Quik Thinking

One element that viscerally dominated the history of every single place we visited was the legacy of the Roman empire. Not only did the Romans build the original city of London (then called Londinium), they also founded Budapest, had a major settlement in Plovdiv and even controlled Istanbul for a long time. I'd always known that the Roman empire had been an impressive phenomenon but seeing their legacy everywhere I went on the trip really hammered the point home. Those Romans were crazy!

We hadn't been in Hungary very long when somebody mentioned that the Magyars, who form the dominant ethnic group in Hungary, had close ethnographic ties with the Finns. I was surprised to hear this because I'd never thought of those two countries as being particularly close, either geographically or culturally. My skepticism was blasted to smithereens when we visited the ethnographic museum, which happened to be hosting a special exhibition about the Finns and their longstanding kinship with the Hungarian people. It was a captivating museum although, having grown accustomed to the high level of professionalism in North American museums, I kept noticing the typos that marred most of the write-ups there.

The inspiration for our trip had been a novel about Vlad The Impaler called The Historian that was set in Budapest and Istanbul. Being able to visit "Dracula's Castle" in Transylvania, therefore, was a special treat. As it turned out, of course, Vlad never actually lived there - although it is likely that he did spend a few days there at one point - but the tourism has transformed the town surrounding the castle into a pretty cheesy caricature. This is unfortunate because Castle Bran does actually have an interesting history quite apart from all the vampire lore. Apparently it was built by the locals in the 14th century and eventually gifted to a queen whose subjects adored her.

By the time we reached Plovdiv I had gotten quite obsessed with the ethnography of Eastern Europe so we paid a visit to the ethnographic museum there as well, only to discover that it had no write-ups for any of the exhibits! In retrospect, I think I learned more about the ethnography of Bulgaria during our day-trip to the monastery than I could have in a museum. The people were impressively devout in their veneration of Mary, waiting patiently in long queues to pray before her statue. I'd always assumed this behaviour was characteristic of Catholic tradition but I guess the Eastern Orthodox church shares those customs with Catholicism. Of particular note were the gipsies in attendance, since their ancestors migrated there from India many centuries ago and never fully integrated into the local culture.

Istanbul's ethnographic museum was very far from our hostel so we never made it there but we did instead visit the archeological museum, which rivals even the British Museum in London with the overwhelming breadth and depth of exhibits it had on display. While the Brit came upon its treasure trove by purloining priceless artifacts from everywhere the British Empire conquered, Istanbul acquired its cultural wealth by sheer dint of having been an integral part of just about every major empire to ever have occupied Europe. Staring from the stone age, we walked through the bronze age, the Mesopotamians, Sumerians, Trojans, Romans and Byzantines before ending up with the Ottomans.