Through the transformative Reconnect Transylvania+ Program, Peyton Snyder embarks on an unforgettable journey of discovery, culture, and connections. Immersed in the breathtaking landscapes and vibrant traditions of Transylvania, Peyton experiences the region’s rich heritage firsthand while forging deep connections with its people. Join us as we explore the stories, insights, and moments that make this program a life-changing adventure for participants like Peyton – and don’t forget to follow Peyton’s journey on his YouTube channel!

July 23, 2025

Farewell from Kolozsvár: Recapping an Exciting Year in Transylvania

My departure from Transylvania at the end of June was bittersweet. After 10 months spent there through HHRF’s Reconnect Transylvania+ program, I found I had come to view Kolozsvár as a home away from home. To be sure, my day-to-day work there – interning at RMDSZ, teaching English at the Református Kollégium, and working on various HHRF projects – was rewarding, professionally. In that capacity, I learned a great deal about Romanian politics, the country’s education system, and what it means to work at an advocacy organization more generally. But the social life I developed in Transylvania – over drinks with coworkers after hours; during visits to friends’ families in Korond, Torda, and other villages and towns across Transylvania; through excursions, planned and spontaneous, to the various parks and cultural events in Kolozsvár – proved to be even more fulfilling than I would have anticipated. By Spring, any semblance of discomfort or anxiety stemming from life in a “foreign” environment had faded away – even despite my less-than-steady grasp of Hungarian and Romanian. This sense of belonging and contentment is a curious sensation for an American who, by all accounts, should be in the throes of homesickness for his native country after more than a year beyond her shores. Yet, as I prepare for a new chapter of life (graduate study in Budapest), I find myself already planning visits back to Transylvania for the Summer and Winter holidays. Whatever it is that I started there, socially, will continue in some form for many years to come, I wager.

 

May 29, 2025

Join me on a walk through Kerepesi Cemetery, the resting place of many great Hungarians and – in a way – one of the best art museums in Hungary.

 

March 24, 2025

On March 15th, Hungarians commemorate the anniversary of their 1848 revolution against Habsburg Austria. Despite the tragic defeat the revolutionaries suffered, today March 15th is a day of national celebration for Hungarians – not only in Hungary, but across the Carpathian Basin, including Transylvania. I tagged along for the festivities in Kolozsvár and captured some of the more significant moments.

 

January 17, 2025

When I came to Transylvania in September, I came partly in search of that flourishing multicultural Eastern Europe – or what remains of it – that I’d come to learn so much about through my studies of the region: that of Pieter Judson’s masterful histories of the Habsburg Empire or Stefan Zweig’s World of Yesterday, a dazzling mosaic of peoples, languages, and religions. In perhaps no other corner of the empire was this heterogeneity displayed more wondrously than in Transylvania. A short walk between Kolozsvár’s main square and the Bocskai tér (Piața Avram Iancu) attests to this history, confronting visitors with churches for the Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed, Greek Catholic, Unitarian, and Orthodox faiths. Rounding out this panorama of religious life in Eastern Europe is the Reformed Synagogue north of the city center. A visit to the Házsongárdi cemetery makes clear that this diversity extended beyond religion as well. The cemetery’s name is itself a transliteration of the German Hasengarten (“rabbit garden”), a holdover from the late medieval period when many of the city’s inhabitants were German speakers. And indeed, a sharp eye surveilling the tombstones there can pick out tombstones bearing not only Hungarian and Romanian names, but also those of the city’s historic Jewish and German communities.

