Dragobete is a late-winter observance that emerged from rural Romanian life and from a close, attentive relationship with the seasons. Traditionally marked in late February, it was neither a church feast nor a celebration designed for pleasure. It developed because people needed ways to recognize when winter, though still dangerous, was beginning to loosen its grip. Dragobete does not yet announce spring or promise relief from the bitter cold. Instead, it marks a subtle but m

I learned this morning that I may be living among remnants left by the children who followed the Pied Piper and disappeared more than seven hundred years ago. The streets I walk through in Brașov, the old walls and churches, and the fortified villages scattered across Transylvania belong in part to a world built by German-speaking settlers who migrated east during the Middle Ages. And the leading historical explanation for one of Europe’s strangest medieval mysteries is that

Immigration is often framed as a decisive break, the before and the after, but that framing hasn't matched my lived reality. What I have experienced instead is a long, unsettled middle. An experience where one foot remains planted in what I lost (or still attempting to untangle from), while the other figures out how to step into a life that is still forming. This in-between space is not dramatic or cinematic. It is quiet, demanding, and persistent. It follows me through ordin

People often ask why I chose Romania, and I always have trouble giving a short answer because there wasn’t one reason. It was the result of a lot of research into what actually makes a country livable: safety, political stability, cost of living, healthcare, immigration, infrastructure, and the realities of daily life. But I was also looking for somewhere I could imagine genuinely enjoying my life. I cared about landscape, seasons, history, culture, community, and whether I t

There is a kind of quiet in northeastern Romania that winter seems to make larger. Snow absorbs the ordinary sounds of a village, fields narrow beneath the cold, and the year appears to be drawing inward. Then, in the final days of December, that stillness can break open with drums. You hear them before the bears arrive, the beat traveling through streets and courtyards, followed by bells, whistles, shouting, and the movement of people toward the sound. Then come the enormous

There are cities that decorate for Christmas, and then there is Brașov, a place that seems particularly made for winter. As December settles over the Carpathians, darkness comes early, snow gathers on the mountains, and the medieval center transforms beneath thousands of lights. Garlands stretch between centuries-old buildings, stars hang above the streets, and Piața Sfatului glows beneath the surrounding rooftops. This is my first Christmas in Romania, and one of the things

Romania stands at a cultural crossroads. It is a member of the European Union, governed by European human-rights obligations and increasingly connected to a continent where LGBTQ+ rights have expanded dramatically over the past generation. At the same time, it remains a deeply traditional country in many respects, shaped by Orthodox Christianity, family-centered social expectations, the complicated inheritance of communism, and a strong instinct toward privacy in personal lif

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

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

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

In the heart of Brașov’s old town, framed by the Carpathian foothills, stands a building that has watched the city change around it for more than six hundred years. Locals call it Biserica Neagră, the Black Church. Its enormous Gothic walls have survived fire, religious upheaval, political transformation, war, restoration, and the gradual shrinking of the Saxon community that built it. Yet it has never become simply a monument to what was here before. Bells still ring. Worshi

Walk through almost any historic town in southern Transylvania and you will find traces of another world. There are fortified churches rising above villages, cobbled squares surrounded by pastel houses, old guild towers, Gothic spires, and German names that still sit beside Romanian ones: Kronstadt for Brașov, Hermannstadt for Sibiu, Schäßburg for Sighișoara. These are traces of the Transylvanian Saxons, a German-speaking population whose history here stretches back nearly ni

Many Americans grow up with a fairly distorted idea of which parts of the world are safe. The United States is familiar, and familiarity has a way of feeling like security. Meanwhile, countries we know little about can easily become vaguely dangerous in our imaginations, particularly when they sit somewhere in that broad part of the map Americans learned to call Eastern Europe. Romania still carries some of that reputation. People hear Romania and think about corruption, pove

In Romania, as November dies and winter gathers on the hills, there comes a night when the old stories stir again. On the eve of Saint Andrew’s feast, November 29 into November 30, Romanian folk tradition imagines the ordinary boundaries of the world becoming less certain. Wolves gather and may be given the power of speech. Strigoi leave their graves and wander among the living. The future becomes briefly readable, and a house that has not been properly protected with garlic

Perched above the Târnava Mare River, the citadel of Sighișoara has never existed only in the realm of documented history. Its towers, stairways, churches, and houses carry stories alongside the events historians can establish, and after centuries of retelling, the boundary between the two is not always easy to see. A Wallachian prince really did live here. German-speaking settlers really did establish a community on this hill. Ottoman power really did threaten the region, an

There is something about Bran that seems made for stories. The villages are scattered across the folds of the mountains beneath Bucegi and Piatra Craiului, with forests pressing close around them and weather that can change the entire character of the landscape in an afternoon. It is easy to understand why outsiders arrived here and saw the perfect setting for vampires, but Dracula is not the folklore of Bran. Long before anyone came searching for a fictional count, the peopl

Sighișoara rises from the Târnava Mare valley like something pulled from a medieval manuscript — pastel houses pressed close, cobbled streets spiraling upward, towers with sharp tiled roofs watching from above. A UNESCO World Heritage site, it is one of the last still-inhabited citadels in Europe. Life hums inside its walls even now: laundry flutters from windows, children chase each other up steep alleys, bells echo from the hilltop church. But beneath the daily rhythm, the

Every city carries stories about itself, but Brașov seems particularly suited to them. The old city sits immediately beneath Tâmpa, still enclosed in places by its medieval fortifications, with towers looking down from the hillside and the Black Church rising over the rooftops. Some of the stories attached to these places can be traced through historical records. Others belong to folklore, growing around strange carvings, old names, fires, boundaries, and events people contin

Brașov sits at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains, surrounded by forests so lush they seem to breathe. Today it is one of Romania’s most beloved cities, but its history runs deeper than cobblestone streets and colorful facades. Brașov has always been a crossroads: of trade, of cultures, of conflict, and of survival. Founded in the 13th century by the Saxons, Brașov was built as a fortress city, its thick stone walls and watchtowers protecting merchants and guilds who travel