Travel Advisor
Tony Denesa
From a passion for travel to advising on it full time — and a city in the Oltenian plain that keeps turning out to be better than its reputation.
How this started
It started with an argument. Someone told me Craiova was a city you drive through on the way to somewhere else, and I had no evidence to the contrary, which annoyed me enough to go.
The first visit was in February, which is the wrong month and therefore the right test. The centre was grey, the fog sat on the plain for two days, and almost nothing was open that did not need to be. What was open was the Art Museum, and in a room on the first floor of the Jean Mihail Palace there was a student bust from 1898 and a block of stone from 1907 with two figures barely separated out of it — *Vitellius* and *The Kiss*, nine years apart, by a man who had learned to carve four streets away.
That is not a provincial gallery. That is the beginning of modern sculpture, kept in the city that taught him, and there were six people in the building.
Why I kept coming back
Because the rest of it turned out to be the same shape: better than advertised, and almost undocumented.
Romanescu Park won a gold medal at the Paris Exposition of 1900 and most Romanians could not tell you that. The Christmas market opens a fortnight before everyone else's and almost nobody outside Dolj knows. Târgu Jiu, with Brâncuși's ensemble on the UNESCO list since 2024, is an hour and fifty minutes up the road and free at any hour.
The gap between what is here and what is written about it is the largest I have found anywhere in Romania. That gap is what this site is for.
How I work
Three rules, and they are the reason some of these pages say less than the competition rather than more.
Measured, not estimated. Every distance and driving time in the Oltenia section I measured myself, and each one carries the date I measured it.
Sourced, or declared missing. Prices and opening hours appear only with a source and a date. Where no trustworthy source exists — and in Oltenia that is most of the time, because the cave at Baia de Fier publishes its timetable as a scanned image and Hurezi monastery's official page carries a placeholder email — the page says so and gives you the phone number instead. A confident wrong number is worse than an honest gap.
Verdicts, not lists. If three things in a city are worth travelling for and nine are not, the page says which three. Ranking everything equally is the same as ranking nothing.
What I will not do
Tell you a place is unmissable because an affiliate link points at it. Where a booking link on this site earns a commission it is marked, and the business's own site and phone number stay next to it. That is in the terms, and it is the arrangement I would want as a reader.
