Thanks to Quentin Tarantino for reviving the Western, my most favorite movie genre.
While you’re waiting for The Hateful Eight – and what a fitting Christmas film this is -, enjoy Django Unchained.
Hungarian fence in 1989: Helping economic migrants who want to buy better cars and bananas – good.
Hungarian fence in 2015: Helping genuine refugees from war-ravaged countries who risk their lives to survive – bad.
And just because it rhymes: Hungarian dance
And another record for Romania! The city with the cleanest air in Europe is Cluj-Napoca.
That’s at least what the French “Association Nationale pour la Préservation et l’Amélioration de la Qualité de l’Air” proclaimed. But they only examined the air quality of the 100 largest cities in Europe, which means that there may be countless smaller cities with even cleaner air, of course.
When I was in Cluj last December, it certainly didn’t look like clean air. I could hardly see to the top of churches as I stood in front of them, let alone overlook the city from the hill across the river that I had climbed to get an overview.
To be fair, I was just unlucky on that dreary winter day, and Cluj is a rather beautiful city most of the time.
Always skeptical about bold claims like this, I try to take a deeper look at the methodology behind the statistics. In this case, the authors of the study are very open about the underlying flaws and explain why Cluj came first:
In effect, it’s a lack of measuring stations that helped to propel Cluj to the top of this table. There were only two stations in town, compared to 48 in Berlin for example, much reducing the likelihood of any threshold being exceeded. And the stations in Cluj don’t even measure fine particles.
So basically, this study is worthless. One wonders why it was done at all.
Targu Mures, about 70 km from Cluj and where I live, definitely couldn’t lay claim to the title of the cleanest air in Europe, for we have the Azomures chemical plant here, which has been caught repeatedly, or should I say regularly, in exceeding the legal limits for pollution.
Tomorrow, 13 August 2015, there will be a protest in Targu Mures against this ongoing pollution, at 1700 in Piata Victoriei in front of the town hall. I will be there!
(The photos in Cluj were taken by my brother in December 2014. I took the photo of Azomures on 6 August 2015.)
I bet this hotel in Amsterdam doesn’t receive many guests from Hungary.
Ok, that one is hard to understand for non-Hungarians or non-historians. Don’t worry about it, or – if you have too much time on your hands – read about the Treaty of Trianon. Surprisingly, some people still rile on about it 95 years later, while the rest of the world has moved on.
I have been living in this beautiful town in Transylvania for almost a year, yet hardly any of my foreign friends have visited me here. It’s not that they wouldn’t be interested, but it’s just too complicated to travel here if you are not familiar with some Romanian peculiarities.
In Google Maps, the town is called Târgu Mureș. So, my friends try to find a train connection to Târgu Mureș. After searching for half an hour, they tell me: “There is no such place. Or it doesn’t have a train station.” Offended in my adopted local pride, I tell them that Târgu Mureș does of course have a train station, and that we even have international direct trains.
After some back and forth, I go to the website of our fantastic Romanian Railway and search for the connection myself. Ah! Now I see the problem. I call my friends and tell them: “You need to search for Tîrgu Mureș, not Târgu Mureș.” This question always comes next: “How long have you been living there? And you still don’t know how to spell the name of your town!” I mumble some apologies about recent linguistic and spelling reforms.
But pay attention: While your ticket will say Tîrgu Mureș, the train station where you get off is called Târgu Mureș.
After a few days, my friends call me again, telling me that if they took the train, they would spend all of their holiday on the way to Tîrgu Mureș and back home from Târgu Mureș or the other way round. – “No problem,” I reply, “we also have an international airport. WizzAir has cheap flights to here from anywhere in Europe.” (I don’t mention that only three planes land every day, that it’s the smallest airport in Europe and the only airport which doesn’t even have a cash machine. They will notice it soon enough.) A few hours later, I receive another phone call: “I don’t know what you are telling me, but there are no flights to Tîrgu Mureș.” They are already getting slightly annoyed. “Oh,” I remember now, “on the WizzAir website, it’s spelled Târgu Mureș.”
