Our 11-year-old daughter was already unsettled by the presence of bears in the hills and wolves in the woods, so the prospect of meeting a real count in Transylvania understandably made her nervous.
To exacerbate the situation we’d had a bit of a Dracula session that day. Tacky souvenirs are surprisingly rare in Romania, but that afternoon in the nearby town of Sighisoara we’d found a little statuette of a naked lady exposing her throat to the fangs of a Boris Karloff lookalike. Rhena spent some time studying the statuette carefully, and then asked a pertinent question: why did the lady need to be naked?
We reassured her that the whole Dracula business was just fiction, but when Count Kalnoky, with whom we were staying, made his appearance that evening in the candlelit cellar, she wasn’t quite as composed as she could have been.
Fortunately, Tibor Kalnoky, 39, is an urbane, sophisticated aristocratic host with flawless English and equally flawless manners, and not in the least bit scary. His family pedigree dates back to the 12th century, and his great-uncle Gustav was Prime Minister of the Austro-Hungarian empire. He also happens to be a family man with young children, and when we talked of our fascination with his village — the storks, the scythes, and the horses and carts — he turned to Rhena. “Have you seen the cow parade? No? Then come. It will only take a few minutes.”
And so we joined other villagers waiting outside their gates. The count looked at his watch. “8pm. They’ll be here any minute now.” And sure enough, round the bend appeared the first of a long string of straw-coloured cattle. As this parade progressed, individual beasts peeled off into family courtyards, then the gates clanged shut behind them.
It looked to be a choreographed routine, but there was no cowherd-in-chief. These cows had always been self-trained, explained the count, taking themselves up to the grazing lands in the morning and bringing themselves home at 8pm every evening. All their owners needed to do was to make sure their courtyard gates were open to let them in. So this was what the villagers did every evening: they waited until the cows came home.
There is something mythical about Transylvania. This is a place where you don’t count your chickens until they hatch, and you make hay while the sun shines. Medieval maths says that a four-legged beast needs four cartloads of hay to survive the winter but a horse needs two more because it works harder. Given that these beasts were the prize possessions of most families, everyone and his auntie seemed to be out scything hay in the week that we were there.
The village of Miklosvar, dominated by Count Kalnoky’s estate, is a Hungarian-speaking settlement where there has never been any recorded crime. For us, the story-book detail was captivating. The storks on chimney stacks, clapping their beaks when their youngster stood up. The boys in the plum trees, collecting for their parents’ brandy stills. And, of course, the daily cow parade. All were suggestive of timeless lifestyles in a fragile environment just waking up to tourism.
The count’s manor house dominates the village centre, but is still under restoration. His guest accommodation focuses on a small group of buildings 100m away. Elsewhere in the village is another clutch of oak-beamed guesthouses gathered around a little courtyard, antique furniture and hand-embroidered textiles, as well as the latest in low-voltage lighting and modern bathrooms.
Guest meals are based on local ingredients — pork stews, dumplings, fresh bread, cheese — and eaten either outside, under a vine trellis, at lunchtime, or down in the cellar around a big oak table.
The count has a handful of guides. Two of them do wildlife adventures such as bear tracking, bird spotting, walking and horse-and-cart rides up to the hills. Two more concentrate on trips to fortified churches, castles and medieval cities.
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