From Transylvania to the Blue Ridge, Part 2: More parallel mountain landscapes
- appalachianplaces
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Updated: 13 minutes ago
In our March 2025 update to Appalachian Places, we explored commonalities between the Appalachian and Carpathian Mountains, focusing on the village of Rosia Montana, Romania, located in northern Transylvania. In this article, we shift our focus to the mountains of southern Transylvania, discussing the parallels between that region and the southern Appalachians, and the innovative work being done by scholars at Transilvania University in Brasov, Romania.
By Ron Roach
Cades Cove in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee and Magura in the Piatra Craiului Mountains of Romania may seem worlds apart. Yet, these two mountain communities share similar landscapes, histories, stories of preservation and resilience, and the enduring bond between people and place. Despite being separated by nearly 5,000 miles, they offer compelling examples of how mountain cultures develop in response to their environments and how these cultures can serve as important sources of knowledge and meaning in today’s rapidly changing world.
Before European settlers arrived in the 1820s, the high mountain valley now known as Cades Cove was used by the Cherokee people as a hunting ground. By the early twentieth century, it was a thriving rural community. In the 1930s, however, Cades Cove was incorporated into the newly established Great Smoky Mountains National Park, displacing the families who resided there. While some residents welcomed the chance to sell, others resisted in court, and some accepted leases that allowed them to remain on their land during their lifetime, under specific guidelines from the park. The last school in the community shut down in 1944 and in 1945 the National Park Service designated Cades Cove a historical area, removing the more modern structures. Today, the now uninhabited community serves as a living museum, offering visitors a glimpse into pioneer mountain life along an 11-mile loop road that passes by preserved log cabins, barns, and churches.
The village of Magura, situated on a high ridge in the Carpathians, is also within the boundaries of a national park: Piatra Craiului National Park in southern Transylvania, Romania. Unlike Cades Cove, Magura’s inhabitants were allowed to stay on their land under certain restrictions from the national park. Therefore, this community of several hundred residents has been able to maintain much of its traditional way of life — hand-cut hay with conical haystacks, sheep herding, and traditional farming — all practices that would have been very much at home in Cades Cove before the 1930s.
There are strong parallels between the two national parks as well. Both were established to protect natural and cultural heritage in mountain communities. Great Smoky Mountains National Park, established in 1934, straddles the borders of North Carolina and Tennessee, following the Great Smoky Mountains range, part of the Blue Ridge Mountains of the southern Appalachians. The Park contains approximately 522,000 acres and is the second largest national park in the eastern US (second only to The Everglades). The highest peak in the Smokies is Mount Kowohi (a Cherokee word meaning “mulberry place”), formerly known as Clingman’s Dome, which at 6,643 feet is the third highest peak in the entire Appalachian Mountains.
Piatra Craiului National Park (its name means “King’s Rock” in Romanian) covers 36,500 acres of karst landscape, with striking limestone ridges, deep gorges, and caves. Its highest peak is Varful La Om, 7,343 feet tall and considered one of the most scenic spots in the Carpathians. The park was founded as a natural reserve in 1938 and became a national park in 1990, one of 13 national parks formed just after the Romanian people overthrew the communist regime of Nicolae Ceausescu and established a democratic government.
Both parks demonstrate remarkable biodiversity and are favorite destinations for outdoor and nature enthusiasts, as well as casual tourists. The southern Appalachians are considered the most biodiverse region in the continental United States, with more than 100 native trees, 1,400 flowering plants, 500 moss and fern species, and more than 70 species of mammal, including black bears, elk, otters, and bobcats. Similarly, Piatra Craiului boasts more than 1,100 species of plants, 110 species of birds, and more than 100 species of mammals, including brown bears, wolves, and lynx.
Another commonality between the two parks is the pressure from increasing development and tourism. Great Smoky Mountains National Park, within a day’s drive of about half the U.S. population, is the most visited national park in the United States, with more than 12.2 million visitors in 2024; Cades Cove is the single most popular attraction in the park, with more than 2 million visitors per year. Piatra Criului, although smaller and with less infrastructure, attracts about 110,000 visitors per year, about 25% of whom are international tourists, in a country with a population of 19.3 million.
