The holidays, the traditions and the customs have preserved their entire originality and, often, their impressiveness only in the villages. They should have, as this is where they appeared. As there is no month of the year without several events of this kind, with their irresistible picturesque, it was only natural that this "calendar" be adopted up to its tiniest details, by the rural tourism. Which, of course, offers other arguments that cannot be refused by the stressed man of our times.

Fancy, for example, isn't it wonderful to watch at night, before going to bed, a sky crowded with stars, as you just cannot see in the town invaded with advertisements and lights? What could possibly be more optimistic when waking up in the morning than a green meadow, covered with wild flowers, whose scent you can perceive through the open window, before you walk towards it barefooted in order to verify the promises of the naturist therapy about the direct contact with the earth and the dew? After all that, instead of pre-packaged and half-prepared food, you are offered a meal with hot fresh milk, eggs from the hen cackling in the yard, a pear, an apple, a plum - which you could pick yourself - the mystery of an oven revealing baked pies, home-made cookies, food that you taste now for the first time. But we won't tell you everything in these pages.

The Transylvanian villages have a whole Scheherazade story to tell you, sometimes in three languages - Romanian, Magyar or German. Search them in any season. At Christmas or New Year's time you will be charmed by the processions of masked people, carol singers and waits. The Easter brings red painted eggs and religious sermons gathering impressive processions with lit candles. It is followed by the celebration, on the 23rd of April, of St Gheorghe (George), the protector of the vegetation, Noaptea de Sânziene, the Midsummer day, in June, when the people pick healing plants and light huge purifying fires, Cununa de seceris (Harvest Garland), at harvest time. There are also the fairs - the most important ones were turned into folk feasts, such as those on the Peak Gaina in the Mountains Apuseni, the pastoral traditions, with Sâmbra Oilor or Masuris, the regular fairs, held weekly or at holidays, with the bustle of the buyers and sellers of cattle, agricultural tools or house-hold objects. For an Occidental traveller, coming from a world where urbanization and civilization have long transformed the rural life, it will be amazing to find that in Transylvania there still are women who spin the wool as they did in the Middle Ages or work linen or carpets with the old weaving loom.

Many villages still preserve the custom of ancient dances, and, on Sundays at the church or for the holidays, the old men wear their national costume as the entire community used to in the old days. The ethnic groups who, besides the Romanians, live in Transylvania - Magyars, Saxons or Romanies - contribute to the colourful originality of this charming picture.
A magical archaism will take into possession the one who searches for this kind of exploring. In the end, as the millennium that has just begun values the mystery, the miracle and the adventure, a holiday in a Transylvanian village, with its feasts and traditions, could be a very interesting choice. The elegant villas - some of them endowed with pools and romantic hunting panoplies - the modern pensions, the rustic setting elegantly adapted are not missing from the offer of a rural tourism continuously developing, not only in Transylvania, but everywhere in Romania, from the North where you must see the gorgeous land of Maramures and Bucovina, up to the south frontier, with the Danube resting after passing through a vast part of Europe.