The Knights' Hall
Red marble columns carrying a Gothic vault.
Carcea Daniel — CC BY-SA 3.0 ro · Modiga.daria — CC BY-SA 3.0 ro · Christo — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Leontin l — CC BY-SA 4.0
An indirect connection that the marketing overstates. There is no evidence that Vlad III the Impaler was imprisoned here, though the story is told often on tours. What is established is that Matthias Corvinus, the son of the castle's builder, held Vlad in Hungary for years after 1462 — but at Visegrád and Buda, not at Hunedoara. The castle earns a visit on its architecture and the Hunyadi story alone, which is stronger than the legend. Anyone who actually wants Vlad should go to **Poenari Citadel** on the Transfăgărășan, which was his real fortress.
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Corvin Castle at Hunedoara is the largest Gothic castle in Romania and the country's best-known architectural image after the Palace of the Parliament — and it is about as close as a real building gets to the castle of the imagination: red conical towers, a timber bridge on stone piers over a ravine, and walls growing out of rock. It was built by **John Hunyadi** in the middle of the fifteenth century on an older fortification. He was a Hungarian-Romanian commander who held back Ottoman expansion in the Balkans for decades, his best-known victory the relief of Belgrade in 1456. His son Matthias Corvinus became king of Hungary, and the castle takes its name from him. Inside are the **Knights' Hall** with its red columns, the Diet Hall, a fifteenth-century chapel, and towers still carrying their old names. In the courtyard is a **well thirty metres deep** that tradition says three Ottoman prisoners dug on a promise of freedom that was not kept. **About 96 km west of Sibiu, an hour and a half by car** — a full day with the journey.
Red marble columns carrying a Gothic vault.
On stone piers over the ravine at the entrance.
Strada Castelului 1-3, Hunedoara