A Coincidence for Day 7
The Luxembourgians may have seen it as a free vacation. They needed one in the heady days of 2007, when the surging European Union was adding two more countries, expanding the cooperation that had ushered the continent into its greatest period of peace, prosperity, and progress ever. That takes a lot of work, from the bureaucratic to the symbolic, so a Lux’n delegation of diplomats went to Romania as representatives from one of the EU’s founding members to the newest.
Division, prejudice, and suspicion are easy vices, but can be quickly remedied by contact, understanding, and celebration, so the EU named Luxembourg City and Sibiu as joint European Capitals of Culture in 2007. Both were elegant cities with proud traditions, important history, and rich heritage, and both flew below the main tourist radar (the former perhaps more deliberately than the latter).
How much did they know about each other? Did the Romanians know that Luxembourg was the last Grand Duchy in Europe? Did the Luxembourgians know about Romania’s many layers, including the way people from back in their own neck of the medieval woods had immigrated here starting in the 1100s? Did they raise a toast to their shared membership in the Holy Roman Empire?
We know that in addition to the various meetings, the delegates visited some of the charming little Transylvanian villages, where they heard something astonishing. Luxembourgish is an almost unknown language outside the confines of the Duchy, spoken by less than 400k people, so when the delegation heard what was basically their language on those rustic streets, they must have cried “O mai gott!”
Immigrants are powerfully aware of culture, and can simultaneously embrace customs of their new home and preserve the traditions they came with. So it was with the Saxons who emigrated from the region around (and including) Luxembourg to what is now Romania eight centuries ago, and one of the things they preserved was their language, to the delight of the visiting delegation.
Coincidence often feels to me like echoes of a divine melody, so I took it as a blessing that the two countries with this surprising historical and linguistic link are coincidentally the first two tours I developed independently, Romania and Benelux. Luckily for me, just as immigrants are powerfully aware of culture, good visitors can be too. Visitors like the ones I bring to Sibiu on Day 7, and will take to Luxembourg on…Day 7 of that tour too.
Sounds about right to me.
