This year, the Transylvanian Saxons will hold their yearly celebration of customs and heritage, the Haferland Week, in 10 villages traditionally inhabited by the German minority between July 31 – August 3.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The program will include dances and brass band concerts, a picnic at the Saschiz Refuge Fortress, as well as a guided tour of the village of Me\u0219endorf, sewing and flower printing workshops, the traditional ball in Rupea, and an exhibition in Viscri.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Every year, the festival receives visitors from Romania, Hungary, and Saxons from abroad. Up to this edition, over 50,000 visitors have come to see the 800-year-old community and its heritage.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The festival\u2019s founder, Michael Schmidt, president of the M&V Schmidt Foundation, said he had the idea for the festival 14 years ago.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis year we\u2019re celebrating the 13th edition. In this area, where I was born, it was actually the last commune still producing or cultivating grapes. Elsewhere, it was too cold to grow grapes. That\u2019s why they started growing oats and that\u2019s how we named the festival Haferland,\u201d he said during a press conference in Bucharest, cited by News.ro<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cEspecially Romanians come to Haferland. Diversity is one of our greatest treasures,\u201d said Caroline Fernolend, president of the \u201cMihai Eminescu\u201d Trust Foundation, an organization that has managed to implement over 1,300 projects for the conservation of tangible and rural heritage in Transylvania and Maramure\u0219.<\/p>\n \u201cThis heritage we inherited and which is sacred to us now helps many people in these localities. Before, it was a poor area, because people lived off working the land. […] Thanks to neighborliness and community spirit, today I can still speak with my grandchildren in the ancestral language, old Luxembourgish, because today we still have fortified churches, houses, and gastronomy that has developed in conjunction with other ethnic groups living in our area,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n