We loved the time we spent in Istanbul, Turkey, in 2021, but it’s a chaotic, sometimes overwhelming city. So after three months there, we headed somewhere more peaceful: north to Romania.

A friend had mentioned a town called Sibiu, and we decided to give it a try.

But we knew less about this place than usual. I’d seen pictures of some great medieval town squares, and apparently, many of the buildings were famous for their strange dormer windows on sloped rooftops that look like “eyes.”

And Brent was excited because it was in the part of Romania known as Transylvania, and he’s a big dork.

Sibiu has long been a favorite destination for Europeans, especially from nearby countries. But it’s much less well-known to Americans. In fact, in 2024, only 115,000 Americans visited all of Romania.

Spoiler alert: we absolutely fell in love with the place, especially how walkable it is.

Here are all the reasons we loved it:

A fascinating history

As Brent noted, Sibiu is in Romania’s Transylvania region, which is, yes, famous for vampires.

And that’s the last time you’ll read that word in this article. We think it’s the least interesting part about this area of the world — and the people who live here are really sick of that connection too.

The Romans established a fort in the area in the 1st century BC. Transylvania was never a “country” in the modern sense, but rather a semi-independent “principality.” That said, it definitely had — and has — a strong regional culture.

A big part of that culture developed in the 12th century, when the King of Hungary, who ruled the area, invited German-speaking settlers — then known as Saxons — to help protect and develop the region.

The invitation worked, and for hundreds of years, Sibiu — and nearby Brașov and Sighișoara — had a majority-German population that spoke German and identified much more with Germany than with the country in which they lived.

Sibiu still bears a strong German influence, including Lutheran churches, a distinctly medieval German town layout, and Germanic fortifications.

But there aren’t many Germans living in Sibiu now. That’s because after WWII, when Romania fell under Soviet control, many were shipped off to the Soviet Union for, er, slavery. The rest were severely discriminated against.

Germany later paid for some ethnic Germans to move back to Germany. And when communism collapsed in 1989, almost all of the remaining Germans fled the country.

So a city that had once been 70% German — with a peak of 25,000 German residents — has fewer than 1,000 remaining.

But there are plenty of German tourists. In fact, local restaurants are just as likely to have German menus as English ones.

The buildings all have “eyes”

After the German influence, Sibiu may be best known for an architectural quirk on many of its buildings: dormer windows that look like eyes.

In fact, the city has a nickname: the City With Eyes.

And almost everywhere you are in the city, it feels like you’re being watched.

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