… and Hand-embroidered in Romania

This is not a lady’s belt. These artfully embroidered belts ornate mens’ waists at Hermannstadt, Romania at least once a year when the Hermannstädter Sachsen celebrate their “national” day.

© Hermannstädter Zeitung, Nr. 2500, 30.09.2016, Foto: Werner Fink
The descendants of German settlers from the Middle Ages are a sizable minority in Romania’s Western province Transylvania. They are all bilingual German and Romanian and have their own newspaper, the Hermannstädter Zeitung. I am grateful to Beate Unger the editor in chief who told me a lot about the Sachsen on my visit to see my daughter who was working in Romania. Klaus Johannis, the Romanian president hails from their community. They have left Germany and Austria hundreds and hundreds years ago. As professed protestants they were exiled from their home countries like the Huguenots from France.

Their fortified churches in Siebenbürgen, the Land of the Seven Towers, testify of the struggles they had to endure at their new country.

The wild guy looking at you comes from the same Romanian town with a different name. In Romanian Hermannstadt is called Sibiu. He got a new home in my French terrace.

© www.tourism.sibiu.ro, author: mb
In early spring the people of Sibiu celebrate the end of their severe winter with processions of masked man and a lot of noise. The custom is dating back to the late Middle Ages. Legend has it that the inhabitants scared the Turks away acting as a funny character, the Lol or Urzel in German. The somewhat pagan custom reminds me of the Basler Fasnacht where the otherwise quite sober citizens of the Swiss town wear also frightful masks in carnival. They do it for the same purpose: Spring is in the air. Let’s give winter a final kick. Out he goes. 


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