. “They say, ‘But didn’t Prince Charles stay here?’ ” Kálnoky says. “I tell them, ‘Yes, and those things are exactly what he’s trying to get away from.’”

Photo by Bill Phelps

The Prince of Wales was an early supporter of MET and has been a Transylvania booster for decades, bankrolling several local projects tied to his interests in sustainability, biodiversity, and architectural conservation. It was during a visit to Miklósvár in 2007 that he joined Kálnoky (the two are distant cousins) on a 12-mile hike to a ridge overlooking the hamlet of Zalánpatak (Valea Zălanului), where one of Kálnoky’s ancestors, a judge, had built a small compound. Looking down at the tiled-roof cottages in a valley of forested knolls and gurgling streams, Charles told Kálnoky, “This is what I always imagined when I thought about Romania.” The buildings had all but collapsed, except for the stables, where “there was one lonely cow, standing in a heap of dung,” Kálnoky says.

Today the Prince of Wales’s ostrich-feather crest adorns the upper facade of the renovated stables, alongside the Kálnoky family seal. Charles bought the property and renovated it with Kálnoky, who hosts travelers in its five rooms year-round, except when the Prince is in residence. (Charles comes back every spring, sans Camilla, for a week of walking, reading, and bear-spotting.) Kálnoky says the prince kept a close eye on the decor choices—many snapshots of antique Ottoman rugs were e-mailed back and forth to London—and paid special attention to his bedroom, whose walls he hung with his own framed engravings.

Although Kálnoky makes light of his familial link to Prince Charles, which dates back to Queen Mary’s Hungarian ancestors (“You’re probably related to him, too, if you go back far enough,” Kálnoky jokes), he isn’t shy about marketing the royal connection for business purposes. If you want to book the prince’s room, just go to Zalánpatak’s website and click on “The Prince’s Room.” But Charles himself hasn’t hesitated to use his celebrity to encourage intelligent, eco-aware tourism in Transylvania, and it’s clear that’s why he’s allowing strangers to sleep in his bed. Of course, some guests can’t help snooping around the shelves in the drawing room and wondering which of the personal effects—a Birds of the World book, a Rolling Stones Love You Live CD—might have made their way here from Buckingham Palace.

Photo by Bill Phelps Photo by Bill Phelps

At both Miklósvár and Zalánpatak, guests eat all meals together at a communal table, and judging by my dinner at each place, the mix is more intriguing than what you’d typically find at a Catskills B&B. The group at Miklósvár includes a church-fresco painter from Bucharest and Germany’s former ambassador to Belarus; at Zalánpatak there’s a London book publisher and her family—four well-traveled Brits who are unabashedly smitten with Transylvania. Over breakfast the father tells me, “I keep expecting Tess of the d’Urbervilles to pop over the hill, carrying a milk pail,” before excitedly showing me his iPhone shots of yesterday’s picnic in a sun- dappled meadow. The photos remind me of the ones I saw more than a decade ago when a French couple I knew, just back from their first trip to Romania, were urging me to get to rural Transylvania ASAP. All these years later the place is still not quite a mainstream destination, partly because its infrastructure remains limited. But at a time when even tech moguls are warning against the poisonous effects of too much screen time, and everyone from suburban chicken breeders to inner-city composters is feeling the pull of pastoral realness, Transylvania’s unique brand of old-world simplicity seems more seductive than ever.

Later that morning, my last one in Transylvania, I take a stroll down Zalánpatak’s only real street, which has a few dozen houses. Even though I’ve been in the village for roughly 24 hours, I’m already starting to feel possessive about the place as I stop to pick a sprig of wild mint. Then I see the most unexpected thing: a car. It’s a gray Toyota with Bucharest plates, and it’s going a bit fast. Finally, I understand how the locals feel. Who is this stranger coming into my beloved village? It’s my turn to stop in my tracks and glare at an intruder.

Evidently unintimidated, the driver offers a polite smile and nods at me. I can’t help it: I grin and wave back.

Planning a Trip to Transylvania

Getting There

The small airport in Târgu Mureș is Transylvania’s most central but is closed for renovation until July. For travelers from the U.S., it’s often more convenient to fly into Cluj-Napoca or Bucharest, where there’s a better selection of international flights, connecting through cities such as London, Madrid, and Rome. From either Cluj-Napoca or Bucharest, the drive to the villages can take at least three hours.

Getting Around

A rental car is essential for exploring the villages and countryside. The Mihai Eminescu Trust’s guesthouses are scattered throughout the Saxon part of Transylvania, south of Sighișoara, while Count Kálnoky’s two properties are in Székely Land, just to the east. It’s possible—make that preferable—to visit both regions, since they’re less than two hours apart. The gorgeous medieval cities of Brașov and Sighișoara are worthy stops en route.

Where to Stay and Eat

Each of MET’s guesthouses (book at experiencetransylvania.ro) has a caretaker-cook who can prepare hearty meals right in your kitchen—a major plus, since most villages have no restaurants. At Count Kálnoky’s properties (transylvaniancastle.com), rates are all-inclusive; even if you’re not usually a fan of communal meals—with goulash!—you’ll probably be won over by the group dinners at Miklósvár (in a wine cellar built from river stones) and Zalánpatak (outdoors in summertime).

What to Do

When you book your lodgings, you’ll receive info on the key sights and activities in your particular area. Among the musts are the fortified churches at Mălâncrav, Alma Vii, and Viscri; you can also arrange visits with local blacksmiths, weavers, and charcoalmakers. Whatever you do, set aside a few hours each day for some aimless driving or walking, so you can chat with a farmer about his haystack technique or watch two bearded herdsmen milk hundreds of uncooperative goats. Since peak season for tourism is midsummer, the ideal time to visit is June or September, when you might have an entire village to yourself. C.B.