The key to understanding the politics of Britain’s new king, Charles III, lies in Transylvania. Anyone interested in architecture in the United Kingdom since the 1980s has had to reckon with the activities of the then Prince of Wales, which have included books, a TV series, and even an entire town, Poundbury in Dorset, designed as a showcase of his ideas. But it is in the eastern Balkans that his personal vision has come closest to fruition.

In 2018, on a trip to Romania, I was tipped off by the urbanist Gruia Badescu that I would find an explanation of Charles’s politics in the western region of the country — the area that was for many centuries part of the Habsburg Empire, but which is best known outside Romania for being the ancestral seat of a (fictional) aristocratic vampire.

Romania was one of the last countries in Europe to industrialize its agriculture. This meant that at the end of the state-socialist period in 1989, large swathes of the country were still farmed without pesticides and machinery. Despite the late dictator Nicolae Ceauçescu’s abortive 1980s attempt to “systematize” the countryside into agri-industrial complexes, many villages and small towns in Transylvania retained their historic appearance, especially those fortified with Gothic watchtowers by Saxon colonists in the late Middle Ages.