OUR BLOG
June 26, 2018
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 lowland and mountain pastures in […]
May 4, 2018
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 possible to get a sense […]
April 19, 2018
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 discover that this first impression […]
March 16, 2018
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 to inhabit during a siege. […]
February 13, 2018
By Warren Singh-Bartlett Remember the legend of the Pied Piper? In 1284, the people of Hamelin, a town in the German province of Lower Saxony, hired a rat-catcher to help them with an infestation. Enchanting the rats with his music, the piper was able to lure them into a nearby river, drowning them. Possibly deciding the solution had been too […]
January 24, 2018
How to get up close to Europe’s magnificent megafauna If you want to see a bear in the wild in Europe, your best bet is to journey to the Carpathians. 60% of all the bears in Europe live in the region, along with wild boar, deer, foxes and other fascinating fauna like wolf and lynx. But at around 1,500 kilometres […]
