Thanks to you, I'm a proud Transylvanian, and a first generation Canadian.
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A few final pieces from Sikaszo, starting with the scenery...
As mentioned in a previous post, the dictator Ceausescu loved to hunt in the area's dense forests. The lot a couple of doors down was his helicopter landing zone. Even though he chose to fly in, they still paved the roads, just for him, and then they'd unpave them afterwards. What a self-indulgent bastard!
We donned funny hats and went wandering in a drunken haze. I don't remember much, other than a story about a neighbour who had burned down his shack and hanged himself only a year earlier.
We met up with some living neighbours. The husband had the hugest ears, but has ironically been deaf since he was a kid. He was a fantastic lip reader, but he only had bottom-row teeth, so if I were as deaf as he was, we'd have a major communication problem. He was the nicest cat, relaxed to the max, despite the fact that the week before, some dogs had bit his ankles so badly that his boots had filled with blood. He went for a beer, and his wife came along to ask us if we knew where he was, which turned into an invitation to our place for some moonshine brandy.
We also checked out a church my grandfather helped design...notice the Szekely cross, very "Szacred" (hahaha).
Inside the cabin, we discovered more family memorabilia. For instance, he loved his trusted Ladas, and hunted in them year after year, in the deepest of snow.
His relatives were always studious, and he met my grandmother (high school graduation picture below) at his med school.
In the fall of '96, he collapsed from a stroke (his second in twenty years) in his bathroom, his last bastion, and died two weeks later after coming in and out of a coma, in a state of manic delirium. He was almost 80. My grandmother died within a year.
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In many ways I see now how my whole life built up to this visit. There's no way, after hearing about my heritage day in, day out, that I could delay this trip any longer.
I learned so much about my family's past, and the history of Transylvania, but it dismayed me to see the cultural fragmentation inherent to the region, and how negatively it has affected not only my family, but every citizen. Maybe I'm just too Canadian, but I believe that the future of Transylvania is in an independent, multi-ethnic, multi-lingual state in which all nationalities are recognized as equal parts in the national fabric.
I'll leave you with two images, the first of which is my mock design for the Transylvanian coat of arms.
The final photo comes from a postcard, circa 1910, on which an artist rendered what he thought Marosvasarhely might look like "in the future". Obviously, it looks nothing like the Jules Verne metropolis envisioned by this mad genius, but let this piece be my tribute to those thinkers who can see with such immense clarity what others might consider impossible.
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