Though Kolozsvár was mostly Hungarian speaking, by the early 20th century, other cities further afield in Transylvania remained remarkably multilingual. Brasov and Sibiu, for instance, were roughly divided into thirds between German, Hungarian, and Romanian speakers. But tragically, much of this world was swallowed by the maelstroms of the 20th century: war, mass murder, state persecution, and emigration – voluntary or (more often) otherwise – reduced Transylvania’s Jewish and German populations to scarcely a fraction of their pre-World War II numbers. With few exceptions, churches, houses and cemeteries are all that remain of their legacy. Though my Hungarian contacts here have seldom broached these subjects in conversations with me, I sometimes sense that this grim history weighs on them as they consider their own future in Transylvania. As members of a minority themselves, the precedent set by other minorities’ disappearance from the region dispels any notion that life as they know it can be taken for granted. Though today there is little fear among Romania’s Hungarians that such horrors will again come to pass, pressures to assimilate subtly exert themselves, and the economic pull of Western Europe has made itself felt, too, slowly draining smaller towns and villages of their youth. The Transylvanian Hungarian communities hardest hit by these forces are in the szórvány – the “scattering” of smaller Hungarian settlements outside the compactly inhabited Székely Region (Székelyföld).

The struggles Transylvanian Hungarians face in their efforts to preserve their identity can appear daunting, certainly when set against the background of the historical trend towards homogenization I’ve alluded to above. But dwelling on census data and wallowing in melancholy about the decline of Hungarian culture in Transylvania can distort one’s impression of life on the ground for Hungarians here, which seems to me to be as vibrant as ever.

I spent Christmas in a szórvány community, in Torda. Torda’s history reads like that of Transylvania in miniature. In 1568, a group of elites convened there and issued the Edict of Torda. The first document of its kind in all Europe, the Edict effectively established religious freedom in Transylvania and spared the region of the sectarian bloodshed that ravaged much of Central Europe in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. If that moment represented a triumph for cultural pluralism in Transylvania, then its opposite was found during World War II, when border changes, fear of persecution, and a fierce 1944 battle displaced much of the city’s Hungarian population. Today, they account for some 6 percent of the city – about 2,500 individuals. But what they lack in numbers they make up for in spirit. On Christmas Eve, I accompanied my hosts to Torda’s Reformed church.Fnati Held in a small, converted movie theater from the communist era – they only use the main church building for special occasions – the service drew around 200 attendants – a packed house. Many had come to see the nativity play. Some attendees, I was told, weren’t even members of the Reformed church themselves, but made a habit of coming to see the play every year – a significant annual event in the life of Torda’s Hungarian community. After the service concluded, it took nearly 30 minutes for me and my hosts to cover the 10 meters separating us from the front door: all the parishioners insisted on exchanging greetings, shaking hands, and catching up with each other, refusing to disperse until everyone was up to speed about what their children had accomplished that year, which renovations they had finished with their houses, and the status of the never-ending road construction outside the city. I myself was cornered by the pastor’s mother for a spell. In a mixture of broken Hungarian and German – some Hungarians here know German, especially among older generations and Protestants –, I answered her questions about what brought me as an American to Transylvania, how it is I came to learn any Hungarian, and whom I work for here. Visitors among Transylvania’s Hungarians grow accustomed to such friendly encounters. As a rule, they are excited to receive outsiders curious about their culture – all the more so when they make efforts to learn their language.

If the experience at Torda’s reformed church gave me hope that a bright future lies ahead for Transylvania’s Hungarians, my stay with the Csomais, who graciously hosted me in Torda for Christmas, led me to wonder whether the upheavals of the 20th century brought less an end to the story of the German life here than a brief caesura. The Csomais, a Transylvanian Hungarian and a German, met as students at the University of Würzburg, Germany, in the 1990s and decided to settle in Torda after marrying. Though the children speak Hungarian with their father, and have mostly attended Romanian-language schools, the family’s main language at home is German. Their trilingual household thus resembles a fin-de-siècle Transylvania in miniature. They aren’t the only Germans in the area, either. I’ve also met others who’ve moved to Kolozsvár to work in its thriving IT sector and have started families here. Enough have come that a fully accredited German school now operates in the city center, whose students often take lunch in the cafeteria of the Református Kollégium, where I teach English in the afternoons. Still other Germans have come to study at Kolozsvár’s medical school. So while the autochthonous German minority of Transylvania – the so-called Transylvanian Saxons – now counts only a few thousand individuals, the ease with which EU citizens can travel and work across the region ensures that a steady stream of Germans and Austrians flows into Romania, suffusing life into the German cultural scene here and establishing a sense of continuity with Transylvania’s cultural past – readily apparent when one visits Kolozsvár’s Oktoberfest or the town’s larger bookstores, in which a fair selection of German titles can usually be found.

