On Schäßburg’s Hill

The second hotel of my journey was another pleasant surprise, from its garishly pink façade, which would make it easy to find my way back even after dark, to the receptionist at the “Pensiunea Mario”, a friendly elderly lady who spoke passable German. She cast a brief, practised glance at my reservation, without attempting to renegotiate the price or cause any other complications, and showed me the way to my room in the basement.

It was pleasantly cool down there. The low ceiling had the same regular arches I had noticed in the cellar of my grandfather’s house. Not far from that house, this building might well have been constructed around the same time. It felt as though I were back there.

I did not stay long, of course. Showered and relieved of my rucksack, I immediately set off again, this time at last for the Upper Town, to which Schäßburg owes its status as a World Heritage Site.

Approaching from the north, one encounters the Castle Hill from its most spectacular side. At the bottom, a colourful assortment of low houses huddles close together, their backs pressed against the hillside. Their gardens, normally situated behind the houses, are narrow, steeply terraced strips of greenery rising above the rooftops. Above them runs a first wall enclosing the hill, and above that a second, the actual fortress wall, which here supports the plateau and the imposing buildings of the Upper Town.

Rather than take the usual route, which would have led me most directly upwards through the Stundturm, Schäßburg’s famous Clock Tower, I chose a steep staircase hidden among the trees a little to my right. It wound its way up beside the wall in a series of hairpin bends and brought me into the citadel from the west.

Fourteen defensive towers once protected this wall, nine of which still survive. They bear the names of the guilds that used to operate in the town. The trees finally released me from their shade at the Tailors’ Tower. Panting, I sprinkled the venerable cobblestones with great drops of sweat, which evaporated almost immediately.

My first look around revealed a Schäßburg far larger and more beautiful than I had expected after my excursions that morning. The town did not merely lie between the Kokel River and the Castle Hill; to the south and east it also extended into the valleys of the Schaaser Bach, the Hundsbach and the Wolkersdorfer Bach, three streams which, following the great floods, had been combined and diverted around the old town, only joining the Kokel beyond it. What pleased me most, however, was that from up here I could clearly make out the little Church of the Holy Spirit at the Siechhof, with its cemetery behind it. That would henceforth be my ideological base camp!

Following the lane towards the centre, I reached the Shoemakers’ Tower, which grew increasingly sinister with every step I took towards it. Yet it seemed to be inhabited, for curtains drawn across its few small windows kept out the sunlight. Perhaps the moonlight, too?

Before this forbidding structure, it required little imagination to picture good old Shoemaker Schorsch resoling a pair of boots in his oriel room on a storm-lashed autumn night, when the light of the full moon suddenly strikes him through the window. Snarling and howling, he transforms, leaps from his chamber and races down the wooden outside staircase in search of prey, unaware that Kate Beckinsale is already waiting for him, well armed with silver bullets … I had to laugh, even as a shiver ran through me. How could anyone dare go to the lavatory at night in a tower like this?

A glance at the matter-of-fact guidebook brought me back from my fantasies. Nobody lived in the Shoemakers’ Tower, it informed me. Only one of Schäßburg’s towers was inhabited, and that was the one with the finest vampire-castle architecture, the Ropemakers’ Tower, appropriately situated right beside the entrance to the hilltop cemetery. And its sole occupant was the cemetery gardener. Who else could possibly lead such an idyllic existence here?

Still reading, I struck the Catholic church from my sightseeing itinerary and reached Tischlergasse, the Carpenters’ Lane. With its charming rows of pastel-coloured houses, historic cobblestones and slightly crooked, winding course, it is the picturesque and romantic highlight of the Upper Town, and probably its second most photographed attraction after the Clock Tower.

While I was considering taking a few photographs myself and had stopped for the purpose, another pedestrian shuffled past me at very close quarters. He was an extremely elderly man, slightly stooped but by no means frail. I was standing in his way, and he made the smallest possible detour around me, moving with the utmost deliberation and without really acknowledging my existence. Time seemed to mean nothing to him.

