A brown bear runs across a paved road in a forested area.

Hoping for food, bears like this one regularly approach cars on the Transfăgărășan Pass in Romania, where a tourist was killed last month.

The Law Protects Them. The Villagers Fear Them.

Romania’s growing bear population has turned conservation into confrontation for people living in the shadows of the Carpathian Mountains.

Hoping for food, bears like this one regularly approach cars on the Transfăgărășan Pass in Romania, where a tourist was killed last month.

Rukmini Callimachi was born in Communist Romania. While reporting this story, she saw three brown bears, including one which encircled her car.

Aug. 8, 2025

The intruder emerged from the thick forest just before dawn on June 20 and approached the entrance of the luxury resort.

The break-in took 23 seconds. The suspect weighed around 400 pounds. His motive: honey.

The bear, captured by security footage that morning, used its paw to pry open the sliding glass door of the Grand Hotel Balvanyos, before squeezing its shoulders into the lobby. As a terrified employee sprinted away, it headed to the breakfast buffet and ate all the packets of honey.

Video

A bear broke through a door of the Grand Hotel Balvanyos on June 20 and proceeded to eat all the honey packets.

It was one of three bear intrusions in June at the four-star hotel, which sits on a mountainside in Romania’s Carpathian range. Another bear entered the resort’s spa and downed a three-liter jug of massage oil, while a third opened a door into a hotel hallway and chased away a housekeeper.

Romania’s relationship with its bears has come undone. The brown bear — the ursus arctos — is one of the country’s national treasures, interwoven into its mythology. Villagers still host annual bear dances, a ritual that goes back to pre-Christian times, when people believed the animals staved off misfortune. Romania’s brutal Communist dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu, would flaunt his power by ordering aides to lure bears from the forest with food, then shooting them in a macabre display of machismo.

For years, tourists flocked to the Carpathian forest, hoping to catch a glimpse of one. But if it used to be that people came to Romania see the bears, these days, it’s the bears who are coming to see the people.

On a stage, performers wearing bear skins dance as an audience watches.

Numerous villages in Romania still hold bear dances in a pre-Christian ritual to ward off evil.Credit...Vadim Ghirda/Associated Press

A confluence of factors — including a 2016 hunting moratorium and a spate of housing development that has shrunk their natural habitat — has led to more bears, and more conflict with humans. Today, there are between 10,000 and 13,000 brown bears roaming free in Romania, according to government data — the most of any European country besides Russia, and three to four times what the country’s Ministry of the Environment deems sustainable, according to spokesman Mihai Drăgan.

The animals, which can weigh as much as 900 pounds and stand as tall as a doorway, are leaving the forests to roam highways where billboards warn visitors not to feed them, and venturing into villages and small towns to raid garbage bins and attack what gets in their way.

Boy Scout troops no longer camp in the region. Shepherds say their flocks are regularly ravaged. Farmers are afraid to plow their fields. Miles of electric fences have been rolled out around villages as residents try to protect their families and their homes.

Cattle graze in a vast field with a ridge in the background.

In the meadows in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, landowners have erected electric fences to protect their herd — and themselves.Credit...Ioana Moldovan for The New York Times

“As children, we grew up going into the forest to collect raspberries and mushrooms. Never once was this a problem,” said Lóránd Szarvadi, 58, the owner of the Balvanyos resort. “Now there is no one left who has the courage to go. For a long time we were against shooting the bears. But in the last two to three years we’ve arrived at what is, in fact, an impossible situation.”

In the nine years since the hunting ban was imposed, 264 people have been attacked by bears — around 28 per year. Before that, the average was 11. Fatalities are also rising: Twenty people have been killed since 2016, according to a report by the National Institute for Research and Development in Forestry.

Still, politicians and ecologists disagree on how to reduce the danger. Some officials, especially in rural counties, are demanding an end to the hunting ban. Conservationists argue that the problem is caused by humans, including tour guides who lead people right to the bears.

Zsuzsanna Teglas, left, and Lóránd Szarvadi at the Grand Balvanyos Hotel, a four-star resort, where bears entered the premises on three separate occasions in June.

An hotel swimming pool is seen from above, with a wooded mountainside in the background.

Summer revelers frolicked at the Balvanyos Resort in early August.

At the Balvanyos resort, there is now a night patrol armed with a gun that fires pepper pellets. The hotel’s electric bikes sit in a shed unused, one of several investments that have gone to waste. Guests routinely ask whether it is safe to bring their children.

“This isn’t ‘Winnie the Pooh,’” said Zsuzsanna Teglas, managing partner at Balvanyos and Mr. Szarvadi’s wife. “They’re charming, and also incredibly dangerous.”

Disfigured

A year ago, Andras Nyisztor was attacked by a bear in the meadow near his rural home.Credit...Ioana Moldovan for The New York Times

Andras Nyisztor, a farmer in the village of Cetățuia, no longer goes into his fields alone, or on foot.

On the morning of Aug. 23, 2024, Mr. Nyisztor set off with his 17-year-old daughter in a horse-drawn cart to cut hay for their livestock. They were about to cross a small brook when the horse suddenly froze. Thinking the animal was spooked by the water, Mr. Nyisztor got down to lead it across.

That’s when his daughter screamed. He spun around and stared directly into a bear’s gaping maw.

What happened next might belong to myth — a battle between man and beast that is as improbable as the image of Saint Michael slaying the demon that hangs above Mr. Nyisztor’s bed — if it weren’t for his medical records and the unprintable images of his disfigured face.

“I remember having enough time to notice that his teeth were each at least three to four centimeters long,” said Mr. Nyisztor, 52.

