A six-hour-40-minute drive or three hour flight from Bucharest, the country’s third largest city, in the central west has some 306,000 and traces its origins to a settlement of the Indo-European Bronze-Age Dacian people who inhabited this area in the 8th-7th centuries BCE – although as it was founded in 1315 on the site of an ancient Roman fortress and surrounding swampland. Much more recently, this was the place where the popular revolt which eventually toppled the 24-year Communist dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu got its start in 1989.

Read more about this and this year's two other capitals in my post The 3 European Capitals of Culture for 2023: Elefsina, Timişoara & Veszprém.

Timişoara 2023