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I was this weekend in Targoviste, the former Wallachia capital, located at 70 km from Bucharest.
Targoviste has some impressive ruins of the Royal Court and Vlad the Impaler ruled the country from there. His name appears on the list of voivodes of Wallachia at the entrance in he archeological site, near his ancestors from the Basarab familly (Mircea the Old, his grandfather, Vlad Dracul, his father, Radu the Handsome-his brother and so on).
The place is dedicated to Vlad, there are a lot of documents about him: paintings, letters, photos of some other ruins in the area. All of them are presenting his agitated existence dedicated to the justice and to the freedom of our country. I discovered here that Vlad the Impaler was very connected to Brasov area (there are a lot of letters addressed to the Brasov population and nobles), however there are no connections to the fact that Vlad was in Bran.
The whole Targoviste site is under restoration right now, the churches are closed, but everything will be ready in October 2009. The most interesting place on that site is Chindiei Tower, which is in fact a Dracula Museum. The tower has 27 m high and about 9 meters in diameter and it survived to the centuries. In the top it is a good place to stay a while and to think about Vlad the Impaler and his role in the history of Romania. Especially because the Chindiei Tower was built by Vlad, in the second half of the 15th centrury.
There were many tourists, most of them Romanian, but the guys from the museum told us that there are also foreign tourists. There are not too many Dracula oriented souvenirs, but you can buy some brochures about Vlad and Targoviste.
If you are looking for a complete Dracula tour in Romania, you don’t have to miss this place, it is one of the most connected to Vlad in Romania.
How to get there?
From Bucharest there are many buses and also the train who get there. It takes less than 2 hours to go to Targoviste and the visit of the archeological site takes less than two hours (I made it in only one hour).
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