Timiș

The centre is organised around three linked public spaces and walking between them takes twenty minutes. Union Square is the grandest — a very large rectangle of pastel baroque and Secession facades with a monumental Roman Catholic cathedral at one end and a Serbian Orthodox cathedral facing it across the paving, a juxtaposition that tells you most of what you need to know about the Banat's mixed inheritance. Liberty Square sits between the three, smaller and more workaday. Victory Square is the long one, a broad pedestrian avenue running between the opera house and an interwar Orthodox cathedral whose glazed patterned roof is the city's most recognisable silhouette; the terraces along both sides of it are where Timișoara sits in the evening. What ties it together is the building stock. This is one of the densest concentrations of Secession architecture anywhere outside Vienna and Budapest — hundreds of protected buildings, floral ironwork, moulded facades, tiled details — and a sustained restoration programme has brought a great deal of it back from a genuinely poor state, with plenty still visibly waiting its turn. The contrast between a restored facade and its unrestored neighbour is the honest texture of the city.

The river Bega runs through the city as a canal, engineered in the eighteenth century when the surrounding marshes were drained, and it gives Timișoara something no other Romanian city has: a continuous green corridor of parks, tree-lined embankments and cycle paths through the middle of it, with small water taxis running as public transport along the water. On a warm evening the banks are the city's living room. The parks themselves are numerous and well kept — a botanical park, a rose park, and a chain of green spaces that make this the greenest large city in the country. The other local specialism is being first. Timișoara was among the earliest cities in Europe, and reportedly the first in mainland Europe, to introduce electric public street lighting in the 1880s; it had horse-drawn then electric trams early; it drained its marshes and built its canal well ahead of the region. None of this is monumental and all of it is quietly present in how the city works. There is a large castle-museum in the centre covering the Banat's history, an art museum in a baroque palace on Union Square, and a village museum on the outskirts in the same tradition as the capital's.

The food here is the most central European in Romania and the difference from the rest of the country is noticeable within a meal. There is more baking, more pastry and more use of the oven; goulash-type stews and paprika appear; there is a strong café-and-cake habit inherited from the Austro-Hungarian side of the city's history, and coffee houses are taken more seriously than anywhere else in the country. Serbian and Hungarian influence sits alongside Romanian and, historically, Swabian German cooking, and the result is a table that is recognisably its own. The food guide sets the Banat out as one of the country's four regional kitchens and covers what to order; the point standing here is simply that a traveller who has eaten their way through Transylvania and Moldavia will find this the biggest single shift. The city also has the most developed independent café and craft-beer scene outside Bucharest, and the terraces along Victory Square are the obvious place to test it.

This is the practical argument for the county, and it is a strong one: Timișoara has an international airport with a reasonable spread of European routes, and it sits in the far west of the country — so arriving or leaving here removes a very long internal leg for anyone whose trip is not centred on Bucharest. The transport guide makes the general case for checking the regional airports before defaulting to the capital, and this is the clearest instance of it. The city is also within easy reach of both the Serbian and Hungarian borders, which makes it a natural entry or exit point for a wider regional trip rather than a Romania-only one. Two nights is right: the squares, the Secession streets and the river in the first, and a slower second for the museums, the parks and the eating. On timing, spring and early autumn are best — the plain is hot and heavy in high summer and flat winters here are grey. The county beyond the city is agricultural and unhurried, with thermal spa towns and the Serbian frontier, and it rewards a drive rather than a plan.