Charles III in the footsteps of his ancestor. The British sovereign has decided to take a trip to Romania, a country he particularly likes to regularly spend time there – he was still there in May 2022 to visit a center for Ukrainian refugees. This is a private trip, during which he will still be received by the Romanian president, but the monarch should then quickly reach the residence he owns in Viscri, a typical village in Transylvania, with its church. fortified and its cobbled streets. There he owns a typical farmhouse with colorful walls, bought and restored in the 2000s, which serves him both as an occasional home and as the headquarters for his foundation aimed at preserving Romania’s agricultural, heritage and artisanal heritage.
Charles discovered the country at the end of the 1990s, and fell in love immediately. He likes everything here: the unspoiled nature, the fields covered with flowers in spring, the friendliness of the inhabitants, the old buildings and the ancestral culture of this part of central Europe. Not to mention his blood ties with the most famous of the Carpathian princes, the famous Vlad III the Impaler, nicknamed Draculea.
The ancestor is certainly a little cumbersome, but does not frighten Charles III, who is amused by this relationship. “My family tree shows that I am a descendant of Vlad the Impaler, so I have ties to Romania,” he once explained in a documentary aired on the Travel Channel. He would indeed descend from the Romanian voivode through his great-grandmother Queen Mary, wife of George V, herself the granddaughter of a countess of Transylvania of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Ties and affection for the country that led Charles to buy several properties in the country, including a house in Zalanpatak, a remote town in the Carpathians, as well as in Breb, in the north of the country, near the border with Ukraine. “Romania appeals to him mainly for its rural side and, let’s face it, a bit archaic, with bears in the forests and oxen pulling plows, as if the tractor and the combine harvester had not yet been invented” , explains journalist Michel Faure in his biography published by L’Archipel. “It is this pure rurality without chemistry, even if it is a little medieval, that upsets the heart of the prince, cantor of Harmony. »
