Poenari Castle

Perched on a rocky spur above the Argeș river and reachable only by climbing 1,480 concrete steps — poured in the 1970s along with the Transfăgărășan road — Poenari Castle was the mountain stronghold that Vlad III, the Wallachian prince known as the Impaler, actually used, with a far more genuine claim to "Dracula's castle" than the famous Bran. The Wallachian chronicles say he rebuilt the fortress with forced labour, but it is worth quoting them as written: not disloyal boyars but *orășani*, townspeople of Târgoviște, punished in revenge for an insult to one of the prince's brothers. The legend of the wife who leaps from the tower during the Ottoman siege does not appear in the older sources: in the oldest surviving account, Metropolitan Neofit's note of 1747, the Turks shell the fortress and find it empty, because Vlad had shod his horses backwards and fled. And the river below is the Argeș, not the Râul Doamnei, which runs through a different valley.

Bran sells the legend; Poenari is the rock Vlad Țepeș actually used. The comparison is fair, and it needs one immediate qualification: not a single charter from Vlad's own reign names him here. What Poenari has is archaeology, a chronicle written two centuries later, and a fortress that plainly grew in the fifteenth century. It sits on a spur of Mount Cetățuia, 850 metres up, at the mouth of the Argeș gorge in the commune of Arefu, some 25 km above Curtea de Argeș — and it is not named after the village below it. Căpățâneni is two kilometres away; the fortress took the name of Poienari, a village six kilometres off but older, and one it owned, as a charter granted to the men of Arefu by Mircea Ciobanul on 8 April 1546 records. Under that name it appears in the documents of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and in the chronicles of the seventeenth and eighteenth. The core came first, and it was small. Excavations directed by Gheorghe I. Cantacuzino between 1968 and 1970 found a square tower set straight on the bare rock, 8.15 to 8.50 metres a side on the outside and only 4.30 to 4.60 inside — walls, in other words, thicker than the room they enclosed was wide. It was built of rough stone bound with mortar, divided by timber floors into three storeys (four, according to Maria Ciobanu, Nicolae Moisescu and Radu Ștefan Ciobanu) and roofed with shingle. Cantacuzino dated it to the first half of the fourteenth century, contemporary with Basarab I (1324-1351/52), the founder of Wallachia; the other three authors argued for the end of the thirteenth century or the first decade of the fourteenth. Those same three tested what the tower was for by lighting a torch at night in the bell tower of the church of Sân Nicoară in Curtea de Argeș: the signal was visible from the square tower, and the tower's signal from the church. Poenari was an eye, not a palace. The second phase is the one everyone comes for. No later than the fifteenth century, and attributed to Vlad Țepeș, a curtain wall of almost sixty metres was thrown around the old tower, which became the keep; the enclosure it defines is today ten to fifteen metres wide, and three semicircular towers were built against its southern side. The technique is Byzantine: dressed stone faces filled with rubble core and stiffened with a grid of timbers laid lengthwise and across. Inside, partly collapsed, is a chamber of roughly four by three metres cut into the rock — the cistern, coated on walls and floor with a thick red mortar render that made it watertight, again a Byzantine method. The everyday debris from those trenches still serves Romanian archaeology as a dating benchmark: collared cooking-pot rims of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a disc stove-tile of the fifteenth or sixteenth, iron scrapers of the kind used to clean wax off candlesticks. What Poenari did for a living is better documented than its most famous owner. It sheltered princes, it held the country's treasury, and it was a prison for boyars convicted of hiclenie, treason against the prince. One inmate is known by name: Milea, who had tried to seize the throne from Vlad Călugărul and whose father bought his release by giving half of Topoloveni to the monastery of Nucet — a transaction recorded in a document of Petru cel Tânăr dated 5 April 1567. That monastery's founder was Gherghina, castellan of Poenari from 15 December 1501 to December 1507, brother of Lady Rada and a boyar of Radu cel Mare; that a man of his rank was given the command says what the place was worth. Before him came Ratea, the first castellan on record, in July 1481, and after him Danciu, in May 1510. By then the fortress had reached foreign eyes: Sebastian Compagni of Ferrara, in his Geografia of 1509, listed Poenari among the most important places of Wallachia, raised on a sharp rock, where the money of the prince of the country is kept. Then it was bargained away. In 1522 Radu de la Afumați, son-in-law and successor of Neagoe Basarab, handed the fortress to John Zápolya, king of Hungary, in exchange for the Transylvanian estates of Vințu de Jos and Vurpăr; the fourteenth of his twenty battles was fought at Poenari itself between June and October of that year. Hungarian castellans followed — Thoma Mysky, Nicolae Thomory, Peter Off — and in 1526, the year of Mohács, the king asked the burghers of Brașov for 400 florins so as not to lose the place. On 2 January 1529 Radu de la Afumați was murdered at Râmnicu Vâlcea by a pro-Ottoman boyar faction; the commander of Poenari died in the same plot, the treaty collapsed and the garrison withdrew. The end was quiet. Romanian castellans reappear — Diicul and Stan in 1534, Drăghici from December of that year, Milco on 15 September 1560 — but in 1542-43 Radu Paisie gave the villages of Poienari, Cheieni and Căpățâneni away to his treasurer, which is what a ruler does with land he no longer needs to garrison. After that, nothing. Archaeological material stops in the second half of the sixteenth century and the documents stop with it: Poenari was abandoned, and possibly slighted, like most Wallachian fortresses once Ottoman control tightened. It came back four centuries later, and by accident. Cantacuzino's excavations coincided with the preparations for the Transfăgărășan, the strategic mountain road driven through the Făgăraș between 1970 and 1974, which passes at the foot of the crag. The authorities took the opportunity to make the climb possible for visitors and poured a concrete staircase of 1,480 steps up the wooded slope. By 2019 Poenari was taking about 100,000 visitors a year.