These numbers will likely continue to grow, as tourism to Romania grew by 4.5% from 2023 to 2024. This high volume of visitors, many with automobiles (especially in the Smokies), places increasing stress on the park’s natural environment, infrastructure, and surrounding communities. Piatra Criului, in fact, recently constructed a state-of-the-art visitors center with interactive exhibits to better handle increasing tourism and orient visitors to the park. Magura occupies a unique place in the midst of these pressures. The influx of tourists provides economic opportunities but also brings new threats — new construction, habitat fragmentation, and loss of traditional culture. Locals now find themselves balancing natural and cultural heritage with economic opportunity, the same challenges that have confronted the Smokies and many mountain communities around the world.
So, while Cades Cove was transformed into a museum under the protection of a national park, Magura remains a living, evolving community within a national park. Yet both places serve as windows into mountain cultures — one of the past and one of the present — representing very different approaches to cultural heritage preservation. These two communities and two national parks are also ongoing case studies of how mountain regions respond to contemporary challenges.
The parallels between Appalachia and Transylvania are striking. Both regions are rich in natural resources yet have a history of economic marginalization. Both face the challenge of balancing economic development with environmental and cultural preservation. Both share a deep historic emphasis on family farming, folk music, religious tradition, and seasonal festivals. Just as Appalachian communities celebrate bluegrass and folk festivals and maintain heirloom seed varieties, villagers in Magura gather for sheep herding festivals, traditional hay mowing, and don traditional clothing for local feasts. And, while Appalachia is famous for distilling moonshine, Romania has tuica, a plum brandy served at weddings, funerals, and just about any other social occasion.
Today, these landscapes are also the focus of innovative work aimed at sustainable development and community empowerment. Transilvania University, in Brasov, a vibrant city about 21 miles from Magura, is at the forefront of these efforts in the southern Carpathians. The university's extensive research facilities and community engagement initiatives have made it a hub for environmental studies, cultural preservation, and innovative social projects that aim to bridge the gap between academia and local communities.
One of the university's flagship programs is its Faculty of Silviculture and Forest Engineering. The university dates its beginning to the establishment of a forestry institute in 1948 and it remains a leader in that field. Today, it is leading in developing sustainable forestry practices, a critical issue in the Carpathians, where deforestation is a continued threat. The forests of the Carpathian Mountains are one of Europe’s largest remaining natural forest ecosystems, with nearly 50% of all Carpathian forest land located in Romania. These forests play a crucial role in carbon sequestration, water regulation, and soil protection, while supporting traditional livelihoods and providing vital economic resources for local communities.
Transilvania University’s Faculty of Letters has also emerged as a key source of research and community engagement in rural mountain communities, as well as taking a leading role in forging connections with Appalachia. Three scholars from the Faculty of Letters, Dean of the Faculty Dr. Adrian Lacatus, Dr. Cristian Pralea, and Dr. Georgeta Moarcas, along with Dr. Theresa Burriss of Emory and Henry University in Virginia, are serving as lead organizers of the Transatlantic Mountain Cultures Conference: Engaging Rural Landscapes & Community (Re)Connections, to be held in Brasov on October 19-24, 2025. In keeping with its focus on rural communities, the conference will include a field experience in Piatra Craiului National Park and Magura.
Pralea, an expert on American Studies, observed that his interest in the Appalachian-Carpathian connection began in conversations with American scholars Dr. Dan Shope and Dr. Donald Davis more than a decade ago. “The connection with Appalachia is manyfold. We have had several conferences exploring the Appalachian-Carpathian connection . . . there are many cultural similarities between these two areas. They were really surprising, and we wanted to investigate this idea that it is related to the landscape, that the landscape can actually generate a certain type of culture.”
Pralea also noted the strong historical connection between Romania and the United States through migration, which still resonates in cultural memory: “A lot of people emigrated to the United States from this area at the beginning of the 20th century. So much so that in the city of Fogarash, which is near Brasov, they had popular old folk ballads about leaving for America.”