Once past me, he wobbled back to the shady side of the lane, stopping occasionally to lean a shoulder lightly against the nearest wall. I could not take my eyes off him. After many long minutes he finally reached his home. Only then did he begin searching his pockets for his key, a process that took another good while. By the time he had eventually produced it, unlocked the door and entered the house with perfect composure, the sun had sunk a little lower than when the scene began. The old man vanished, as it were, into the light, while the western sky was already beginning to glow faintly gold.

His pace had proved infectious, and I now found myself walking considerably more slowly. Thus I arrived at the Town Hall, built on the site of the former Dominican monastery. Its sandstone façade stood out coolly against the colourful little houses surrounding it. One of these was missing its roof tiles. Through the rotten, sun-dried timbers of the roof structure, one could see inside, where a group of Romanian builders had gathered for a cheerful smoke.

I simply had to photograph that!

The viewfinder had not yet reached my eye when I felt someone staring at my back. Was I blocking somebody’s way? Was a pickpocket sizing me up? Whoever it was, I intended to immortalise him. I spun round abruptly, the camera now raised to my eye. The sudden movement made me sway, but I immediately recognised the face glaring back at me.

Those enormous eyes.

That impossibly long nose.

That monstrous moustache.

Of course. It would have been strange not to encounter him — HIM, of all people — here. And so we stared at one another, briefly but intensely, Count Dracula and I.

It was hardly surprising that the town had erected a monument to its most famous son, even if it is not entirely clear whether Vlad III Draculea really was a native of Schäßburg. That the bust identified him by his epithet “the Impaler”, which he had earned through his somewhat unconventional methods of making an example of people, was remarkable in itself. In the twenty-first century, one could probably only expect applause for such behaviour in Transylvania.

The location of the bust was explained by a very old-looking but neatly restored building, painted canary yellow, just a few yards away across a square where the density of tourists was rapidly increasing. Between the Count and his supposed birthplace, the Clock Tower presented its inner face to visitors, inviting them to photograph it or climb it, provided they trusted its structural integrity.

I turned towards the house of the Wallachian voivode, who is said to have been born here in 1431 and spent a few years of his childhood in the building before departing this charming little town to take up the skewering of Turks.

Today the house accommodates a café and the obligatory bloodlust-gratification shop, where those eager for a fright can purchase all manner of nonsense.

At one of the delicate metal tables outside the café sat a vampire impersonator, his face carelessly made up, gazing mournfully across the square. Judging by the condition of his black tailcoat, he had been sitting there all year round. He was so obviously disgusted by his lot, having to play Dracula for a few lei, that one might have expected this to discourage tourists from making him their photographic prey.

But nothing deterred them. They even encouraged their children to clamber onto the poor wretch’s lap or back, tugging at his cape, pretending to bite him or giggling as they held up two fingers behind his head to give him bunny ears, while their parents snapped away in a frenzy.

I hurriedly abandoned this ghastly scene and climbed towards Piaţa Cetăţii, the former Castle Square. Behind the “House with the Stag’s Antlers” begins Strada Scolii, at the end of which stands the Scholars’ Staircase. Built in 1642, this covered wooden structure leads to the summit of the Castle Hill, where the grammar school stands beside the Church on the Hill. The pupils were thus spared the additional hardship of bad weather during their steep ascent to the place of intellectual exertion.

I was determined to go up there, for my mother had attended that very school.

First, however, I had to run a gauntlet of horrors in the form of souvenir shops and stalls, all overflowing with the same merchandise: rubber bats, fabric spiders, plastic skulls, T-shirts bearing horror motifs, vampire schnapps in castle-shaped bottles, artificial necks complete with bite marks, black robes, Dracula badges, skeleton necklaces and more of the same. I tried in vain to buy a postcard depicting something other than an assortment of blood-smeared cartoon characters.

Then the climb began. I soon envied the children coming towards me: for them, a long school day was over. Relieved, they bounded downhill, while I puffed my way upwards, counting step after step and immediately forgetting how many there had been.

At the top, I sank into the grass beside the path and wondered how many times my mother must have climbed these stairs.

Once I could breathe again, I cast a brief glance at the very modest interior of the Church on the Hill, considered and rejected the idea of entering the school, and finally discovered the open cemetery gate, beside which a sign expressly invited visitors inside.