The airport’s website is one of the many examples where you find both spellings used by the same organization, as if they can’t make up their mind.
At this point, my friends usually think that I have been joking and that I made up some random town. They suddenly got their vacation “cancelled” or their child becomes sick.
And they haven’t even asked about the bus website. There, you can book a bus from Târgu Mureș to Tîrgu Mureș. Confusingly, it takes between one and one-and-a-half hours to get from one name of the same city to the other.
So I decide to take a walk around town to find out once and for all what the correct spelling is. Naturally, my first stop are the signs outside of town. Sure enough, they say Târgu Mureș. (The signs also list Marosvásárhely, which I assume, based on the unpronounceability of the word, must be an Icelandic twin city.) These are the official signs, so everything is settled. Or is it? I shouldn’t have walked past City Hall on my way back home, for there I got mightily confused. Like on the city’s own website, it says Tîrgu Mureș.
At that point, I realized that I couldn’t solve this puzzle on my own. I would need to ask my Romanian friends. Many of them had studied languages, so they would be competent experts. All I got, however, was the information that the name should actually be spelled Târgu-Mureș or Tîrgu-Mureș, with a hyphen. “It is most annoying how the hyphen gets dropped and people get caught up in the â-vs-î debate,” these academics proclaimed indignantly, before arguing among themselves whether the official name should be Târgu-Mureș or Tîrgu-Mureș, in the most heated manner.
“It has always been Târgu-Mureș.” – “But there was a spelling reform in 1953!” – “That was a Communist plot!” – “It doesn’t matter whose idea it was, but the spelling is now Tîrgu-Mureș.” – “You are way behind! There was another spelling reform in 1993.” – “That was a plot by the European Union!” – “What would the EU care about our spelling?” – “We should not forget that we are the true descendants of the Romans!” – “You nationalist!” – “You internationalist traitor!” – “Anyway, a spelling reform doesn’t affect names, you dumbass.” – “It does affect official names. Târgu Jiu, Târgu Neamț, Târgu Cărbunești, they all changed their names.” – “They are losers!” – “Look how it’s spelled in your ID card!” – “In my ID card, it also says that I am 183 cm.”
The debate got out of hand and I began to understand why Târgu/Tîrgu-Mureș has so many hospitals. I had also understood what made Târgu/Tîrgu-Mureș so special. In other cities in Romania, this was a matter of spelling. If it changed, it changed; no big deal. In Târgu/Tîrgu-Mureș however, there are basically two factions of the population (let’s call them Târgus and Tîrgus) and both of them make up around 50% of the population, making sure that the debate will never be settled.
Like in Eastern Ukraine and in Transnistria, the debate about language is not only a debate about language here. It’s a debate about identity, about history, about interpretation, about representation. Language is used not as a tool of communication, but as a divisive tool, as if people weren’t able to speak two or more languages (which even the most radical Târgus and Tîrgus implicitly acknowledge by sending their children to English- and German-speaking schools).
At one time, the sign at the town entrance looked like this. Don’t worry, it’s all the same place.
Now, I should say that most Târgus and Tîrgus are absolutely friendly, welcoming and helpful people. In fact, they get along in everyday life much better than their distant cousins in Buchapest and Budarest believe.
However, when I look at who goes to which church, who goes to which bar and who gets married to whom, there is still a level of (voluntary) segregation like in Alabama in the 1960s. If you are reading this from afar, you probably find all of this very funny (I can assure you that the locals don’t and that I will suffer everything from being unfriended on Facebook to finding Molotov cocktails in my mailbox), but let’s not forget that as recently as in March 1990, people were killed over this shit.
Some centuries ago, the conflict between Târgus and Tîrgus had actually escalated so much that Europe’s most peace-loving and peace-guaranteeing nation had to intervene. Germans settled the area and decreed that the town would henceforth be known as Neumarkt am Mieresch. For linguistic, political or ethnic reasons, this new name never took hold. But, in an appreciative nod to the one thing the Germans were really good at, the local beer is still called Neumarkt.
