Mureș

What separates Sighișoara from the other walled towns of the region is that people still live in it. The citadel is not a preserved shell or a museum quarter — it is a hill town of a few hundred residents with a school, houses, cats on the steps and washing on lines, wrapped in fourteenth-century walls. The clock tower at the entrance is the landmark: painted, roofed in coloured tile, with a mechanism of wooden figures marking the days of the week and a viewing gallery over the roofs. Nine defensive towers survive around the circuit, each historically maintained by a particular guild — the tailors, the tinsmiths, the ropemakers — which tells you how these towns were actually organised. The covered wooden stairway is the other set piece: a roofed staircase of nearly two hundred steps built so that children could reach the school and church on the summit in bad weather, climbing steeply through half-light to a Gothic church and a hillside cemetery with an unexpectedly beautiful view. The lower town below the walls is ordinary and pleasant and almost nobody walks it. A large medieval festival fills the citadel for a weekend each summer, which is either the best or the worst time to come depending on temperament; check before booking either way.

An hour east, the county seat rewards the detour more than almost anything else in central Transylvania. The main square is broad, green and unremarkable, and at one end stand two buildings that are not: a town hall with a slender tower and, beside it, the Palace of Culture, both completed in the early twentieth century in the Hungarian Secession idiom — the central European relative of Art Nouveau. The exterior is striking; the interior is the reason to come. There is a hall of mirrors lined with stained-glass windows illustrating Székely folk ballads, panel by panel, in colours that are startling on a bright day. There is a concert hall with an organ and an acoustic that the city is rightly proud of. There are mosaics, ceramics and ironwork throughout, and the whole thing is visited by a trickle of people rather than a queue. Whether the halls are open varies with what is being staged, so it is worth checking on the day. The city around it is comfortable, green and student-heavy, with a good square-side café culture and — a curiosity worth an hour with children — one of the country's oldest and better-regarded zoos on the hill above, alongside a planetarium.

Somewhere in this county, travelling east, Transylvania stops sounding Romanian. Hungarian is the everyday language of a large part of the population here and further east still, and for a visitor it registers in immediate practical ways: menus arrive in two languages and sometimes three, the pastry counter changes — chimney cake turning on its rollers, strudel, poppy-seed fillings — and the cooking picks up paprika, sour cream and slow-braised meat in a way that the Saxon west does not. Signage is bilingual. Greetings differ. None of this is difficult to navigate, since Romanian is universal as well and English is common enough in the towns, but a visitor who assumes one culinary and linguistic register across Transylvania will be quietly puzzled by the second half of it. Take it as one of the more interesting things about travelling east through this country: the architecture changes from Saxon to Hungarian, the food follows, and the transition happens over about fifty kilometres of the same river valley.

Two more things justify time in this county. Sovata, in the hills to the east, is built around a salt lake with an unusual physical property: fresh rainwater sits on top of dense salt water beneath, and because the fresh layer lets sunlight through but traps the heat below, the water warms in bands and can be markedly hotter a metre down than at the surface. Bathing in it is a strange and genuinely pleasant experience, and the small resort around it has been a spa town for well over a century. Elsewhere, the Târnava valley carries a run of Saxon villages with fortified churches of their own, less visited than the listed pair further south — the Sibiu guide covers the two UNESCO sites in that county, and the ones here are the same tradition without the queue. Castles at Gornești and Brâncovenești add a stop for anyone driving between the two cities. On timing, late spring and early autumn are best; Sighișoara is oppressive in high summer at midday and lovely at seven in the morning. Two nights covers the county comfortably — one for the citadel and one for the palace and the east — and the trip-planning guide places it in the middle of the Transylvanian leg rather than as a stop on the way somewhere.