Jules Verne - 'The Castle in the Carpathians'

'This is not a fantastic story, but a romantic one. Given that it is highly improbable, must we consider it untrue, too? This would be a mistake. We live in a time when anything can happen, we almost have the right to say: a time when everything has already happened. If it is unbelievable today, it might be credible tomorrow, thanks to the scientific resources which constitute the fortune of the future, and thus nobody will consider it as a legend.'

'What a strange grain of the Austrian Empire is this Transylvania, called Erdely in Hungarian, meaning 'the land over the forests'! It borders Hungary on the North, Wallachia on the South and Moldavia on the West.

Stretching for 60,000 square km, that is 6 million hectares - approximately one nineth of France's territory, it is a kind of Switzerland, but one and a half its size, without being more populated. With plateaux good for crops, rich grazing fields, freakishly created valleys, harsh peaks, striped by the ramifications of plutonic origins of the Carpathians, Transylvania is wrinkled by numerous water flows which enrich the Tisa and the proud Danube the Iron Gates of which, some miles towards South, close the pass of the Balkans on the border between Hungary and the Ottoman Empire.

This is what the ancient land of the Dacians looks like, the land which was conquered by Traian in the first century of the Christian era. The independence which the country enjoyed under the rule of Ioan Zapolya and who annexed it to Austria. But irrespective of its destiny, it remained the common land of different peoples which came into without mingling, Wallahians or Romanians, Hungarians, Gypsies, Szeckles and Transylvanian Saxons, whom time and circumstances will Magyarize for the benefit of Transylvanian unity'

Postface by Vladimir Colin

'This is Jules Verne' renowned novel which made the coal fields between 'the two Jiu rivers' and the people living there well-known, maybe even more than the famous works of Elisee Reclus and Gerando, it contributed in a decisive way to the creation of a romantic aura around the Carpathian region and drew Europe's attention not only to the beauty of the legendary landscape, but also to the national drama that took place in the last century in Transylvania

The echo of the novel, surprisingly strong among its contemporaries, seems diminished today. Could it be that this 'story', as Verne modestly calls it, has grown old faster than so many of his works?.... Everything that could have seemed ' improbable' in the events narrated in 1892, when 'the Castle in the Carpathians' was printed and ' exactly in one of the last years of the 19 th century', when these events happened, in 1967 they become not only credible but really ordinary, precisely due to those ' scientific resources' called forth by Jules Verne and which do not constitute for a long time now the 'trousseau of the future', but the inheritance of the past....

What still has not disappeared for the readers all over the world is the exotic perfume, the local color, the charm of remote Transylvania, this province of ' Far Europe' as Jules Verne calls it using a phrase meant to suggest the distance called to mind by the Far East. Alas! this charm disappears for those who know better than him the places, habits and life of the people in the Jiu Valley. In our case the magic of the exotism cannot operate'.