László Varga

…well the ruins of it actually. But still it was an interesting place to visit. And again I have begun talking about the subject, without first presenting it. So: what is the subject? The subject is the Bánffy Castle from Bonchida, a small village near Cluj. The construction of the castle started in 1437 and was finished in 1543, but it was still standing until WWII. The castle had a mixture of renaissance and baroque style. It was owned by the Bánffy family who also had a palace in Cluj.

So, how to get there? Well if one starts off from Cluj, then the main road towards Gherla has to be taken. One has to pass Jucu (Nokia) village and from then it is basically a straight road until the crossing of the entry road to Bonchida (Bontida). At the entry to the village there is a huge map of the area and one can easily spot where the castle is. Now this was a nice surprise: at last something that is easily found. The entry fee is 2RON (50 cents), so it is a bargain 😉

A lot of people do not know about the castle, simply because it does not mean much to the local population and it’s touristic potential is barely being scratched. But there is hope: the castle is being slowly restored after signing an agreement between the Romanian Ministry of Culture and “Institute of Historic Building Conservation” from Great Britain and The Office for Hungarian Cultural Heritage Protection (I hope I translated it right). The restoration works have been under the high patronage of Prince Charles of Wales who has visited a number of times the construction works.

What is sad: this is only one of the numerous castles and fortresses which have been destroyed after WWII and under the period of the communism. I have visited several countries and admired the abundance of cultural heritage sites. These are the backbones and pride of a society: something to fight for, something what gives you the necessary power to move on. Much of this is completely lost in our country. We have a lot to work until we can get things right, but as this example shows, nothing is lost forever…

Picasa photos here.

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I find myself in the same situation as I was at the time I started to write about my travel experiences. Again, I could not find too much information about the place we wanted to visit on the internet. Or… I must correct myself, I found something, but of course it was wrong… from two points of view: the opening hours of the place we wanted to visit were wrong (due to which we actually changed the day of visit) and the entry price was wrong. What was this place? It was the Salt Mine of Turda (a nearby town), which can be visited by tourists. The mine has undergone recently an extensive renovation process making it more accessible for visitors of all ages, so we said we have to visit, to see how it looks like.

Yesterday at around 13:00 we had the idea of doing this short trip. On the internet I have found a timetable saying, that the mine is open from 9:00 to 13:30, so we postponed the trip to today. We started off at 10:00 to get there on time. One little thing: look for small indicators saying “Salina Turda” they forgot to mark it on the big indicators (good thing they didn’t put out an A4 and hand-written the directions on it 😉 ). Anyway we arrived there safely and relatively easily (the short road connecting the main road to the mine which is full of holes can be ignored).

We got to the ticket-office, where to my surprise I saw indications in three languages (wow): Romanian, English and Hungarian (a lot of Hungarian tourists by the way). On one of these indicators there was also a time-table: the mine is open between 9:00 and 15:00 (so much for the accurateness of what I have found on the net). Anyway we payed the entry price of 15RON (€3.65), contrary to the internet price of 10RON and we went in. The whole visit started with a quite long walk through an entirely lit tunnel until we arrived to the actual entrance to the mine. From here a larger corridor lead us to separate chambers. Nothing spectacular there. There was however, a small, wooden staircase leading downstairs: now don’t miss that, that IS the actual entrance into one of the modernized chambers (photo below).

The chamber itself is huge: it even has it’s own lake on which people can go row boating. There is a mini-football field a small theater even a ferry’s wheel (which was stopped at the time of our visit). The view of the walls was breathtaking. The sheer size of them and the stalactite-like formations of salt give the place a unique feeling. Even the bottom is filled with salty-sand which is sparkling in the internal lighting of the place. Amongst all this salt, we met a few tourists, who have not been able to see the salt: “Where f…k is the salt? All I can see is big gray walls”.

It is really hard to write about it. One most go see. It has a little bit of ‘Sci-fi’ feeling: at first glance I thought I was in a secret underground facility where spacecrafts are built 🙂 . The whole trip lasted between 90 and 120 minutes (at the entrance it says it takes 1:30h).

Here are some photos I took.

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