The Neighbor's Goat: An American in Romania

Ode to Transylvanian Summer, Sans Dracula

A video popped up this week in my Instagram feed from an American vlogger who was wandering through Brașov, Romania, a picturesque city that I know fairly well, spouting off:

“Did you know Transylvania is a real place?”

I just had to chuckle, even more so when I saw the guy has 1 million YouTube followers. Geography can be a weakness for many Americans, as the world knows.

The clip was a year old and just a minute long, but he succinctly summarized Transylvania for its beautiful mountains, cobblestoned, medieval towns and authentic charm, as one crams into 60 seconds.

He also went down the Dracula path, that is, referencing Bram Stoker’s 1897 Gothic horror novel set in Transylvania, and the so-called “Dracula’s Castle” that is really Bran Castle, near Brașov. He got that part right but wrongly said that Vlad Țepeș, the 15^th-century Wallachian prince also known as Vlad the Impaler, who was the inspiration for Stoker’s fictional Dracula character, had lived in Bran Castle. A Romanian woman corrected him in the comments.

Transylvania is real, alright.

Stoker, an Irishman, never visited Romania, but the Dracula lore continues – for good and for bad – in the country’s tourism, particularly in parts of Transylvania. I’ve touched on the region in other posts, and it’s well worth a visit, but the Dracula myth is another story.

If you glance at a map of Europe, Romania resembles a fish, with its mouth in the west where it meets Hungary and Serbia and its tail along the Black Sea and Danube Delta. Transylvania, when superimposed on the map of Romania, looks like the country’s enlarged heart, which aligns with the reality, in my view.

A historical and multicultural region in the center of the country, sandwiched between the Apuseni and Carpathian mountain ranges, Transylvania spans roughly 12 of the country’s 41 counties.

It’s big, beautiful and diverse; I’ve traveled much of it. But the corner of Transylvania that I’m most familiar with is our little village nestled in the hills of Sibiu County.

I say “our” because my wife’s parents retired there, and it’s where my mother-in-law grew up and we built a country cabin on the same land that’s been in the family for generations. A few hours’ drive from our city life, it’s another world, as we just experienced this past week.

If I had to describe the village in just one word, I’d say “timeless.” Although it’s gradually modernized with “gas, water and sewer” as locals like to say, not to mention fiber-optic internet that’s faster than in our city, it’s incredibly old-fashioned in other ways. The pace, faith and traditions have endured and even flourished.

There’s also a fishbowl existence that I could do without, but I’m treated well there and have grown comfortable visiting repeatedly over the years. The pastel-colored houses add to the charm. Fedora-wearing gentlemen on horse-drawn wagons give you a hat tip. Older women in kerchiefs and widows clad in black offer a wave. Everybody talks about everybody else, but also the weather and their gardens.

And this time of year, the garden is everything. The area’s rich dark-chocolate colored soil produces incredible fruits and vegetables. Driving or walking through the village, it’s quickly evident that nearly everybody has a thriving garden, some even harvesting additional land outside the village. This is also about livelihood. Many are small farmers or pensioners who rely on their gardens and animals for much of their food, including using it for pickling and other goodies for winter, such as zacuscă, a tangy red pepper and eggplant spread. Potatoes and onions keep for months in cool cellars.

My wife’s parents, especially my mother-in-law, maintain the sizeable garden and we help on visits, from the spring preparation to the autumn wind-down and picking in between. Last weekend, the team effort meant pulling bushels of onions from the ground and then cleaning them for storage. Beans were also picked, shelled and set out to dry (think navy bean soup in winter), and fresh green beans made for a lovely sauté. Cucumbers were picked, their crunch and fresher-than-fresh taste – no bitterness on the skin – such a treat to eat as is, or mixed with tomato and onion for the classic summer salad. It’s all organic, too.

The American corn we planted, the Silver Queen variety that I ate as a kid, grows nicely here. Several buckets of corn were picked, husked, boiled and plated. Summer deliciousness and impossible to get any fresher, for which we’re grateful. Meanwhile, the hens are laying abundant eggs in the warm weather. Pivot to the plums, which need picking in our small orchard, sweet gems they are, melting in your mouth. Carrots and herbs are coming in, too. At every turn, hard work, a labor of love and nourishment.

We buy wood-oven-baked artisanal bread and fresh milk from a neighbor who seems to have the best cows, while another neighbor owns a blackberry plantation just outside the village, growing them commercially to sell mostly in the nearby city of Sibiu. But we came home with a load of his luscious fruits, the best blackberries I’ve eaten anywhere and a deal at $3 a pound.

Unlike many of the villagers, we don’t keep horses, sheep, cows, pigs or goats. So after the “grass” is mowed – it’s really a mix of grass, weeds and alfalfa – it must dry properly and be raked. And rake I did, all afternoon on Saturday, sweat dripping from every pore, giving me a good workout in the process as Spotify kept company in my earbuds.

I raked several dozen piles and tried to consolidate them, leaving the equivalent of a haystack for another neighbor who would come collect it after I returned to the city. He’ll use it to feed his animals, which is better than us burning it.

This is the real Transylvania, far from the Dracula kitsch, where nothing goes to waste and hard work never ends but yields rewards in cycles.