While visiting Cluj-Napoca, I took an excursion to the Turda Salt Mine with Leo Wang and Adria Major about thirty minutes away near the town of Turda! Extracted for salt since before the Middle Ages, its vast caverns have been highly commercialized since 2006, complete with a subterranean Ferris wheel, mini-golf, and even a boating lake! I enjoyed being underground, tracing the pale veins of salt etched across the impossibly large cave walls. However, the real marvel for me revealed itself once we re-emerged onto the surface.
After battling a school group to use the exit elevators, we stood on the side of a rural road waiting for an Uber that never came. Unsurprisingly, the area does not have much demand. Leo flagged down a moving bus, which begrudgingly picked us up. The man who collected our money initially did not seem too pleased with us, but ended up giving Leo a grin and a hearty slap on the shoulder after our strained attempts to communicate in Romanian.
As the bus rolled into Turda, we were greeted by a mostly empty city center lined with modest buildings of Neo-Baroque and Neoclassical style, a local headquarters of the National Liberal Party (PNL), a Profi City convenience store, a Hungarian-language high school, and the local Catholic church covered in plastic under construction. Once quite prosperous from the flow of salt, Turda has been steadily losing population since the turn of the century, and you could feel that reality.
It appeared unremarkable, like many things we had driven past, but unlike anything we had stopped to see. It was not a quaint, bucolic village like Biertan, nor was it a bustling, cultural hub like Cluj, nor was it particularly historically important like Alba Iulia. It is something in between that often gets overlooked.
We got dinner in an empty hole-in-the-wall restaurant, visited a jewelry store, bought some snacks, and befriended a dog, which we affectionately named Stray Dog #4 to avoid getting too attached. He followed us for a bit, but eventually wandered off as we explored the green alley streets of a residential neighborhood. An unassuming stream passed under us as the sun decided to poke itself out. On our way to the bus stop back to Cluj, we popped into a small convenience store run by Chinese immigrants, where Leo got to show off a bit of his Mandarin. I was struck by the beauty of everything. It was all so ordinary, and I loved it!
We saw some pretty remarkable places during our progression through Transylvania — Brașov, Cluj, Târgu Mureș, Sibiu. I think stumbling through the winding streets of Sighișoara at dusk was the most surreal moment of the trip. But throughout the week, I also felt like I was not fully seeing what it meant to live in Transylvania in 2026. And don’t get me wrong, the fortified Saxon churches are breathtaking, with their grand organs and imposing walls. But even the remarkable and historic begins to feel ordinary when it is all you see, and there’s always the lingering question of whether what you’re seeing in a historic city is authentic or just a Disneyland created for me, the American tourist, to gawk at.
Whenever I travel, I always feel myself drawn to the small towns whose names I barely catch on street signs as we pass through — Comarnic, Râmnicu Vâlcea, Brezoi, Aiud, Turda. Maybe it is because my own hometown of Appleton, Wisconsin, would fall into this category. These towns are away from the tourists, and more importantly, away from the money that tourists bring, but they are nonetheless home to thousands of people, who live, work, fall in and out of love, and build their lives every day.
Of course, we only saw about three hours of Turda. There are, after all, infinite lives to be lived there! Still, it gave us a look into how a more ordinary, uncurated Transylvanian life looks. I think when we travel, we expect everything to be extraordinary — the sights, the food, the feeling of awe in our chest — since travel is this extraordinary privilege. However, at least for me, what is truly extraordinary is how daily life in a given place is so different yet so similar to my own. I am most amazed not necessarily by the grand monuments and memorials that I may not even visit if they were in my own town, but by the little peculiarities of life: the design of the average house, the bus route, the drink brands on the shelf, the local news on the TV, the look of the language on advertisements.
During this program, we have sought to interrogate how the Romanian nation has been constructed and how the idea of “real Romanians” has been weaponized to exclude and marginalize. And while such a conception can never exist, I think something resembling a “real Romania” can be found on the streets of Turda — not in any nationalistic sense, but in what it shows about (extra)ordinary modern, Romanian life.