Long-distance trail crossing Romania to host residencies exploring communities, traditions of its eight regions

Terra Memoriae, a large-scale interdisciplinary initiative running from 2026 to 2028, will host nine cultural residencies across the eight regions along the Via Transilvanica, the long-distance trail crossing Romania.

The project is meant to turn the encounters with the people, places and stories of these regions into cultural resources accessible to the wider public. It will bring together artists and researchers from fields including literature, gastronomy, anthropology, art, architecture, theatre, history, photography and biology.

At the same time, the project seeks to recover and preserve fragments of memory that are at risk of disappearing: stories, gestures, practices, languages, images, tastes, and ways of understanding a particular territory. Each residency will leave behind a cultural imprint, a text, image, sound, object, artwork or archive, that will remain connected to the community where it was created.

Writer Moni Stănilă, gastronome Adriana Sohodoleanu, ethnologist Laura Jiga Iliescu, artists Irina Botea Bucan and Jon Dean, architect Dorin Ștefan and his students, playwright Elise Wilk, archaeologist Cătălin Pavel and his students, artist Iosif Király, and biologist and explorer Alexandru Stermin are the ones who will undertake the research.

“Together, these projects create a form of contre-mémoire: the living memory of ordinary people, places and their experiences, recovered through encounters and preserved in contemporary forms. The residencies do not seek to speak about communities, but to create lasting testimonies together with them,” the organizers explain.

Terra Memoriae is an initiative of Tășuleasa Social and the UmanEast Association for Education and Culture, with public broadcaster Radio Romania Cultural serving as curator and co-producer.

If we want to know where we are going, we must first understand who we are and where we come from.

“I remember that back in 2017 I had a serious concern: how could we make sure the organization did not operate based on fear, and how could we learn to build good things? Since Via Transilvanica emerged, I have become a trail builder and discovered an almost inexhaustible ethnographic landscape and a Romania that I feel we still have so much to say about. Terra Memoriae is an opportunity to delve deeper into these places, to bring knowledge into dialogue and to give people, including those coming from abroad, the chance to fall in love with our country. For us, this project is a journey through Romania, but also a journey towards ourselves. If we want to know where we are going, we must first understand who we are and where we come from,” Alin Uhlmann Ușeriu, president of Tășuleasa Social, said.

Via Transilvanica is Romania’s first long-distance trail crossing the country from Putna to Drobeta-Turnu Severin. It was designed to be travelled on foot, by bicycle or on horseback. It is a project of Tășuleasa Social, which has been developing educational, cultural and environmental projects for the past 25 years. The 1,400-km trail, crossing eight historical regions in 10 counties and 12 UNESCO World Heritage sites, was inaugurated in 2022.