After only a few steps, I realised that my expectations concerning the size of Schäßburg’s hilltop cemetery had not even begun to approach reality. A sea of gravestones provided convincing proof of the theory of curved space, and even the existence of a wormhole through which one might pass directly to Vienna’s Central Cemetery or the Père Lachaise in Paris no longer seemed absurd. It was inconceivable that so many graves could fit onto such a small hill!

It was not long before I came across the first grave bearing my surname. This time, however, unlike at the little cemetery by the Siechhof, the phenomenon seemed endless. After only a few more steps came another; off to the left, yet another, and from the stone border of that one, which I had scarcely hopped across as though playing hopscotch, I could already see another gravestone bearing the same name.

The slope and the passage of time had left many of the graves in poor condition. Low retaining walls had slipped, gravestones had shifted. One bush was trying to grow sideways around a stone that obstructed its progress. Some graves even afforded glimpses inside; coffins could be dimly discerned in the gloom. Whether they were closed was impossible to tell.

A cool breeze prickled the back of my neck.

After the fortieth grave of a dead relative, I stopped counting. I had hardly even begun taking photographs; there was too much to look at. The cemetery seemed like one enormous family crypt without a roof: Traveller, should you come to Schäßburg, who is there left to bear tidings to? They are all here already!

Once again, images from my mother’s estate rose before my eyes, more people whom I had never met, who had died before I was born. And another voice, this time entirely free of sentimental thoughts, simply asked me:

“What’s it to you?”

“They were like me,” I replied. “At least I suppose they were. And without them, I wouldn’t be here.”

These are the sorts of conversations dehydrated people have. Since the schnapps-laced coffee at Grandpa’s house, I had drunk nothing, but had sweated heroically. I had to get down from this hill of the dead, and not by the staircase, but by the shortest, steepest possible route.

I emerged a little way east of the Clock Tower, found a shop that supplied me with a cold Coke and shuffled on, already tired enough to collapse into my hotel bed, yet still nowhere near finished with discovering things.

“Strada Stefan Octavian Iosif,” announced a sign on the corner.

The street had once been called “Hintergasse”, Back Lane, when Schäßburg was not yet part of Romania. At least, that was what a directory of German street names, published online by a former resident of the town, claimed. My grandfather had lived in this lane too, after his marriage, already with a wife and two daughters. But I had brought no document giving the house number for this address.

The street led away from the Castle Hill and, after a bend, continued southwards. At that bend, I looked back. Everything was in the photograph I took there, everything that seemed worth remembering — except the house behind me. That would have required a photograph of its own, the most important of them all…

Nor did I turn into the even smaller lane that began a short distance further on. It would have been Strada Păstorilor, the Hirtengässchen, or Little Shepherds’ Lane, where my great-grandmother had died at number 31, the same great-grandmother on whose grave red roses now lay. But I did not know that either, and it was gradually getting dark.

On my way back to the hotel, I passed the Clock Tower again. Apparently, that was unavoidable in this town. A little to its right, some steps led diagonally up a narrow lane. Above the corner thus formed, a very old house bulged out into the street.

I knew this view. From a book that had lain on my knees. Almost fifty years ago. As a child, I had sat between Grandpa and my mother, spellbound by their story. My great-grandmother had lived in this house, they told me. And the photograph showed one particular window of the flat, facing the Castle Hill. The walls had been so thick and wide that, as a child, my mother could lie stretched out full length on the windowsill and still have to stretch further to see the Clock Tower.

There was no doubt about it: I was standing in front of the right house, even if it now had the word “Bijou” stuck to it. Just a few yards above me was that windowsill on which my mother had lain. That was what I wanted to see! Somehow I would explain to the residents why they simply had to let me in!

A black iron bridge spanned a little ditch and led to the door. And what an old door it was, made of dark wood and decorated with carvings. In a vase outside stood real flowers, not plastic ones, and beside them, on a blanket, lay a real dog. A giant of a German shepherd.

And could he growl! Properly loud, and in a very bad temper indeed. Already he was no longer lying down but straining against the chain that held him to the house.

So that was not to be, and by now I had had enough anyway.

Soon the hotel was glowing neon pink in the light of the street lamps. I could not even manage half the pizza I had bought on the way, and long before my usual bedtime I lay in bed, heavy as a gravestone.