Aiud has a split reputation in Romania. For historians it is an old Transylvanian market town on the Mureș with a fortified citadel at its heart and one of the most famous Protestant colleges of the region. For an older generation it means something much darker: the prison on the edge of town, where the communist regime held and broke thousands of political prisoners in the 1950s and 1960s. Both sides of that story are part of the place, and a memorial near the prison remembers the people who died there.
The centre is pleasant and quiet. Inside the old citadel walls stand a Reformed church and a Lutheran church, a reminder of the Hungarian and Saxon communities who built the town, and the Bethlen Gábor College, founded in the seventeenth century and moved here from Alba Iulia, is a handsome building with a long tradition of teaching. The town sits in vineyard country, on the edge of the Târnave wine region, and the slopes around it have been planted with grapes since Roman times, so a glass of local white in the evening is very much in keeping.
West of Aiud the land rises quickly into the Trascău mountains, the limestone outliers of the Apuseni, and that is where the riding gets interesting. Small roads lead up into gorges, past villages like Râmeț with its old monastery tucked under the cliffs, and onward toward Rimetea and the jagged limestone crest of the Piatra Secuiului. The Transapuseana heads west across the mountains toward the gold country around Abrud, with long climbs, forest, high pastures and plenty of corners. Surfaces are a mixed bag, from new asphalt to broken patches, and it is worth riding them with some margin.
Aiud itself is a practical place to start or end a day in the hills. It has fuel on the main road, supermarkets, banks and cafes, and Alba Iulia, the old capital of Transylvania with its huge star-shaped Habsburg fortress, is about half an hour to the south. The Mureș valley can be hot and dusty in high summer, while the mountains to the west stay cooler, so a morning start and an afternoon in the hills makes sense. Watch for horse carts on the side roads, and for local police with radar guns on the main road through town.