Cantacuzino Castle

Listen first. Somewhere below the terrace, water is falling over stone. The air here smells of pine and wet moss, even on a warm day. Ahead of you, steep grey walls rise out of the Bucegi Mountains, close enough to feel cold. Under your feet the gravel shifts and crunches. And in front of you stands a house of pale stone and dark timber. It looks less like a fortress and more like a mansion that decided to wear armour. Welcome to Cantacuzino Castle, above the town of Bușteni.

You are standing in the Prahova Valley. This narrow corridor of road and railway climbs from the plains of Wallachia, the old southern principality of Romania, up into the Carpathians. For more than a century, wealthy Romanians came here to escape the summer heat of Bucharest. Royal summer residences rose a little further up the valley, in Sinaia. So did the villas of bankers, ministers and old aristocratic families. This castle is one of the grandest traces of that time, when the mountains became the place to be seen.

The man behind it was Prince Gheorghe Grigore Cantacuzino. He was one of the richest people in the country, and he served more than once as prime minister. His fortune was so famous that people gave him a nickname — the Nabob. The word comes from the title of Mughal-era governors in India, and in Europe it came to mean a man of almost unimaginable wealth. Building a mountain palace was, for the Nabob, a natural thing to do.

The castle was completed in the early twentieth century, around 1911. The prince did not enjoy it for long. He died only a few years later, so he barely lived in the house he had imagined. That is the first quiet irony of this place. It was designed as a statement of permanence, of a family settled on its land forever. Yet its builder had very little time inside these walls.

Now look carefully at the architecture. This is not a copy of a French château or a German castle. It belongs to what is called the Neo-Romanian style. Around the turn of the twentieth century, Romanian architects wanted a national look of their own. They borrowed from the country's old monasteries and boyar houses, the homes of the traditional landed nobility. You can see it in the carved stone around the windows. You can see it in the arched loggias and the heavy, overhanging wooden roofs.

The architect usually named for this building is Grigore Cerchez, one of the leading figures of that national style. Notice how the materials work together. Rough local stone forms the base, so the house seems to grow out of the slope. Above it, lighter walls and timber details soften the shape. The towers are not really defensive. They are there to frame the views and to signal status. A castle, in this case, is more of a costume than a military plan.

The Cantacuzino family was very proud of its ancestry. They traced their line back to the Byzantine world, to the Kantakouzenos family of Constantinople, which once gave an emperor to that empire. Whether every link in that chain is solid is a matter for genealogists. But the family believed it, and the house shows it. Inside, look for coats of arms on display. Heraldry, the old language of family symbols, was a way of saying who you were before you spoke a word.

Here is something many visitors walk past. The interior is not only about grand rooms. Pay attention to the woodwork, the carved ceilings, the fireplaces, and the stained glass where the light falls through it. These are the details that tell you the money was spent slowly and with care. Stand still in one of the main rooms for a moment. Notice how the windows are placed. Many of them point straight at the mountains, as if the landscape were a painting hung on the wall.

The twentieth century was not gentle with Romania's aristocratic houses. After the Second World War, the communist state took over private estates across the country. Properties like this one were turned to state uses, and the old owners lost them. The castle went through decades far removed from the life of a princely family. Only much later was it restored and opened to visitors. That long gap is worth remembering as you look at the polished rooms today.

And now for a surprise that brings this place right up to the present. If the tower and courtyard look strangely familiar, there is a reason. The castle appeared on screen in the Netflix series Wednesday. It stood in for parts of Nevermore Academy, the gothic school in that story. Since then, a new kind of visitor has arrived in Bușteni. Some come for Romanian history. Others come to stand where a television character once walked. Both groups end up on the same terrace.

Step outside into the gardens. This is where the sound you heard at the start comes from. Water runs through the grounds in small falls and channels, past rockwork and shaded corners. On a misty morning, the gardens feel almost theatrical, with stone, fern and spray blending together. On a clear afternoon, they feel open and bright. Find a spot near the water and simply listen. The mountains carry sound a long way here, and the town below can seem very far off.

Now turn and look across the valley. The great cliffs opposite belong to the Bucegi massif. On one of the high summits, Caraiman, a large cross stands as a memorial to Romanian soldiers of the First World War. On a clear day you can pick it out against the sky. It is a reminder that this valley was not always a place of holidays. During that war, fighting reached these mountains. The calm view in front of you has heavier memories behind it.

There is one more detail worth noticing. The castle sits a little above the town, on a slope. That position was deliberate. From the terrace, the prince could look down on the valley and across at the peaks, while the house itself stayed half hidden among the trees. It is a building that wanted to see more than to be seen. Even today, many people driving through Bușteni along the main road never realise how close they are.

Before you leave, take one last look. Look at the stone base, the carved windows, the timber roofs against the dark green of the forest. Listen again for the water in the garden. A prince built this house to last for generations, and he barely lived to see it. Empires, wars and governments came and went. Now it belongs, in a sense, to everyone standing on this gravel. As you walk back down toward the town, glance over your shoulder. The towers will slip into the trees sooner than you expect.