HUNEDOARA
(Vajdahunyad/Eisenmarkt), 16km south of Deva, would be dismissed as an ugly, smoggy, industrial town were it not also the site of
Corvin Castle
, the greatest fortress in Romania (Tues-Sun 9am-5pm). The travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor found its appearance "so fantastic and theatrical that, at first glance, it looks totally unreal". It's moated to a depth of 30m and approached by a narrow bridge upheld by tall stone piers, terminating beneath a mighty barbican, its roof bristling with spikes, overlooked by multitudes of towers, "some square and some round and all of them frilled with machicolations". Founded during the fourteenth century and rebuilt in 1453 by Iancu de Hunedoara, with a Renaissance-style wing added by his son, Mátyás Corvinus, and Baroque additions by Gabriel Bethlen in the seventeenth century, it was extensively (and tastefully) restored between 1965 and 1970. Within, the castle is an extravaganza of galleries, spiral stairways and Gothic vaulting, with an impregnable donjon and a Knights' Hall with rose-coloured marble pillars.
The castle's
museum
relates the achievements of
Iancu de Hunedoara
, the warlord known in Hungarian as János Hunyadi. Legend has it that Hunyadi was the illegitimate son of King Sigismund, who gave the castle to Hunyadi's nominal father, Voicu, a Romanian noble, in 1409. Hunyadi, the "White Knight", rose largely by his own efforts, winning victory after victory against the Turks, and devastatingly routing them beneath the walls of Belgrade in 1456. Appointed voivode of Transylvania in 1441, Hunyadi later became regent of Hungary and a kingmaker (responsible for the overthrow of Vlad Dracul and the coronation of the Impaler), while his own son, Mátyás Corvinus, rose to be one of Hungary's greatest kings.
