If you’re reading this because you’re considering a move abroad, or because you already have and are still processing that decision, I understand why history might become part of the question. It certainly became part of mine. I spent a long time in the historical record before I felt clear about my own decision, looking at what people had done when governments became unstable, institutions weakened, or the political future of a country became frighteningly uncertain. What I

When most people think of Transylvanian folklore, they picture a familiar world of haunted castles, restless dead, protective herbs, old churches, and stories carried through Romanian, Hungarian, and Saxon communities. Yet another tradition has existed within the same mountains and valleys for centuries, woven so thoroughly into the cultural landscape that it can be difficult to determine where one community’s stories end and another’s begin. Roma people have lived in the ter

Freedom of movement rarely depends on a single unlocked door. To leave a country, you need some combination of valid documents, access to your money, functioning transportation, permission to cross borders, and somewhere on the other side willing to receive you. Under ordinary circumstances, those systems work so quietly together that we experience movement as a simple personal choice. We decide to go somewhere, buy a ticket, gather whatever documents are necessary, and leave

Every October, the warnings return: keep your black cats inside. Be careful about adopting them out too close to Halloween. Pagans, witches, or Satanists might be looking for animals to harm or sacrifice. There is remarkably little evidence behind these claims. Animal welfare organizations have challenged them for years, yet the warning survives because the black cat already occupies a particular place in our imagination. We have been taught for centuries that a black cat bel

When autumn arrives in Transylvania, the air grows sharp and metallic, and the forests shed their color until the bones of the mountains begin to show through. Smoke rises from the first hearth fires, curling above tiled roofs and lingering in the cold. The villages seem to draw inward. Gardens empty, wood is stacked, evenings come earlier, and the mountains that felt green and generous in summer become darker around their edges. I came to this season carrying Halloween with

This message is an invitation to stay awake. The world is shifting quickly, and uncertainty has a way of making people search for a deadline. The question keeps surfacing: How long do we have? How long before leaving becomes harder, before circumstances change, before the options available today are no longer available tomorrow? I don’t think anyone can answer that honestly. There is no reliable countdown, and history does not give us a neat sequence of stages that tells us w

Before Dracula made Transylvania synonymous with vampires, Romanian folklore already had its own restless dead. They were called strigoi, and they did not necessarily live in distant castles or belong to another world. They could be people you knew. That familiarity is what makes the strigoi so unsettling. The threat did not always come from somewhere beyond the village. It could come from the cemetery where your own family was buried, from someone who had recently died, or e

The Keeper of the Flame In every culture, there are keepers of the flame—those who carry the memory of a people across generations, adapting it to new languages, new screens, and new worlds. In Romania, one of those keepers is Corneliu Țepeluș, a filmmaker, storyteller, and cultural ambassador whose life has been shaped by the timeless human pursuit of immortality—not the kind that denies death, but the kind that ensures meaning endures. His work bridges the mystical and the