Life continues to return to the empty churches and villages of Transylvania, writes Jonathan Gaisman.
If you want an authentic literary experience of Transylvania, the one connection to avoid is anything to do with Bram Stoker. A better entrée would be Miklós Bánffy’s Transylvanian Trilogy, in spirit the last great 19th-century European novel, though written in the 1930s. This Hungarian nobleman, whose estates (like the rest of the province) were transferred to Romania under the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, evokes better than anyone the landscapes of a province whose name still seems charged with a magical, even mythic essence. Its actuality has captured the imagination of many English people, including His Majesty the King.
