Transsilvanien

In 1985, Horatiu Sava fled Romania for Germany with his parents. More than twenty years later he returned with a camera to his former homeland, southern Transylvania. The title page reads “[zurück nach] transsilvanien” (“[back to] Transylvania”), and that is exactly what his first book is about: a return that is both a reunion and a rediscovery.

The book offers a concentrated view of Sava’s Transylvania project and follows its three strands. The village and landscape pictures go back to a childhood in the small town of Sighișoara/Schäßburg, among forests, low mountains and the surrounding villages. They are an attempt to bring those memories back to life. The city pictures show the prefabricated housing estates built in communist times, and the photographer’s astonishment at how much they have changed in twenty capitalist years. Between them stand the portraits: people he met along the way, who represent the present and turn one’s thoughts to the future.

Sava’s gaze is calm, precise and free of nostalgia. Pastel-coloured gabled houses along an unpaved village street, a tangle of power lines in front of a church tower, meadows in yellow bloom, bathers in a clay-brown lake, a tram stop in front of apartment blocks, a man standing by his red Dacia before a castle wrapped in scaffolding. In these pictures the familiar and the estranged lie close together.

“Transsilvanien” was published in 2010 as volume 12 of the edition365 series by ex pose verlag, Berlin, in a limited and numbered edition of 365 copies. The book was designed by Kai-Olaf Hesse; its greyboard cover carries the stamped title. After ex pose verlag closed, Corandus Books took over the title.

The book is dedicated to the author’s parents, who drove him as a child in their Dacia 1300 to almost every place in this book.

About the book
Horatiu Sava: Transsilvanien
edition365, volume 12
Limited, numbered edition of 365 copies
First published by ex pose verlag, Berlin, 2010
Design: Kai-Olaf Hesse, Braunschweig
Cover: greyboard with stamped title
22 × 17.5 cm, 24 pages, 37 illustrations
Text in German