My miniscule Airbnb apartment in Cluj is superbly located, just a couple of minutes’ walk from the central square, Piața Unirii. And so I keep finding more photo ops (and eating more meals) there.
The southern portion of Cluj’s main square, Piața Unirii, facing south, away from St. Michael’s Church and the Matthias Corvinus statue (21 June 2018).
This is a fun urban scene. Here I’m standing at the southern edge of the square, looking north toward the rear of St. Michael’s Church. To the left are more anti-corruption protesters. Shortly after I took this photo, they took off on another march. To the right, an outdoor concert is underway. And just behind that, local kids have turned the statue of King Matthias Corvinus into a jungle gym (23 June 2018).
Those threatening storm clouds in the photo above? They’ve been a familiar fixture for me here in Transylvania. It’s rained (usually a thunderstorm or two) almost every day I’ve been here, and it’s really cramping my style. It’s hard to plan long walks and explorations when you’re always at risk of being caught in a downpour. And with the rain have come cooler temperatures — the mercury barely made it to 60˚F yesterday (23 June), and lows have been in the 40s. I didn’t bring a jacket with me. Even with three layers (a t-shirt, my orange long-sleeve shirt, and my brick-colored sweater), I’m usually cold. Take a gander at my upcoming Cluj selfies — usually I’m in orange or red here.
Not that the frequent rains are all bad. I spotted a couple of nice rainbows as the rain abated (23 June 2018).
I took full advantage of a rare hot and sunny early afternoon on 21 June. Here’s one of my few Cluj t-shirt-wearing selfies. If I look pale, that’s because I’m slathered with sticky, streaky white baby sunblock (21 June 2018).
Here’s a closer look at the larger-than-life equestrian statue of Matthias Corvinus, a 15th-century Hungarian king, in the center of Piața Unirii. Although it makes sense to have a statue of him here, since he was born in Cluj, it’s still a bit surprising to me that when Cluj became part of the new nation of Romania, the city left his statue here, given ethnic Romanians’ resentment at centuries of Hungarian rule over them (21 June 2018).
And the Hungarian angle is interesting. One thing that differentiates Cluj from Brașov is the strong Hungarian contribution to Cluj’s history and culture. Until the 1950s, Hungarians made up the majority of Cluj’s population, although with the communist government’s decades of importing Romanian peasants into the cities to work in industry, Cluj is now only 16% Hungarian. It’s one of those historical legacies that makes for ethnic tension in the Balkans. The Romanians trace their origin to the Roman province of Dacia in this region, but from the third century C.E. until the early 20th century, the Romanians were ruled by others — Hungarians, Saxons, Turks, and Austrians. After all those centuries of living as second-class citizens in their own country, it would be unfortunate but understandable if the Romanians tried to suppress that legacy of foreign rule. But here in Cluj, people seem to embrace these different traditions. I think that’s very commendable.
This statue of Romulus and Remus, the legendary founders of Rome (and thus Romanians’ mythic ancestors), stands along Bulevardul Eroilor not far from Piața Unirii (21 June 2018).
Unlike Brașov, Cluj has a big-city feel. Well, I take that back. It has a medium-sized-city feel. Like, about the size of Portland, Oregon, say. Which is a perfectly respectable size for a city, in my opinion.
Bulevardul Eroilor, running east from Piața Unirii, is one of Cluj’s main streets. While unfortunately not traffic-free, it has a very wide pedestrian section lined for a block or two with outdoor café tables. And that’s a bike lane you see there in red. I like it (21 June 2018).
Another of my favorite streets in Cluj, Strada Matei Corvin, is one of the city’s very few pedestrian-only streets. This will be a future dinner spot for me, if the weather cooperates (21 June 2018).
And no matter where I go in the world, it seems, the Jehovah’s Witnesses have beaten me there. From Washington, D.C. to Taiwan to Europe. Two of them will be standing in a high foot-traffic area, looking approachable, beside their posters and pamphlets. And I can’t remember ever seeing anyone talking to them, in any of these places.
At least they have nice weather (for the moment). And I like the lavender paint job on the building behind them (21 June 2018).
During my thunderstorm-interrupted explorations on 21 June, I followed pedestrian Strada Matei Corvin past the cafés and Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Not all of Cluj’s buildings are lovely turn-of-the-20th-century pastel-painted manses. Most of the city is more modern. This building on the right is a bit unfortunate. But to be fair, gray, blocky buildings were all the rage in the United States in the mid-20th century too. Washington, D.C. is full of these monstrosities (21 June 2018).
This Holocaust Memorial stands in a small park off Strada Matei Corvin. In the early 1940s, Romania’s Axis-installed government killed hundreds of thousands of Jews — including 18,000 here in Cluj — and several thousand Roma (gypsies). Romania switched to the Allied side in 1944 following a coup d’état (21 June 2018).
Cluj’s Central Park is laid out like an airstrip with trees — straight and narrow. This lovely pedestrian path screams out to be run on, which is what I did on 23 June. Once again the weather conspired to make life interesting. I was pelted by pea- and grape nut-sized hail for almost my entire run through here. I don’t think that’s a first, but it’s certainly been a very long time since I ran through a hailstorm (21 June 2018).
A footbridge crosses this muddy canal near Cluj Central Park. This seems to be Cluj couples’ preferred spot to symbolize their undying love with padlocks. Also note the darkening clouds. I am about to get wet (21 June 2018).
Periodically, walking around Cluj, I’d catch a vista of the farmlands surrounding the city. Cluj is an urban island in the rural ocean of northwestern Transylvania (23 June 2018).
