Proceedings of The 9th International Conference on Modern Approach in Humanities
Year: 2021
DOI: https://www.doi.org/10.33422/9th.mahconf.2021.10.150
The history and memory of houses in an Ethnographic Park. An innovative approach
Raicu Carmen Florentina
ABSTRACT:
The Ethnographic Parks are usually presenting their visitors houses, tools, folk costumes, household items, installations with an accent on traditions and customs. But the soul of those houses was given by the people that lived there and their history should be cherished along with those traditions. How difficult can be to rebuild the memory of a family that lived in such a house, from the construction time up to moving it in the park, meaning even hundreds of years? In this paper I will present the research that I’ve done in order to find the descendants of such a family from the northern part of Transylvania, German ethnic, even though nobody from their original village remembered them. They left by carriages, along with all the others of the same ethnicity, not only from that village but from all the area when Romania, former ally of Germany in the Second World War, changed sides becoming Russia’s ally on the 23rd of August 1944. The direction was Austria and Germany. Some of them made it and settled there, others not, being caught behind the war front line and dying in labour camps in Russia or surviving and returning to the village where their homes were meanwhile taken by others. Some of the members of this specific family, that escaped, managed to arrive in a market town in Upper Austria and settled there together with other 14 families from their village. A story behind a house of The Ethnographic Park “Romulus Vuia”, Cluj-Napoca, Romania.
keywords: Transylvania; war; ethnicity; village; German.