Before leaving for our tour of Transylvania, the furthest I had gotten from Bucharest since arriving in Romania was the village of Buşteni, which was my first taste of a slightly more rural Romania. Buşteni is a little less than two hours by train from the city and seems to almost disappear into the densely forested valley it lies in. After hearing Transylvania described as mountainous and hilly, I began to picture a landscape much like that around Buşteni with sharp peaks, deep valleys and homes that seemed to be much like chalets tucked into steep hillsides.
However, after a night in Braşov and passing over the Carpathian mountain range, the landscape that came into view seemed in some ways familiar. In the hills of Transylvania, I saw the hills around Northfield. In a place unlike anywhere I had been before and many hours and miles from Northfield, I still could not help but see places that I knew well and thought of as a home. There were other moments like this through our trip, some more personal than others. The sheep on the side of the road made me think of Scotland, streets in Sighișoara made me think of Florence, and a park in Cluj was much like one near where my family home in Seattle. A few of these connections were certainly weak, and I expect that any impartial viewer would have been able to tell me that the rolling pastures of Transylvania were no more like the hills of Northfield than any other nondescript green hillside with a few bushes or crops. But part of the power of places that matter to us is that they are carried with us everywhere and can transform the slightest similarity into a memory or connection to the past and home.
As we traveled through Transylvania, I was not only reminded of places that are close to home for me, but also of how people create memories of their homes in new communities whether it be the memory of a real place or an imagined cultural home. In the formerly German majority cities of Sibiu, Braşov and Sighișoara we saw what remained of the creation of a Saxon tradition by immigrants from Germany in the 12th century, lasting several hundred years. They built homes of German influence as well as Catholic and Lutheran churches, wrote on monuments in German and influenced several of the delicious meals I had while visiting these cities. Hungarians also established traditions which honored their cultural home in cities we visited like Târgu Mureș and Cluj. The history of these groups in Transylvania is certainly more complex than can be addressed here, but I wonder, when arriving in what is modern day Transylvania, what reminded these groups of people of their homes. In the case of Saxons, most of whom have since left the region, what did they take with them from Transylvania and what reminded them of Transylvania in the places they found themselves next?
During our stay in Cluj, we also had the pleasure of hearing from speakers from the University of Babeş-Bolyai about minority groups in Transylvania. Our third lecture by Oana-Maria Mateescu, Work and Racialization in the Context of Recent South Asian Immigration, focused on recent immigration to Transylvania mostly by working young men from Southeast Asia. Despite a landscape that is foreign I wonder if and how recent immigrants to Transylvania have seen pieces of home in their new landscapes. Because, as we learned, these young men have primarily been marginalized by Romanians in Cluj, I am sure that their creation of home in a new landscape has been different and probably more difficult than for those who come less far to Transylvania and are more easily accepted/integrated into the communities of cities like Cluj. But I do not doubt that for most people in a new place, weather on vacation, studying abroad, traveling for work, or to stay forever, we see pieces of our old memories and home hidden among whatever foreign landscape we are learning to inhabit and in many cases we continue to act out the traditions, customs and histories that have shaped us. When I return to Northfield next fall, I am sure that I will see bits of Transylvania in the hills of the Arb, now that Transylvania has become a place of interest and importance to me.