Why we chose the Carpathians, and not somewhere easier

Tuscany is finished. The Cotswolds are finished. The Provence is finished. What is left, and why we think it might be the last quiet corner of Europe worth a careful look.

The Saxon villages of Transylvania were settled in the 12th century by German farmers brought east by the Hungarian crown. They built fortified churches, raised barns, planted orchards, and stayed for eight hundred years. In the 1990s most of them left, in the great Aussiedler emigration to Germany. The villages emptied. The houses stayed. And the people who came back, or arrived for the first time, are now rebuilding them — patiently, mostly by hand, often with the original mortar. That is what we wanted to show you.