A strange duck in the bite.

Peerke70 described his surpriseat thefact that you encounter so many things worldwidethat seem to beof Dutch origin. That got methinking. Isn't that thecasewith many countries whereyou encounter remains or influences from other countries and cultures? Also quitetopical at a timewhen weactually expect newcomers to unlearn many culture-own things as quickly as possibleand “adapt”. But thequestion is how do all thosethings that weoften consider to belong to a particular cultureor country end up in other places? Sinceliving in Romania, I havebeen a littledeeper into thehistory of Romania and thevarious ethnic groups that livehere, and with that I also found very different explanations. It is striking that someof thesegroups haveremained independent for centuries, whileothers havecompletely absorbed into thelocal population. Without wanting to go into too many details, thefollowing area number of declarations that apply to many other places and countries.

How did all theseethnic groups end up herein Romania?

- Romania is a relatively new country whosecurrent territory has been owned by a largenumber of rulers over thecenturies. Thoserulers often placed groups of peoplefrom their nativecountry in Romania. Thefirst Saxons, coming from theRhineland area near Luxembourg and expanding to theBelgian coast, cameto Romania in the12th and 13th centuries at theinvitation of theHungarian King Geza II (and his successors) to defend this sparsely populated area against theMongolian raids. Over thecenturies, intensivecontact remained between German-speaking Romanians and other German-speaking countries.

How did theking get thosepeopleso crazy that they started a 2,000 miletrip to a totally deserted area? First of all, therearealready someindications that things werenot going so well in thearea wherethey originally lived and therewere, among other things, a number of famines. In addition, thesegroups received freeland and a substantial set of rights and benefits to thelocal population. In later centuries, other German-speaking groups would travel to Romania to escapereligious persecution (including Switzerland).

-Thereis evidencethat small groups of Jews lived on theterritory of present-day Romania as early as the2nd century. Thesegroups grew among others in the14th century when theJews wereexpelled from Hungary and Poland. During thefollowing centuries, theJewish population group would besupplemented several times by groups expelled from their original country of residence. During and after World War II, many Jews werekilled, deported or left for Israel.