Fiction set in Transylvania has never recovered from the Dracula legacy which dictates that this remote part of Romania is the scene only of Gothic horror, a place of fantasy castles and inbred aristocracy. Yet for the writer and politician Miklós Bánffy, who died 60 years ago this month, the only horror in the bucolic landscape of his native territory (then Hungarian, but soon to revert to Romania) was the blind frivolity of his fellow Hungarian landowners, the consequences of whose refusal to face the future in the years before the first world war led to calamity and imperial collapse. His best known work, The Transylvanian Trilogy, (also known, for self-evident reasons, as The Writing on the Wall) charts this glittering spiral of decline with the frustrated regret of a politician who had tried to alert Hungary's ruling classes to the pressing need for change and accommodation. Patrician, romantic and in the context of the times a radical, Bánffy combined his politics – he negotiated Hungary's admission to the League of Nations – with running the state theatres and promoting the work of his contemporary, the composer Béla Bartók. Unlike most of his generation, he understood that his class was doomed and Hungary's hold on Transylvania threatened. He never abandoned the hope of reclaiming northern Transylvania but a last desperate bid during the second world war, which involved trying to persuade Romania to abandon the Axis powers, led only to the final destruction of the Bánffy estates.