Burriss has served as a Fulbright Scholar in Brasov and has played a leading role in organizing several academic conferences there. She especially notes the great similarity in the mountain landscapes, observing, “Even down to the flora and fauna of the areas — I'll show pictures of wildflowers and people think they’re from Southwest Virginia but they're actually from Magura or Viscri. So, I think that even the land is important in terms of the connection between these two mountainous regions.”
In addition to forestry and environmental projects, faculty and students from Transilvania are involved in numerous initiatives to support mountain communities, including afterschool literacy programs for Roma children, social work programs, ethnographic and ethnomusicology projects, and arts-based community engagement. For example, Lacatus noted the university’s work to support local artisans and traditional craftspeople, recognizing that cultural heritage can be a powerful driver of economic development: “They (the university professors and students) are not using rural environment and culture as a showcase for their art, but to actually work with the communities to ethically engage and produce something that is relevant for that community.”
Transilvania University has also recently joined the UNITA alliance, which includes 10 universities across seven European countries. “This alliance,” Lacatus said, “is made up of universities located in mountain areas, initiated by the University of Torino, which is close to the Alps and to the Dolomites. The alliance also includes universities from France, Portugal, and Spain, in the Pyrenees. They all try to find ways that the university can contribute to energizing the territories around them, finding ways to contribute to the revival, the health, the sustainability, the conservation, and the well-being of these communities. We all share this as a common goal.”
The parallels between Cades Cove and Magura are not mere coincidences; they underscore broader patterns of mountain life worldwide. Understanding these similarities allows us to draw valuable lessons in sustainability, community resilience, and cultural preservation — lessons that are becoming increasingly urgent in today’s world. The October conference will bring together scholars, artists, writers, and others from a wide range of disciplines to explore these deep connections between mountain communities and how we can learn from one another as we respond to common issues.
Pralea stressed the importance of universities engaging with rural and mountain communities: “If we don't do this as academics, if we don't actually go out there and help to energize the communities, we are in big trouble ... especially in Romania. I would say it is our duty to go there and engage these communities and actually bring humanities to the practical end that they are supposed to have.”
In a similar way, American writer Wendell Berry emphasized the importance of rural communities and what they have to offer the world. In his essay “The Work of Local Culture,” Berry warned that modern society and economies tend to have a centrifugal effect on people, pulling them away from their local communities and leading to a loss of local culture. This, he says, makes it imperative that local communities develop a strong sense of place, taking care of the environment and preserving sustainable ways of living for future generations:
The loss of local culture is, in part, a practical loss and an economic one. For one thing, such a culture contains, and conveys to succeeding generations, the history of the use of the place and the knowledge of how the place may be lived in and used. For another, the pattern of reminding implies affection for the place and respect for it, and so, finally, the local culture will carry the knowledge of how the place may be well and lovingly used, and also the implicit command to use it only well and lovingly. The only true and effective “operator’s manual for spaceship earth” is not a book that any human will ever write; it is hundreds of thousands of local cultures.
Thus, Berry argues, the answers to saving planet Earth for future generations are embedded in the local cultures or rural and mountain places — we just need to preserve and rediscover them. The work of international mountain studies such as the fruitful partnership between the Carpathians and Appalachians, can make important contributions to these efforts. In the words of Helen Mathews Lewis, the grandmother of Appalachian studies: “It is time to be creative, dream new dreams, develop new models. Let us plan for resurrection, not designate the region as a further sacrifice area.”
Ron Roach is chair of the Department of Appalachian Studies and Director of the Center of Excellence for Appalachian Studies and Services at East Tennessee State University. He has been a delegate at five Appalachian/Carpathian International Conferences in Ukraine and Romania since 2013.
The Transatlantic Mountain Cultures Conference: Engaging Rural Landscapes & Community (Re)Connections will be held in Brasov and Magura, Romania Oct. 19-24, 2025. Proposals for papers are due by May 30, 2025. For further information, download the PDF file below, or email transatlantic-mountains@unitbv.ro
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