Sighisoara: The Living Citadel Where Dracula Was Born

In the 12th century, German craftsmen and merchants known as the Transylvanian Saxons climbed a hill in the heart of what is now Romania and built a citadel they called Schaessburg, on the site of an earlier fort recorded as Castrum Sex. Over the next few centuries it grew into a small, fiercely defended trading town on the eastern fringe of Latin Europe, its skyline bristling with towers and its cobbled lanes still lined with the pastel houses of the guildsmen who built them. In 1999 UNESCO inscribed its historic centre as a World Heritage Site, calling it an outstanding testament to the Saxon culture that shaped Transylvania for 850 years.

Sighisoara is not a museum behind glass. It is one of the last inhabited medieval citadels in Europe, a fortified town where people still wake, work and grow old inside the walls. The fortress was once ringed by fourteen towers, and the nine that survive each carry the name of the craft guild that built it, manned it and defended it: the Tailors, the Tinsmiths, the Furriers, the Ropemakers, the Butchers. Defence was a civic duty parcelled out by trade, and the stones still remember whose hammers and needles paid for them.

Crowning it all is the Clock Tower, some 64 metres of stone raised in the 14th century to guard the main gate of the upper town. Its four little corner turrets were no decoration: they signalled that the Town Council held the right to pass its own judgements, up to and including a death sentence. After a catastrophic 1676 fire, when the gunpowder stored in the Tailors' Tower exploded, Austrian craftsmen rebuilt the roof in the Baroque silhouette that survives today.

Behind the tower's faces turn two sets of figurines carved from linden wood. The dial facing the citadel shows Peace with her olive branch and a drummer who beats out the hours; above them Justice and Law stand with scales and sword between angels of Day and Night. The dial over the lower town carries seven pagan deities, one for each day of the week, rotating into view as the days turn. Below, the Scholars' Stairs climb the hill under a wooden roof: a covered tunnel of steps, once around 300 and now 175, built in 1642 so that children and worshippers could reach the school and the 14th-century Church on the Hill without facing the Transylvanian winter.

And then there is the legend that draws the world here. Around 1431, the warlord Vlad II was hosted by the town in a three-storey stone house just steps from the Clock Tower. That same year he was inducted into the Order of the Dragon, a chivalric brotherhood sworn to halt the Ottoman advance, earning him the name Dracul, the Dragon. His son, born in or around Sighisoara, would carry the diminutive: Dracula, son of the Dragon. The world remembers him as Vlad the Impaler, the historical shadow behind Bram Stoker's count. The house still stands, now a restaurant, though historians caution that the precise spot of his birth remains a matter of debate rather than record.