The sad castle at Campina

There are many stories that we did not manage to tell about. Here is one of them that might be interesting, and a tourist attraction too.The story of Iulia Hasdeu’s castle at Campina is one of the most mysterious (and, by me, saddest) true legends in this part of the country.Iulia had been an “enfant prodige”: she had finished secondary school as she was 8, high school when she was 11. By that time she already spoke three foreign languages, wrote poems and plays. She studied then at the Conservatory in Bucharest and was admitted at Sorbonne when she was 16. She mastered Greek and Latin and was advancing in her studies of philosophy, history and philology. Iulia was preparing to pass her examination for a doctor’s degree, with a difficult topic: “The Unwritten Literature and Philosophy of the Romanian People: Metaphysics, Logic, Psychology, Ethics”. She was to become, at the age of 20, the first woman at the Sorbonne to take the Arts degree. To all this we should add that she had a wonderful voice that she cultivated taking canto lessons and her talent as a pianist was remarkable. She also had great painting skills. Unfortunately, she got ill with tuberculosis and died as she was just 19, in 1888.Her father, Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu, a writer, playwright, historian, and a great scholar, gave up his huge work Etymologicum Magnum Romaniae, which was planned to be the biggest Romanian dictionary ever, and dedicated himself entirely to the communication with his dead daughter, by means of spiritualism (if this is the right term). During a talk he had with her spirit, he was suggested a way to keep in touch with her, and according to him, she gave him the plans for building a mysterious castle at Campina, a town on the way to Sinaia. Actually, it’s not a big castle, more like a strange house, even more peculiar inside than outside, built with a lot of symbolic architectural elements and based on the numbers 3 and 7. The castle has three entrances, two secondary ones and a main sliding stone entrance, with a big eye above and two Sphinx statues on the sides.

The castle is now a museum, very well kept and with a lot of explanations, and the audio-guide’s explanations may make the hairs on the back of your neck stand. The most interesting things to see are the donjon, with the “Graal” and the roof window that allows the sunlight to fall on the head of Iulia’s statue, the room with no windows where he took photos of Iulia’s spirit, the parallel mirrors in every room (symbolizing a never-ending number of existences), and of course a lot of her objects and photos.
The dwellers of the town were so impressed with Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu’s suffering that they even began believing in the ghost’s existence and there were stories about Iulia playing the piano at night in her father’s applauses, or a silhouette wearing a white dress and daisies in her hair walking on the terraces. The stories are dead now, as is Iulia, but you cannot help feeling sorry for her and her father, two beautiful minds who lost the battle.