Poenari Castle

A stronghold held this peak above the Argeș canyon for two centuries before Vlad the Impaler took an interest in it. The Wallachians raised a castle near the spot at the beginning of the 13th century, known as Castle Argeș, and by the mid-14th century it had become the main citadel of the Basarab dynasty. Romanian tradition holds that the earliest work here, in the time of Negru Vodă, amounted to a single tower. Over the following decades both the name and the occupants changed several times, until the place was abandoned and left in ruins.

The mountain has long been linked, though never firmly, to the fighting Nicolae Iorga named the Battle of Posada, fought between 9 and 12 November 1330 and marking Wallachia's emancipation from the Hungarian crown. Charles Robert of Anjou had come to punish his former vassal Basarab I, who since 1327 had refused to pay his tribute, and was beaten as he withdrew. The Vienna Illuminated Chronicle records the defeat without naming the ground; a document of Sigismund of Luxembourg from 1395 places such a fight on the ridges of the mountains, at what ordinary local speech called a posada, among narrow passes and paths squeezed between great thickets. Posada is a common noun for a mountain pass, and which pass it was is not known.

In 1459 Vlad the Impaler saw what a second castle on that rock could do for him, and rebuilt it with the labour of the Wallachian boyars he had arrested and driven up to the site. He rebuilt the former Castle Argeș on the left side of the river using stone from the older Castle Poenari, which stood on the right bank and somewhat lower, and the single tower of tradition grew towers, walls and outbuildings around it. The result was one of his main fortresses, a secondary residence held as a fortified post against the Ottomans, and a document issued by the Hungarian king Ladislaus V the Posthumous names the citadel.

Much of the defence was done by the ground itself. The citadel sits roughly 400 metres above the floor of the valley, elongated in plan, with five towers — four round and one prismatic — behind walls two to three metres thick.

The story most often told of Poenari has Vlad pursued by Turkish troops and escaping into the citadel after shoeing his horses with the shoes reversed, so that the tracks he left behind pointed the wrong way.

Under communism the ruin gathered a second body of stories from foreign visitors who were sometimes allowed to spend a night inside it. One of them, the American writer Vincent Lee Hillyer, spent a night there in 1969 and afterwards published an account of cold, sleeplessness and unexplained bites that has been repeated in most popular writing about the ruin since.

The fortress remained in use for many years after Vlad's death in 1476, but was abandoned again in the first half of the 16th century and lay in ruins by the 17th.

On 13 January 1913 an earthquake set off a landslide that brought parts of the castle down into the river below. Further earthquakes in 1940 and 1977 caused more damage. The walls and towers were partly consolidated and still stand, and since 2009 the site has been administered by the Argeș County Museum; visitors reach it by climbing 1,480 concrete stairs.

In 1906 a smaller replica of Poenari was built in Carol Park in Bucharest for the Romanian General Exhibition, and it is one of the few structures from that exhibition still standing in the park. It now houses the National Office for the Cult of Heroes and opens to the public twice a year: on Heroes' Day, which in Romania falls on Ascension Day, and on the Romanian Army's national day, 25 October.