Comărnicel is the name on the map, and the Dacian fortresses of the Orăștie mountains, listed by UNESCO in 1999, are the reason this country matters. Here, in the first century BC and the first century AD, the Dacian kings built stone citadels on mountain tops, with terraces, walls and sacred precincts, the grandest of them Sarmizegetusa Regia, not far to the north-west.
The Dacians were a formidable people who gave Rome a lot of trouble. Their last king, Decebalus, fought Trajan's legions in two wars, in 101 to 102 and again in 105 to 106, and after the second the kingdom was conquered and turned into a Roman province. Trajan's Column in Rome shows these campaigns in a spiral of carved scenes. Roman gold from the mines of Dacia helped to fund the empire for a generation, and the memory of the Dacians has become a central strand of Romanian national identity.
The landscape does the rest. The Șureanu range is a broad, grassy massif cut by forested valleys, with high pastures where shepherds still graze flocks in summer, and the scent of crushed thyme on the air. To the south, beyond Petrila and Petroșani, the Jiu valley is a coal-mining region, with industrial towns tucked among the hills, and farther south rise the high ranges of Retezat and Parâng. The famous Transalpina road, the highest in Romania at over two thousand metres, crosses the Parâng range not far to the east, but it is closed by snow for much of the year, usually opening in early summer, so check before you plan a day around it.
Roads in the area are a mixed lot, some excellent and some patched, with heavy trucks in the Jiu valley and very little traffic on the mountain lanes. Fog and sudden storms are common in the high country, and nights are cold even in July. Fuel is easy to find in Petroșani and Petrila, both towns of tens of thousands, but not in the villages on the slopes. The ride goes on toward Cigmău and the old Roman thermal baths of Germisara, where the Romans dedicated altars to the nymphs of the hot springs, a pleasing contrast to the grim stone of the mountain forts.