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Blue Guide Travels in Transylvania: The Greater Târnava Valley
This short Blue Guide, now in its 2nd edition, is an explorer’s handbook to one of the most fascinating corners of Europe, one of the few places on the continent where travel is still a genuine adventure. It takes as its focus the towns and villages of the Greater Târnava Valley, home to an exceptional cultural heritage. Here Romanian, Hungarian, Saxon, Jewish and Roma elements come together in an extraordinarily rich mix, against a backdrop of some of the loveliest rural landscapes in Europe. This was once a stronghold of German-speaking Lutherans, whose great fortified churches, defended by turreted walls, dominate every village. Abandoned now since their congregations emigrated en masse to Germany after the fall of Communism, they remain as stalwart and poignant reminders of a vanished era. In the surrounding countryside, farming practices remain largely unchanged since the Middle Ages. Stooks of corn dot the fields, grass is hand-cut by scythe, cows return from pasture at evening time, and great flocks of sheep roam with a single shepherd and his dog.
The guide was launched at the 3rd Transylvanian Book Festival, held in the village of Richiș in September 2018.
Inside look