Last stop in Romania - Cluj-Napoca

March 17-19
Cluj-Napoca, Romania


I spent two nights in Cluj, couch-surfing both nights.  The first night was spent with Sanyi, a trumpet player studying at one of the over 400 schools in the city.  The city is almost entirely comprised of students and the population nearly halves in the summer but is compensated for by all the tourists who come to visit.  Cluj is also located in Transylvania and some of the history of this portion of Romania became much more apparent after visiting this city.  Both Sanyi and his friend who hosted me the second night, Szili are Hungarian.  Technically they are Romanian but identify themselves as Hungarian and speak Hungarian almost exclusively.


Transylvania was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire until the end of WWI, when Hungary was carved up and lost a majority of its land in the form of Transylvania to Romania.  Since most of the people living in this area were originally Hungarian, the Hungarian language is prevalent everywhere.  At the university there will often be multiple schools for the same subject, one school of biology in Romanian, one in Hungarian and sometimes one in English for French and Chinese students who come to Cluj for their education.  The Romanian and Hungarian languages are completely different, with Romanian being very similar to Italian.  Hungarian has 44 letters in its alphabet and pretty much shares no word etymology with any other modern language.  The Hungarians originally came from Mongolia presumably through Scandinavia, so the closest language in terms of the rhythm of the speech is Finnish.  But reading aloud from one of the Hungarian student's novels gave me a preview of what to expect when I arrived in Budapest.  Any sign I would see would make absolutely no sense to me.


The other thing that is very apparent is the loss of Transylvania is a sore point for many Hungarians and the history according to Hungary and Romania are vastly different.  While sightseeing in Brasov with a Hungarian girl, she started to get very upset reading the histories at several of the sites we visited which nearly completely omitted any reference to Hungary.  It almost seemed as though the castles were built in the 1400's and then nothing happened until 1918.  When she started to talk to me about it she had to cut herself off before she started crying in anger.


Because Cluj is a college town and really is a huge mixing bowl, it was interesting because the tensions between Hungarians and Romanians that is more evident in other areas of Transylvania is not an issue here.