While the Transylvania of 1900, whose loss has been much bemoaned by generations of melancholic memoirists and Magyarphiles, is unlikely to ever return, a keen observer can note with satisfaction that a new multicultural constellation is taking shape here that isn’t too different from that of yesteryear. And if the ongoing project of European integration is seen to its conclusion, one imagines it might have more pleasant surprises in store for us.

 

November 18, 2024

Peyton explores a religious landmark in Alba/Fehér County

If you ask Hungarians what Transylvania means to them, as I did before coming here, you’re likely to get enthusiastic, but somewhat obscure responses. They mention the castles, the mountains, the churches – but transcending all of this is a certain je ne sais quoi; an almost mystical quality the region holds in their worldview that they can’t quite articulate. Gradually, though, through excursions like the one I made to Gyulafehérvár, I think I’m coming to understand it, at least partly.

I recently stopped in the city of 60,000 to the south of Kolozsvár (Cluj). Though there are few Hungarians living there today, Gyulafehérvár (Sfintu Gheorghe) retains a place of prominence in the Hungarian world as a historical and religious site. The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Gyulafehérvár, which covers most of Transylvania, was established here by Stephen I in 1009, during his drive to Christianize Hungary, then still a very young kingdom, whose people practiced the pagan religion they had brought from their Eastern homeland. Before entering St. Michael’s diocesan cathedral, I was welcomed by a modest archaeological monument outlining the location of the first church, which imparted a sense of stepping back in time to Hungary’s earliest days.

The cathedral, on the other hand, is anything but modest. Though its interior is relatively austere compared to many cathedrals of western Europe, the effect of light passing through its stained-glass windows and shining on the stone walls dazzles, nonetheless. Inside, perhaps the most important points of interest are the tombs of several famous figures from Hungarian history. The most prominent among them is John (János) Hunyadi, the father of King Matthias (Mátyás) Corvinus and a national hero in his own right, having repelled multiple Ottoman invasions in the 15th century. (It is even said that the European tradition of the noon bell ringing originated as a celebration of Hunyadi’s victory over the Ottomans at the Siege of Belgrade.) His tomb was adorned with ribbons in the Hungarian national colors, left by visitors and pilgrims from Transylvania and beyond, highlighting the enduring bonds that unite Hungarians despite modern borders.

Many pilgrims come to visit another tomb in St. Michael’s: that of Áron Márton. Born in the Székely Region, Márton entered the priesthood and acted as bishop of Gyulafehérvár from 1938-1980, a tumultuous period of Transylvanian history shaped by border changes, World War II, and totalitarianism. He is remembered for speaking out against the deportation of Transylvania’s Jews during World War II and, after 1947, the abuses of the communist regime in Romania. The communist state punished Márton severely for his opposition, first incarcerating him, then confining him to house arrest for most of the 1950s and 1960s. His courage and sacrifice earned him the enduring reverence of Transylvanian Catholics, and today, one finds many schools, streets, statues, and other memorials dedicated to him throughout the region.

The borders between past and present are less discrete in Transylvania: Hungarian history is experienced intimately here, being deeply embedded in the landscape and woven into the fabric of everyday life in the form of countless rituals and customs; it’s made tangible in a way that touches even the less sentimental. And in a dizzying modern world replete with uncertainty, these encounters with the past serve as a powerful source of balance and reassurance.

 

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