Ceahlău

Ceahlău stands more or less alone above the Bistrița, and its shape is the reason it has always been treated as a special case. Hard Cretaceous conglomerates cap a base of marly flysch, and where the cap has broken it leaves vertical walls and isolated towers — Panaghia below the summit ridge, Piatra Lată, Căciula Dorobanțului, the Detunatele — so that the massif reads from a distance as a fortress dropped into the Eastern Carpathians. Protection began in 1955 with a 5,830-hectare scientific research zone, and the national park declared by Legea 5/2000 and delimited in 2003 covers 7,742 hectares, about a quarter of the massif. It is the one Romanian national park that Romsilva does not administer: Consiliul Județean Neamț runs it, through its own directorate, which is the entire explanation for the "twelve of thirteen" that Romsilva publishes.

The summit question has an odd answer. Ocolașul Mare, at 1,907 metres, is the highest point on the mountain — and it lies inside a scientific reserve that visitors may not enter. The peak everyone climbs, everyone photographs and everyone captions as the top of Ceahlău is Toaca, at 1,904, three metres short. A holy mountain whose holiest ground is closed is a fitting arrangement, because the religious layer here is unusually thick. Ceahlău is popularly identified with Kogaionon, the Dacian sacred mountain, though nothing archaeological confirms it. What is documented is that this is the only mountain in Romania with its own feast day: 6 August, the Transfiguration, which puts it in company with Athos and Tabor, and since 2009 the county council has made it an open-gates day with free entry and a service at the hermitage on the plateau. Around that date, at sunrise, the massif throws an enormous pyramidal shadow across the country below.

The best thing in the park was painted rather than built. At Durău, in a church of 1832–35, Nicolae Tonitza obtained permission in 1935 — with Nicolae Iorga's backing at the Commission of Historical Monuments — to decorate the interior in encaustic, hot wax, a technique never previously used in Romania. He began in the summer of 1936 with a group of students from the Iași academy that included the young Corneliu Baba, and finished in 1937. The shepherds in the frescoes wear Moldavian peasant dress.

What's worth knowing before you go

Durău, at around 800 metres on the northwest side, is the arrival village; Izvorul Muntelui on the east has the visitor centre. The nearest railway is Bicaz, the terminus of the line from Bacău through Piatra Neamț, and from there it is road or bus. The DN15 runs along the Bistrița and the Izvorul Muntelui reservoir, the dam and lake of 1960 that fill the valley below the massif.

There is no cable car — Durău has only a short T-bar on Poiana Soarelui — so everything above the villages is on foot. In winter Salvamont routinely closes the Duruitoarea and Poiana Maicilor approaches for ice and avalanche risk, leaving Durău–Fântânele–Dochia and the eastern route from Izvorul Muntelui as the reliable lines; snow lies one to two metres in sheltered ground, markers disappear, and the wind on the plateau regularly runs past seventy kilometres an hour. Cabana Dochia at 1,770 metres is the refuge on top.

One planning note that matters more than any of the above: 6 August is by a wide margin the busiest day of the year on this mountain, with thousands walking up for the service. If the pilgrimage is what you came for, that is the day. If it is not, pick any other.