Transylvania

Grin and bear it

3 February 2007

As my little car laboured around a bend in the snowy Carpathian logging road, a brown furry figure jumped out of the forest on all fours and made off in front of the car. It was, perhaps, a sign that I had been too long in the city that I identified it as a man in a bear outfit. But as we pursued the lolloping creature, I realised my mistake: this was the real thing, a bear!

Bears make regular raids on the towns and villages of Transylvania in search of food. Occasionally they are shot; more often they get away, and their lot is infinitely better than the pigs’. One amazingly cold morning, not long after the start of my Transylvanian holiday, I was invited to a pig-killing, the highlight of the social calendar in this part of central Transylvania.

My hosts were Székely (pron. Se-kay) farmers, members of a Hungarian-speaking people claiming separate origins from the Magyars. They are tough, independent and mordantly humorous people who defended the borders of Transylvania and later the Habsburg empire from the Turks. In return they enjoyed the privilege of self-government like Russia’s Cossacks, free from serfdom and foreign military service.

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