Comarnic

Comarnic is a town in the west of Prahova County, set where the Prahova Subcarpathians meet the southern spurs of the Baiu Mountains, on the floodplain and terraces on the left bank of the Prahova river, between 500 and 580 m above sea level. The town covers 89.97 km² and had 11,106 inhabitants at the 2021 census; besides Comarnic itself it includes the localities of Ghioșești, Podu Lung, Poiana and Posada. It is crossed by the DN1 road and the Ploiești-Brașov railway, with Comarnic station and the Posada and Valea Largă halts. The name comes from the word „comarnic”, meaning a shepherd's hut. At the end of the nineteenth century Comarnic was a rural commune in the Peleș district, with nine hamlets and 4,365 inhabitants, two churches (one built by the Bibescu family in 1815, the other, at Podul Neagului, by the chancellor Pârvu Cantacuzino and his father) and, on the Prahova, mills, sawmills and hydraulic lime works. It was declared a town in 1968. The Bibescu family estate at Comarnic and Posada left several buildings, including the George Valentin Bibescu manor of 1878 on Republicii Street, a listed monument. Posada has the Holy Trinity church of the former Lespezi hermitage (1661-1675), a Cantacuzino foundation painted at the end of the seventeenth century and a class A historic monument, described on a separate page. Also in Posada, within the grounds of the Martha Bibescu castle, is the Carpathian Hunting Museum (11 Posada Street), founded in 1996 as a branch of the Peleș National Museum and now run by Romsilva, with hunting trophies and mounted animals, many of which came from the Ceaușescu family. Beside the road to Sinaia, in Posada, stands a stone cross from 1741, a listed monument. In Comarnic, the urban ensemble from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century, with many houses with shops on the ground floor, is a historic monument of local importance. The church of St Nicholas, built in 1901 on the ruins of an older one, has a painting showing King Carol I and Queen Elisabeth.