The bear bit off half his face. His vocal cords were severed so he couldn’t scream. He fell back into the brook, and the bear stepped on his chest, leaving a scar on his abdomen and rib cage. He was saved by his sheepdog, who charged the bear and scared it away.

The village of Cetățuia in Covasna County where Mr. Nyisztor grew up. As a boy, he said, he could wander freely into the meadow. Not anymore.

Unable to see, Mr. Nyisztor fumbled in the air until he found his horse and let the animal lead him to the asphalt in Cetățuia, a small village that sits in a bend of the Carpathian range. The people who helped him, including his daughter, who survived the attack, called 112 — the Romanian equivalent of 911 — and he was rushed a hospital where he spent months intubated as doctors rebuilt his face.

Calls to 112 to report a sighting or an attack have ballooned, from around 1,750 in 2020 to more than 7,500 in 2023. This year, there have already been 5,000 calls, according to the government agency that runs the hotline.

After a 48-year-old Italian motorcyclist was killed this summer, TV crews descended on the mountain pass where the attack occurred. There was no such coverage of Mr. Nyisztor’s attack. The Times interviewed five people or their families who had been disfigured by bears, and three said they received no media coverage at all.

The reason, they said, is that the majority of victims are farmers and shepherds. “We are the little people,” said Maria Györgyjakab, 64, whose son survived a bear mauling in the village of Angheluși.

They have reluctantly come to a conclusion that many here struggle to articulate: The bear needs to be killed.

“What we need to do is what every other country does,” said Levente Porzsolt, the former forestry adviser to Romania’s Minister of the Environment, who helped draft a series of emergency measures. “Basically, we need to be allowed to shoot them.”

(((Ecologists))) disagree, pointing out that it is humans who have encroached on the bears’ habitat with real estate developments, and that it is humans who continue to attract them with food. Advertisements for guided tours often feature images of bears, which can now be regularly found along one of the main mountain roads, hoping for a snack.

“There’s no silver bullet,” said Cristian-Remus Papp, the wildlife practice coordinator for the World Wildlife Fund’s Romania office, who says the fragmentation of the bear habitat caused them to come closer and closer to human communities.

He pointed to Băile Tușnad, a village of around 1,700 people along the Olt River, where the density of bears is among the highest in the country, and where a series of changes caused emergency calls to drop from 149 in 2021 to 30 in 2022 to six in 2023, according to a study published on the initiative.

Government-funded “bear emergency teams” were created, equipped with walkie-talkies and cameras. Bears were fitted with GPS collars, and an app alerts residents to an approaching threat. The community also took the radical step of cutting down most of its fruit trees, installed bear-proof dumpsters and added electric fencing to 90 percent of the properties, said Mr. Papp.

The progress in the town has been hailed as a success, but critics including Mr. Porzsolt disagree.

“We haven’t resolved anything,” he said. “People have become prisoners inside their own homes.”

Signs along the Transfăgărășan Pass warn visitors not to feed bears. People continue to ignore the signs, endangering themselves and the animals.

In 2021, as the problem spiraled out of control, Romania tried to ship the bears to other European countries. “No one wanted them,” said Mr. Porzsolt.

That same year, the government passed a stopgap law, one that Mr. Porzsolt helped draft. Ordinance 81 called for a kind of killing by committee. First, the victim of an attack must call 112 and report either that a person or their property is being threatened by a bear. Next, a police officer, a veterinarian armed with a tranquilizer gun, a hunter armed with a real gun, and a local official in charge of overseeing them must rush to the location.

Usually, by the time they arrive, the bear is gone. On the rare occasion they find the perpetrator, the veterinarian is allowed to try to tranquilize the animal.

On a recent afternoon, Mr. Porzsolt drove a reporter up a dirt road to the site of a recent attack. On the white-colored soil, two enormous blood stains were still visible, turning the ground to a dark charcoal. The first stain marked where a bull had been killed by a bear in July. The second marked where the bear had been shot.

The responding group had found the bear devouring its 1,000-pound prey. The veterinarian’s tranquilizing dart not only didn’t work, it aggravated the bear, which charged the committee, Mr. Porzsolt said. Only then was he allowed to give the order for it to be killed.

“It was like in a film,” he said. “People screamed. The police officers ran. The hunter fired, and this is where the bear died.”

A roadside shrine on Transfăgărășan Pass speaks to the historical and religious significance of Romania’s brown bear.

Last year, following the death of a 19-year-old hiker, the Romanian parliament held an emergency session and voted to allow 481 bears to be hunted per year, more than doubling the previous quota. It’s a drop in the bucket, said Mr. Porzsolt, who pointed out that in other countries, as much as 10 percent of the bear population is culled annually — a ratio that if applied to Romania would mean up to 1,300 bears each year.

As officials and conservationists debate the way forward, the victims are mounting.

Hours across mountain roads, in the dim interior of his house, Andras Nyisztor recently learned to speak again, after his vocal cords were rebuilt. So was his right cheek — surgeons implanted a piece of metal to reconstruct the shattered bone. He removes his dentures to show that most of his teeth are gone.

Mr. Nyisztor spends most of his time in this cot following the bear attack. He struggles to get up and is blind in one eye.

“All my life, I’ve seen the bears, but I never thought that they could do this,” he said.

The small room, which smells faintly of grass and wood, is cheerfully decorated in 3-D posters of pink roses. They line the wall above Mr. Nyisztor’s cot, where he spends his days convalescing. Among the roses, hanging crookedly, is a small icon of Saint Michael the Archangel.

He can’t remember if he placed it there before the attack, or after. In the image, the archangel’s sword is drawn and his wings are flared as he stands triumphant over the writhing form of the monster he has defeated.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5760716&forum_id=2],#49171719)