Cozia

Cozia is often described as a conglomerate mountain and it mostly is not. The massif is built of crystalline rock — the augen gneiss that geologists name after it — with limestone, conglomerate and sandstone only as a subordinate cover, and it is the gneiss that weathers into the serrated towers and bare slabs along the summit ridge. It rises to 1,668 metres at Ciuha Mare and throws ridges out radially from there, hemmed in on the west by the Olt cutting its transverse defile straight through the Southern Carpathians. The park was first proposed in 1966, listed by Legea 5/2000 at 17,100 hectares and delimited in 2003, and it is about ninety-six per cent forest.

That forest is the part most write-ups miss. In July 2017 UNESCO extended the transnational serial site covering Europe's ancient and primeval beech forests, and two components of it lie inside this park: Cozia, at 2,286 hectares, and Lotrișor, at 1,103, with a further 2,408 hectares of buffer. The flora has its own local signature too — Dianthus coziensis, the Cozia carnation, endemic to the massif, and edelweiss growing at altitudes where it has no business being — along with an endemic bush-cricket, Isophya harzi. Bear, wolf and lynx are all present.

The defile below has been a route and a refuge for as long as there have been records, and the buildings show it. Mircea cel Bătrân founded Cozia monastery on the right bank of the Olt and had it consecrated on 18 May 1388; the banded brick and stone and the carved rosettes belong recognisably to the Serbian Morava school, and he is thought to have brought the masons in. He was buried here in 1418 rather than at Curtea de Argeș with his predecessors, and the funerary stone that now covers him was laid in 1938. Beside him lies Doamna Teofana, mother of Mihai Viteazul, who took the veil at Cozia after her son's assassination and died in 1605. Brâncoveanu added the porch in 1706. Up the hill at Turnu, founded in 1676 by a former metropolitan of Wallachia, the hermits' cells are cut directly into the rock and some of them are still there.

What's worth knowing before you go

Călimănești-Căciulata is the gateway spa town, twenty kilometres north of Râmnicu Vâlcea on the DN7/E81 through the defile, and Brezoi at the northern end is where the park administration sits. There is a railway through the gorge — line 201, its mountain section built between 1896 and 1901 through a chain of tunnels, with a station called Cozia — but passenger service on it is thin, so check a current timetable rather than assuming a train.

The summit is only 1,668 metres, so the walking season runs from spring to late autumn; snow sits on the ridge from roughly December to March and the approaches are steep and greasy in the wet. Monastery and spa traffic peaks in summer and around Easter and the feast days, while the mountain above stays quiet. Autumn is the beech season, which is the whole reason the UNESCO forests are here.

Before joining the queue at Mircea's tomb, go and find the bolniță — the little hospital church in the outer courtyard, painted in 1542–43 by a painter named David and his son Raduslav. The murals are older and in better condition than most of what is in the great church, and almost everybody walks straight past them.