Preface
I first visited Transylvania by accident. The intention had been to take a walking holiday in Kyrgyzstan, but that plan was derailed by a coup which rendered travel to the country inadvisable. Romania was the hastily-arranged alternative. My enthusiasm for the region, which had belonged to Hungary until the aftermath of the First World War, was stoked by Miklós Bánffy’s Transylvanian Trilogy, the subject of another essay on this website (“Hungary’s Tolstoy”). The present article was the product of a second visit, this time to the region’s book festival, curated by Lucy Abel Smith. Like the first, it occasioned meditative thoughts on the vast, melancholy churches which dominate the villages of Transylvania, though they have now been abandoned by the communities whose forebears built them and generations of whom used to worship in them.