The Sphinx of the Bucegi: Stone Sentinel of Romania's Sacred Plateau

High on the Bucegi plateau, more than 2,200 metres above the valleys of Prahova, a slab of conglomerate rock turns its profile to the sky. Seen from the right angle, it becomes unmistakable: a human face, brow and chin and gazing eye, weathered into something between a pharaoh and a sleeping king. Romanians have called it the Sfinx since 1936, after the Great Sphinx of Giza. The wind, ice and rain did the sculpting, working for hundreds of thousands of years on layers of rock that resist erosion unevenly, leaving the hard core exposed while the softer stone wore away.

A short walk across the same plateau stands its companion: Babele, 'the old women.' These are mushroom rocks, broad stone caps balanced on slender stems, formed where a tougher upper layer sheltered the softer rock beneath from the relentless mountain weather. Together the Sphinx and Babele are textbook examples of differential erosion, yet they look entirely otherworldly, scattered across the windswept tableland like the abandoned chess pieces of giants.

Long before the cable cars and the trail signs, this was sacred ground. The ancient Geto-Dacians worshipped a god named Zalmoxis who, according to the Greek geographer Strabo, withdrew into a cave on a holy mountain called Kogaionon, vanished for years, then returned as if resurrected. Where that mountain truly stood is still argued by scholars, with many pointing to the peaks near the Dacian capital Sarmizegetusa Regia. But a strong popular tradition insists it was here, in the Bucegi, that the god kept his cave, and that the Sphinx has watched over the plateau since before history was written.

Then there is the modern legend, and here the air thins into pure folklore. The story goes that in 2003 a secret Romanian intelligence unit, aided by a Pentagon satellite scan, found an enormous hidden hall deep inside the Bucegi, sealed behind an energy barrier and connected by tunnels to chambers beneath Egypt and Tibet. Inside, supposedly, waited holographic records of Earth's true history and the DNA of a vanished race of giants. It is a thrilling tale and it is fiction, popularised by the books of 'Radu Cinamar' and Peter Moon. No archaeologist has ever found such a chamber, and no credible evidence supports it. Treat it as the campfire myth it is.

What is real, and worth timing a visit around, is the light. The Sphinx shows its clearest, sharpest outline on 21 November at sunset, when the low sun rakes across the rock and the face stands out as if lit from within. Each year crowds climb the plateau in the cold to watch it, wrapped in the same wind that carved the stone, and for a few minutes the old sentinel looks almost awake.