Top of the World
Are you sensitive to the charm of old Central Europe? Do you take a weekend trip to Vienna, Prague, Budapest or Krakow? Do you like Art Nouveau, or the style that the Austrians call Sezession, the Germans Jugendstil, the Catalans modernism and the Italians, who knows why, Liberty? Well: if you answered three times yes, you might wonder why you have never been to Romania, to Oradea, in that extreme corner of Transylvania that even Dracula must never have visited. According to an online survey, the most beautiful city in Romania. Definitely, one of the most charming, quiet, joyful, safe and green. Seen from the sky, or on a map, the star-shaped plan of Cetatea stelara, the Citadel with its five pointed bastions, is reminiscent of Palmanova in Friuli. Its current appearance was given to it by the Austrians in the 18th century, but a thousand years of city history have passed from here. It was the great and enlightened king of Hungary Ladislaus I the Holy, in the eleventh century, to build a fortified monastery, on the advice of an angel appeared to him in a dream, the fifteenth century was a golden age, when the Citadel was a center of humanistic studies of the first order, literary and astronomical, then the Protestants swept away the Catholics, the Turks swept away the Protestants, the Hapsburgs swept away the Turks. Long degraded and inaccessible, the Citadel was reopened to the public in 2015, after 17 years of renovation work (with European funds). You can walk around it, inside and out, visit the rich Museum of the City, attend spectacular medieval festivals, even stay in the new Hotel Cetate (Hotel Cittadella) carved out of a bastion.
