Last Updated: May 2026
The day before we had toured the Palace of the Parliament in Bucharest — a building designed to project absolute power at enormous human cost. On our second day from Giurgiu, we drove north of the city toward Snagov Lake for something entirely different: an elegant royal lakeside palace, a medieval island monastery, and one of the most persistent legends in Romanian history. Sandy and I had barely recovered from Ceaușescu’s colossus when the pine trees opened up and there was the lake, calm and silver in the morning light, with a small white church visible on an island in the middle.