Poenari stands above Căpățânenii Pământeni, in the commune of Arefu, Argeș county, right beside the DN7C — the Transfăgărășan — a few kilometres below the Vidraru dam, at the entrance to the Argeș gorge and about 25 km above Curtea de Argeș. The monument belongs to Argeș County Council and is run by the Argeș County Museum (0248 212 561, [email protected]). It opens daily from 10:00 to 18:00, with the last group starting the climb at 17:00. Admission is 30 lei for adults and 20 lei for pupils, students and pensioners; children under three, under-18s with disabilities or in care, war veterans, adults with a severe disability and their companion, and ICOM/ICOMOS members enter free. The panoramic binoculars at the top take a 0.50-lei token for thirty seconds. Tickets are sold on site or online through the ARGES TOURIST PASS. Then there is the climb, and it is the whole visit: 1,480 concrete steps up a beech slope, about an hour of them. There is no lift and no cable car — a feasibility study for one was announced in 2019, budgeted at 3 million lei, and nothing was built — so the site is not wheelchair accessible and there is no alternative route. When it reopened, the Ministry of Culture advised proper equipment and plenty of enthusiasm, which is the correct advice. Bears here are not a marketing device. Staff reported them at the foot of the stairs in 2017, and that was part of the reason the fortress closed at the end of March 2019. The restoration installed an electric fence, lighting, CCTV along the access route and acoustic noise generators on the path — and it was still not enough: on 29 April 2025, a fortnight after reopening, a she-bear denning near the fortress with two cubs broke the fence, and the county council shut the site while the animals were trapped and relocated. Take the staff's instructions seriously, keep to opening hours and do not eat on the steps. Check the state of the works before you travel. On 30 March 2026 an inspection confirmed that about thirty steps needed urgent repair, along with crumbling brickwork in places; the county's vice-president, Marius Nicolaescu, said the fortress would stay open throughout, with 1 August 2026 as the deadline. What waits at the top is ruins and a view: the keep, the sixty-metre curtain, the three semicircular towers and the rock-cut cistern, above the Argeș valley, the Făgăraș range and the Transfăgărășan, with the Vidraru dam and its lake below. Allow two to three hours including the climb, and go up early — there is no shade at the summit.