Sibiu's Old Town organizes itself around three connected squares, each with a distinct character. Piata Mare, the Great Square, is the grandest -- anchored by the Roman Catholic Cathedral and lined with Baroque facades that were scrubbed and restored for Sibiu's year as European Capital of Culture in 2007. Piata Mica, the Little Square, is where the cafes and bars cluster, their tables spilling out onto cobblestones under parasols. Piata Huet is the quietest and the oldest, a Gothic enclosure dominated by the Lutheran Cathedral and its 73-meter steeple. The squares connect through passageways and narrow streets, with the Council Tower -- Turnul Sfatului -- marking the transition between the Great and Little squares. Below the Upper Town, stairways and cobbled ramps descend into the Lower Town, where the atmosphere shifts from civic grandeur to residential charm. The Citadel Walls survive along the southern edge, their towers and bastions forming a boundary beyond which the modern city begins -- and the medieval spell breaks.

The Transylvanian Saxons who built Sibiu also settled the surrounding countryside, and when Ottoman and Tatar raids threatened in the 15th and 16th centuries, they did something unusual: instead of building castles, they fortified their churches. The result is a constellation of fortified churches scattered through the villages around Mediaș and the Târnava valleys, many of them UNESCO World Heritage sites. Biertan and Valea Viilor are the most celebrated, their defensive walls and watchtowers encircling modest churches with a determination that seems outsized for their setting. These villages are within easy cycling distance of Sibiu, though the main roads are busy enough that combining a bicycle with a train to Mediaș is the smarter option. The fortified churches are Transylvania's most distinctive architectural contribution -- buildings that served simultaneously as houses of worship and last-resort fortresses.

Transylvanian food is not delicate. Ciorbă, a sour soup loaded with meat or vegetables, arrives in portions meant to sustain people through Carpathian winters. Sarmale -- cabbage leaves stuffed with seasoned pork and rice -- come in heaps alongside mămăligă, the Romanian polenta that appears at nearly every meal. The restaurants around Piata Mica serve these dishes at prices that startle Western visitors: a full dinner for two with drinks rarely exceeds 30 euros. The quality is genuine rather than touristic, though vegetarians will need to ask careful questions in a culinary tradition built around pork, game, and dairy. A local oddity worth seeking out is the "meter of beer" -- exactly what it sounds like, a wooden rack holding an improbable length of small glasses, served in pubs that have been pouring drinks in these same rooms since the buildings were new.

Five kilometers south of the city center, the ASTRA Museum of Traditional Folk Civilization is Sibiu's one genuinely essential museum -- an open-air collection of traditional buildings, workshops, and farmsteads gathered from across Romania. It functions as a skansen, preserving a way of rural life that is disappearing but not yet gone. The museum is the starting point for a drive that reveals Transylvania at its most atmospheric. Continuing south through the village of Rășinari, the road winds through countryside where horse-drawn carts still share the pavement with automobiles, past Cisnădioara and Cisnădie and eventually up to the ski resort of Păltiниș. Nearby, Ocna Sibiului offers salt lakes formed by the flooding of ancient mines -- some of them utterly black and opaque, their waters dense with dissolved salt. The region around Sibiu is not scenery to be photographed from a car window. It demands stopping, walking, and lingering.