It must be really depressing if your nation is good in literature, poetry, music, football, engineering and even humor, but everything the world knows you for is beer.
Anyway, as an international visitor to Târgu/Tîrgu-Mureș you want to know how to refer to the city you are about to visit. That one is actually surprisingly easy:
“And what’s with the roof on top of the a and the i?” you have been wondering all along. Once you are in Târgu/Tîrgu-Mureș, take a walk to Valea Rece, the largest slum in town, and you will see where the roofs are missing. After all, a silly language dispute is more important than housing people.
Communist centrally planned economy:
Capitalist free market economy:
The main difference seems to be that nowadays, young people do the queuing themselves instead of sending their mothers. That’s progress.
In the past two years, I have had the exact following conversation around 57 times:
Someone: Where are you from?
Me: I am originally from Germany, but …
Someone: Oh, from Germany?!! There is this really funny video on YouTube …
Me: [Sigh.] I know that one already.
Someone: … where they compare the sound of German …
Me: Yes, I know which one you mean. Everyone mentions that to me.
Someone: You have to watch it! It’s really funny!
Me: I have seen it often enough, thank you, and it’s really not that funny.
Someone: Kraaaaaankenwaaaaagen! [rolling with laughter]
Me: [being unimpressed/tired/annoyed]
You know which video I am talking about. It’s this silly stereotyped video which was not even particularly funny the first time I watched it.
I kept pointing out that German can actually sound quite agreeable when I speak it and that we aren’t really shouting and screaming all the time. Actually, after living in Malta and in Bari, I can say for certain that there are countries/regions where people shout much more. We can probably add some Middle Eastern and at least one North American country to that list.
Anyway, finally someone got around to making a more nuanced, neutral, scientific comparison between German and a few other languages:
Granted, comparing anything with Hungarian or Latvian skews the playing field a bit.
When I am looking for a quiet place to read, there aren’t as many options available as it may seem: In the park, noisy children are playing. In the forest, man-eating bears are roaming. At the library, some of the girls are distracting.
That’s how I took to the thought of hanging out at cemeteries. Not at active cemeteries where I might disturb a funeral or fall into a dug-out grave, but old cemeteries which haven’t been visited by anyone in a long time. Forgotten cemeteries. Cemeteries that in a way died themselves. Like the Ottoman cemetery in Bitola in Macedonia or the German military cemetery in Vilnius, Lithuania, which is now a leafy, shadowy park.
In Târgu Mureș in Romania, where I currently live, I stumbled upon a Soviet military cemetery. If you have already traveled in Eastern Europe, you will recognize the standard architecture which has been used hundreds of times.
The cemetery is indeed as deserted as it looks. One reason is its location on a steep hillside which puts an arduous climb before any commemoration. The other reason is that in these future-bound, forward-looking times nobody wants to remember what happened 70 years ago.
Even on 8 May, the anniversary of the end of World War II, no wreaths were laid, no speeches made, no anthems sung. Only a few geraniums in black plastic pots had been deposited by someone.
Siting on one of the decaying wooden benches, I contemplate how much depends even nowadays on whether you were born east or west of that line where the Western Allies or the Red Army stood in May 1945. In Eastern Europe, the memory of the liberation is understandably marred by the memory of the 45 ensuing years of communism, yet this often overlooks cause and effect. If you go to bed with the Nazis, like Romania did, then you gotta be liberated.
For Jews, Roma and other persecuted people who were hiding in cellars or attics (if they hadn’t been deported or murdered already), the chattering engines and rumbling chains of Soviet tanks did primarily announce liberty.
For that reason and because numerically they bore the largest burden in liberating Europe from the fascists, I do find it appropriate to commemorate the Soviet soldiers who are buried here.
There are these two Frenchmen, Raymond and his son David Belle, who go around and claim that they invented Parkour running.
In reality, the sport had already been invented by Arnim Dahl in Germany in the 1930s. Here is some early Parkour footage:
This reduces the number of useful inventions made in France back to 4 (all cheese-related) and increases the number of useful inventions made in Germany to 18,277.
The Happy Hermit 