Yes, Virginia, there really is a Transylvania. It is today part of Romania, a part, in fact, where I lived for about two years in the 1990s. And when I was there, I quickly learned about the unique nature of the settlement of that land over the past 800 years or so. You see, 800 years ago, that part of the world was being overrun by invaders from the south and east. The Hungarian king, who ruled Transylvania at that time, was worried about all the groups who were encroaching into Europe and threatening his kingdom. So, he issued an invitation to people to come and have free land along his eastern border–the area of the eastern edge of what has traditionally been Transylvania. And the people he invited were from what is now Germany, many of them from economically stagnant areas of the eastern provinces.

And the hardy German people he invited were given the freedom to build walled cities and smaller fortified villages built around churches as a way to created a line of linked fortresses along the border. Now, Transylvania sits in the curve of a series of mountains known as the Carpathians or, more colloquially, the Transylvanian Alps. The idea of the Hungarian king was that once the invaders crossed the mountains (no small feat), they would be met with this system of fortress cities and villages that would act as a deterrent and, hopefully, cause the invaders to turn around and go home.

Seven large walled towns were built along the border. Dozens of smaller fortified church villages linked these larger towns. The towns and villages look like something that was taken from Germany and transplanted into Transylvania; they’re designed and built in the style they had built at home. And that makes sense. Many of them have been unchanged over the centuries, and today, some German tourists come to Romania to see what German villages looked like centuries ago. Hermannstadt, the largest of these walled towns, is called Sibiu today. Several walls ring the town even today, and there are defensive towers built and maintained by the various guilds in the town to protect their homes and businesses. All the large towns were built like this. In fact, the German name for Transylvania is the Seven Forts–Siebenburgen, in German.

Up until the post-World War 2 decades, Transylvanian towns maintained mostly German majorities. Interestingly, as soon as communism fell in the early 1990s, many of the Germans–after 800 years–decided to return to Germany.

And that takes us to one of the German towns where the ancestors of the modern Transylvanian Germans came from all those centuries ago. In the record books of one town in eastern Germany, there is a curious reference to the original migration of a large number of the town’s citizens who answered the Hungarian king’s invitation way back then. The curious passage dates from 1384, and it reads: “It’s been 100 years since our children left.” In the same town, the old church had a stained glass window depicting and referring to the migration as well, showing a person leading a group of migrants out of the town and, presumably, to Transylvania. The person leading the group was dressed in multi-colored clothing and was playing a wind instrument.

Of course, the German immigrants to Transylvania weren’t led there by a Pied Piper, but the documents and church that describe that migration are absolutely from the town of Hamelin.