I toured most of Romania in October 2022 when the leaves started to change colors. Most of my time was spent in Transylvania, a region famous for its association with vampires and other supernatural folklore. The winding Carpathian Mountains cover most of the region, and one of the most challenging hikes I have ever endured happened at Parîngul Mare in the southwest. I spent a month exploring the country and still didn’t get to see everything on my itinerary.

The Transylvanian territory was acquired during the ratification of the 1916 Treaty of Bucharest on December 1st, 1918 after the end of the First World War that resulted in the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian state. Romania had originally declared neutrality but soon signed a secret deal with the Entente Powers that guaranteed Transylvanian territory would be recognized as belonging to Romania if they agreed to invade their neighbors to the west. After a successful invasion in August, they were met with reinforcements from Turkey, Bulgaria, and Germany and ended up losing most of its gained and already-held territory, including the capital city of Bucharest, which prompted the existing government to relocate to Iasi close to Moldova.

Romania negotiated the re-acquisition of Bucharest in 1918, but the treaty was never ratified. This allowed Romania to re-declare war on the crippled Central Powers in November, where they emerged victorious and ultimately acquired Transylvania as their own, at the total expense of 200,000 soldiers over the course of two years. However, in 1940, King Carol II abdicated the throne after being forced to cede northern Transylvania to the Nazis, as well as surrendering Bessarabia to the east and Bukovina to the north to the Soviets, and a military dictatorship supported by Germany was established after a failed coup attempt in 1941.

The Romanian puppet government regained Bessarabia and Bukovina in June 1941, after the Nazis invaded the Soviets, and held territory as far as Transnistria. It was in these territories where the slaughter of 160,000 Jews eventually took place. 132,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to northern Transylvania and exterminated in 1944. After the Soviets led a successful offensive attack against the Nazis in the eastern part of the country near present-day Moldova, King Carol II’s son, Michael I, and a coalition of political parties overthrew Antonescu in a bloodless coup, restoring the monarchy and precipitating the end of the war. Romania then switched sides with 250,000 troops joining the Red Army.

Stalin viewed Romania as part of the Soviet sphere of influence and forced Michael I to appoint Communist Party member Petru Groza, head of the Communist Party, as prime minister in March 1945. The signing of the Paris Peace Treaties, which took place in February 1947, is when the entire Transylvanian region was recognized as Romanian territory, and it also officially allowed the presence of Soviet troops throughout the country. The Securitate was Romania’s secret police force, which functioned the same as most of the other Communist countries. There was a bureaucratic element to the state spy ring. High-ranking officials would oversee several lower-ranking ones, who would recruit and monitor any kind of worker and family member to spy on everybody in their daily lives. It was a totalitarian state that functioned very similar to Albania and East Germany.

In 1965, nationalist Nicolae Ceaușescu came to power. He distanced himself from the Soviet Union by condemning the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, making Romania the only Warsaw Pact country that refused to take part. That was the only good thing about him because he and his wife Elena lived luxurious lives while they brutally oppressed the rest of the country and watched the citizens starve. He was obsessed with paying off the national debt accrued from mismanaging oil production in the 1970s, so in 1981 he instituted austerity programs, which severely limited imported goods, and exported most of the yields from the country’s agriculture industry. Someone who lived during those days told me that “people had money, they just didn’t have anything to spend it on.”

Ceaușescu’s vanity project was building the monumental Palace of Parliament. It’s the heaviest building in the world, weighing in at over nine billion pounds (over 4 billion kilograms). I have no idea where they found a scale big enough to weigh it, but that’s what is reported. It was closed for a conference when I was there, so I had to settle for a self-guided walking tour around the perimeter. It truly is an impressively imposing building despite its origins.

In the western city of Timisoara on December 16, 1989, after a wave of anti-communist protests swept the Easter Bloc, a Hungarian-Romanian priest was forcibly evicted from his home by the police after publicly criticizing the government, eliciting strong condemnation from a surrounding crowd that was steadily increasing in size. In the following days, the number of protesters began to overwhelm the police forces. Ceaușescu was in Iran as the protest was taking place, so his wife, Elena, responded by deploying troops to quell the uprising.

Romanian press didn’t report the uprisings, so much of the country had no idea that things were getting serious out west. Residents of Bucharest soon got word through foreign radio stations and took to the streets to protest the regime. On December 21, Ceaușescu, having just returned from Iran, addressed a crowd of 100,000 in front of the Central Committee building. He only spoke for a few minutes before screams and shouts soon drowned out the speakers. The television camera became shaky and the feed was cut soon after, but the rest of the country was already made aware that a revolution was taking place. In the video, you can actually see the moment where it appears that Ceaușescu realizes that he is losing his grip on power. It’s a pivotal moment in history that I have always found fascinating.

Protests continued into the next day, December 22, and others around the country were gearing up to protest as well. There were dozens of civilian casualties at the hands of the military forces and Securitate as they were shot and beaten to death. That same morning, the Minister of Defense was found dead in his office after being fired for treason, with many placing the blame on Ceaușescu. Once the rumor spread of the Minister’s death, the military brass defected and ordered Ceaușescu to be placed under arrest. He and Elena managed to escape by helicopter but were soon ordered by the military to land and surrender under charges of genocide and illegally accumulating wealth. After a speedy televised trial on December 25, the couple were taken outside and executed by firing squad, in which there were many volunteers. They were the only communist leaders to be executed during the fall of the Iron Curtain.

After the fall of communist Romania, most of the government-owned industries were either shut down or sold to private investors. The system of government is now a multi-party parliamentary system of government. The country’s overall development has been inhibited due to pervasive corruption but saw an economic boom in the 2000s and mid-2010s. They joined NATO in 2004 and the European Union in 2007 but are not part of the Schengen area.

Romania is an affordable tourist destination and one of the prettier places in Southeastern Europe. Traditional food there is delicious, but there is also no shortage of pizzas and hamburgers. Transportation through town and across the country is cheap and easy with its extensive railway system, and the language barrier wasn’t much of a problem, either.

There is so much to see and do there. Below is a short list of destinations if you are thinking about making your way over one day.

The hike was pretty but it was also incredibly tough.