Postcard views of Culă Boierească, Romanian General Exhibition, Bucharest, 1906.
The Romanian Culă is a type of fortified manor house. The word kula means tower in Balkan languages (its roots are Turkish), and in Balkan countries kulas served as defensible dwellings. Those in Romania were built (and some can still be visited) in areas below the Carpathian Mountains in the provinces of Moldavia and Wallachia, once a borderland at the periphery of and controlled by the Ottoman Empire.
As the Empire weakened, starting in the seventeenth century, the local Romanian boyars (or nobles) who owned large estates in the rich lands between the mountains and the Danube found themselves under threat from rebellious peasants and from bands of brigands. They needed safe places for their families and valuables, and so they created their own form of fortified tower houses.
