This article is a selection from the July/August issue of Smithsonian magazine Buy Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $12 Later in his life, he was known for chasing villagers from his estate with a pistol. He kept up years-long correspondences with famous and learned men all across Europe. Along with a younger man whom he called his secretary, he traversed swaths of the Balkans on motorcycle. It was said that he would disappear for months at a time only to arrive for polite tea at posh European hotels dressed as a peasant. Once, he was nearly crowned King of Albania. He crossed the Albanian Alps on foot and befriended local mountain men, sometimes involving himself in their tribal feuds. A wild genius with a flair for the dandyish and the dramatic, he was an explorer, spy, polyglot and master of disguise. Baron Nopcsa was a notorious figure in his day. The castle was once the family home of Baron Franz Nopcsa von Felso-Szilvas, an Austro-Hungarian aristocrat born in 1877. In the corner, an ornate wrought-iron spiral staircase leads up to nowhere, and I see light coming through a hole in the roof. “I like to imagine him here reading,” he says. We come into what was once a stately library. The walls are pockmarked with holes where treasure seekers, hearing a legend of hidden gold inside, have punched through. They scamper over the rubble one stops to pee on a pile of debris.
It’s clear that this crumbling, abandoned castle is their home.
“I think so.” A dog with matted fur follows us, along with her lame puppy. Others are detached on one side and hang down precariously. Two huge ceiling beams have fallen and are lying askew on the landing. Swallows fly through where the panes once were and sunshine pours down on stairs now covered in rubble. If it weren’t for the window, I wouldn’t recognize it at all. That is nothing like what I find before me. I’ve seen the entryway in old photographs-Persian rugs, a piano, a grand staircase lit by a round, cathedral-like window of leaded glass. Sacel Castle, in a part of Transylvania known locally as the Land of Hateg, is not open to the public, but Dacian Muntean, my guide, has arranged for us to get in.
Long known as Sacel, the castle was recently renamed for Baron Franz Nopcsa, a pioneering 19th-century dinosaur expert and geologist who spent his childhood years there.