Cluj has its share of green space. Across the canal, Parcul Cetățuia sits on a hill overlooking the city. The stairs and paths here are in rough shape. This is the best-kept section of it that I found (21 June 2018).
This is a nice view from up in Parcul Cetățui. I spent a little too much time enjoying it and got caught in the downpour you can see advancing there on the horizon (21 June 2018).
After the rain abated, I headed back to the park, to a restaurant I noticed with excellent views. And excellent protection from the elements. That’s chicken covered in bacon in a sour cream sauce — very Romanian. And the inevitable french fries. And I felt a little odd ordering a “Lynchburg lemonade” (Jack Daniel’s, Southern Comfort, lemonade) in Transylvania, but it hit the spot and the price was right (21 June 2018).
Over the past several weeks, I’ve realized that I was a little harsh with Spain regarding smoking and graffiti. Both of these, but especially the former, are much more common in every European country I’ve visited so far than they are in the U.S. And Romania takes the cake in terms of smoking. As I sat eating my meal (at a fairly isolated table, thankfully), virtually every other patron of the restaurant was smoking. Indoors (well sort of; if you consider that plastic sheeting a wall, we were indoors). Many of the cafés I’ve eaten in here in Romania have cigarettes on the menu, for the convenience of their customers. It’s revolting. And more to the point, it diminishes my dating prospects. So many women (young women!) smoke here. I don’t have many red lines when it comes to dating, but one of them is I can’t date a smoker. Kissing someone with cigarette breath? Yuck!
Another thing I don’t like about Romania: Romanians don’t recycle. Remember those colorful recycling bins in Zagreb? In Spain, Portugal, Croatia, and Slovenia, there were often four or five different types of bins, for household waste, organic waste, paper, plastic and metal, and glass. In Ljubljana in particular, I remember being frustrated at times because all I could find were three different types of recycling bins, when what I really needed was a plain old trash can. Not so here in Romania. Here, everything goes in the trash. I’ll have to find a way to incorporate this into my city ratings somehow. It bothers me that nobody recycles here.
Anyway, getting back to my exploration of Cluj. On Friday, 22 June, I got in a little more walking in between cloudbursts. One thing I like about Cluj: It gets very few tourists. Even compared with Brașov’s very modest tourist scene, Cluj is all about the locals. Of all the places I’ve visited so far, only in Rijeka, Croatia did I see fewer tourists than here in Cluj. And as with most dissimilarities with Washington, D.C., I like it.
OK, one more pasty-looking sunblock-slathered selfie from Thursday, 21 June. I also passed through this square, featuring the tall statue of 19th-century Romanian revolutionary Avram Iancu, the following day.
Unlike Brașov, the physical traces of Cluj’s medieval history are few and far between. This is a small section of the surviving city wall, with one of its towers. As in Brașov, members of craft guilds were responsible for defending each tower. This one was the tailors’ tower (22 June 2018).
Here I am, wearing two layers on this chilly day, in front of Cluj’s lovely opera house. I heard a soprano inside singing some glass-cracking scales (22 June 2018).
Cluj is a college town, which I suppose I’m not fully experiencing since I’m here in the summer when classes are out. The local university is called Universitatea Babeș-Bolyai. Wait.. University of Babes?! Sounds awesome! But no. Babeș (the “ș” is pronounced “sh”) means Romanian, and Bolyai means Hungarian. So it’s “Romanian-Hungarian University.” And even today, with so few Hungarians around, it offers classes in both languages. Part of Cluj’s multicultural scene. And this being Romania, I passed a group of eight students sitting on the steps nearby, and seven of them were smoking like chimneys (22 June 2018).
Saturday 23 June also started out chilly, gray, and rainy on and off. It was the perfect temperature for running, although the hailstorm definitely cramped my style. I got in a quick outdoor café lunch during a perfectly timed break in the rain, and after sitting out the latest cloudburst, I took a walk in Cluj’s enormous Hungarian Cemetery.
I spent a lot of time walking through here, and took tons of photos. I suppose that makes me a bit morbid (23 June 2018).
The cemetery sits on a hill with what would be commanding views of the city and surrounding fields, but for the suburban sprawl abutting the cemetery. There’s a website, www.findagrave.com, that I ran across during my genealogy research. I wonder if anyone has catalogued all of the gravestones in this cemetery online? I think cemetery-cataloguing would be a very interesting hobby. Because I like data, and, as we’ve already established, I’m morbid (23 June 2018).
I saw the squashed remains of several of these big snails in various parks in Brașov, and here in the cemetery I found my first live specimen. Pretty cool! (23 June 2018)
As befits Cluj’s inclusive nature, there are people other than Hungarians buried in the Hungarian Cemetery. There are about as many Romanians as Hungarians, a smattering of Germans (probably descendants of Saxons the Hungarians encouraged to settle here in the Middle Ages), a monument to locals killed during the anti-communist uprising of 21 December 1989, and military plots, such as this one honoring Soviet soldiers who died alongside Romanians (after the latter switched sides in 1944) fighting the Axis powers in World War II (23 June 2018).
The most interesting tombstones to me are the ones for people who died young. I wonder how they died, and what their lives would have been like if they had lived to a ripe old age. Andrea Antal here was born in 1977, the same year as me, but died in 2006. So she was only 28 or 29. What happened? Did she have time to get married or have kids before she died? Would my life have been worthwhile if I had died in 2006? With all the time I have on my hands during this trip, I think about stuff like this (23 June 2018).