Tutti Liberi Subito- Best of Travel 2015

Too much cheap bullshit has been blown into the bloodstream of the Internet about how you should be a traveler, and not a tourist, so much so that the original statement has lost much of its meaning. What does being a traveler imply, after all, besides some Instagram shots of the second most interesting thing in a city as the first one is just too mainstream these days.

Thing is, I do instinctively hate organized tourism without having been taught to do so. Always did, even before having anything to do with herds of tourists flocking like hordes of barbarians to the Eiffel Tower, Colosseum or the Houses of Parliament. Though frankly, the barbarians get bad press, roaming around in a time of general continental mess is more justifiable than trampling little old ladies for a selfie. One of my worst nightmares is the time I had to grind through the endless maze of the Musei Vaticani to make it to the Sixtine Chapel- and once there, listen to a multilingual choir of ’this is it?!’.

No, that’s not it. ’It’ is that time I arrived in Turin in a fine winter drizzle, which had been advertised by the ever ebullient Italian media as ’forti nevicate al Nord’, and had to wait about an hour for the most elusive of buses. Under the sheltering umbrella of another transportation victim, I could quite literally soak in the city’s motions and rhythms.

Or that other time when I was sitting in the back seat of a car in the most average of villages in Turkish Thrace, watching the most average of summer evenings unfold in a way which was both completely familiar and alien. Or that time I was sitting in a cafe in Vienna, sipping a kleiner Brauner and staring into the distance, not really reading my book but listening to the indefinite lull of German surrounding me and saying to myself how, given the right time and place, it’s actually such a beautiful language.

And that time I turned away from the palace in Knossos and gazed over the hills around it, noticing how they shimmered in the scorching Mediterranean sun, hundreds of mirrors used by the locals to ripen their crops even faster- modern world insanity meets Balkan solutions to everything.

Pocket Trippin': Hunedoara Castle

The Városliget in Budapest harbours the rather intriguing architectural specimen of the Vajdahunyad castle, an end of the 19^th Century fever dream combining elements of disparate historical buildings from diverse Hungarian inhabited lands.  While it’s not all bad in its entirety, it has always given me too much of a Frankenstein feeling to feel completely at peace with it, and my spring wandering through the taxidermy of the Agricultural Museum has done nothing to ease the tension.

I of course always knew that the basic model is the ‘real’ castle in Hunedoara, and that Hunedoara is pretty close to my hometown, but as it often happens, you long to travel to faraway lands and miss out on what’s right in front of you, so to speak. Hunedoara itself does get bad press for having been a communist monstrosity of mines and factories, and to be frank, it still is pretty dull and a bit too socialist brutal for most tastes.

The castle is of course, as a Brit would remark, pretty.  It feels very much like a castle-ish castle- there are parts from different periods, the newer ones obviously shinier and better preserved, yet it’s the older stone fortress part that gives a sense of real history. It’s also the place where you can escape the tourist infestation, for as a younger visitor exclaimed, it’s just a room!- and then he was promptly off.

‘Just a room’ happened to be the  place where the positions of the canons were still clearly visible and you could discern how they were adapted to the landscape, aiming at the nooks and crannies where  an evil Turk might try to sneak in.  And ‘just a room’ also happened to be called the Nebojša tower, from the Serbian ‘do not be afraid’, a reminder of both Iancu de Hunedoara’s famous battle of Belgrade and the fact that ethnic groups were so intensively intermingling in this part of the world that it’s outright silly to have hissy fits over whom a particular mountain or valley belongs to. Today they belong to anyone who happens to live there and anyone who visits them with an open mind and heart.