About Romania

About Romania. The very name ‘Romania’ evokes all sorts of associations: Count Dracula, Transylvania, Ceausescu, gypsies, folk music, glue-sniffing children, inhumane conditions in orphanages, grey cities and – possibly - green mountains. As with most countries, Romania cannot be described in just a few words! The complex history of the area now called “Romania” has contributed to its having so many different faces: one sees this also in the diversity of its many ethnic groups and different cultural heritages. There are so many different kinds of Romanians: Romanian Romanians, Hungarian Romanians, Swabian Romanians, Saxon Romanians, Tatar Romanians, the “Roma” Romanians (the Gypsies) and still other Romanians as well.

Many peoples throughout history have left their traces here. Present-day Romania was for centuries the battlefield of three major European powers: the Russian, the Ottoman and the Austro-Hungarian. Consequently, Romania was seldom allowed to become a unified, sovereign state of its own. That concept is still relatively new, even today. It was only with the Treaty of Trianon after the First World War that Romania acquired its present-day form. Even after the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Romania still remains largely unknown, with myths and prejudices abounding.
Romania contains a hidden treasure of still untouched, idyllic Nature,  with a very rich culture and an extremely hospitable population. Travelling through Romania is very worthwhile indeed!
Time seems to have stopped in rural Romania. It’s one of the last places in all of Europe, where one can see, as in a time-capsule, how the traditional life of farming communities all over Europe must once have lead their daily existence. Many people in the Romanian countryside still make little or no use of modern methods in agriculture or animal breeding. It is precisely for such reasons that so many people in the fast-paced regions of the West long to experience the beauty, simplicity (and hardness) of traditional life in an unspoiled countryside, as it once existed in their own countries, too. Such experiences are still possible in Romania: horse-drawn wagons are everywhere, draft animals are still used for ploughing the land. In some of the regions we will be visiting, the wearing of traditional garb is not reserved for special occasions, but is still a habit of everyday. For the Western imagination the pace of life in rural Romania is close to that of slow motion and its scale dramatically downsized, with small plots surrounding small villages and with people for the most part still completely self-sufficient - as they also used to be not so very long ago in the more “advanced” nations of the world.