Planting in Transylvania

These are just two words. But they encompass nearly five years of effort and aspiration. The aspiration to realize the idea and practice of 10 Million Trees not only within our national borders but everywhere we can have a direct connection with nature. 

On the weekend of March 15, a dozen of us from 10 Million Trees here in Hungary will finally hit the road and make a pilgrimage to Székely Land to plant around four thousand mixed forest saplings that we bring with us. 

Last November, Dr. Réka Aszalós, a forest ecologist and expert of 10 Million Trees, and I traveled to Székely Land. 

After traveling through wonderful landscapes and beautiful small villages, we finally found the location where, in collaboration with a local civil organization, the Land Art Association, we designated the site for the current planting near Székelyderzs.

Hargita, and generally the Carpathian Mountains, as we have written before, are in significant danger both historically and ecologically. Consequently, so is Europe, which is now lacking in large, contiguous, untouched forests. 

Due to human folly and profiteering, forests that existed even just a few decades ago have been, in ugly technical jargon, harvested. 

Not only are foreign companies to blame, which could no longer do such things in their own countries, but unfortunately also their local enablers who prepared the way for their environmentally destructive business. 

We are planting in Transylvania. 

These are just two words – as I wrote above, yet it is about much, much more. 

Because we are planting, and we plan to realize our planting in Transylvania, all in honor of March 15, the revolutionary holiday of Hungarian civil development. 

I do not forget the years of my youth when Ceausescu’s evil tyranny cast a dark shadow over the lives of Hungarians (and Romanians, Saxons, Roma, Jews) living there, and when it meant a lot to travel to Transylvania, to bring news from a relatively more open, freer world. Since then, the world has changed greatly. On the way to Székelyderzs, we will pass through Sighișoara. 

That beautiful city, where, according to our best current knowledge, the perhaps greatest Hungarian poet fell a year and a half after the revolutionary days, at the age of just 26, a daring, bold genius with an incredibly rich and extensive body of work, the author of “The Sea Has Risen,” “Hang the Kings!,” “Glorious Lords,” and perhaps most importantly, the “National Song,” Sándor Petőfi. 

We are planting for him now. 

Every bow we make for the sake of each sapling will be a tribute to Petőfi and his contemporaries who heroically fought for Hungarian freedom. To the reform generation that preceded the fermentation of the revolution, which gave us the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the Chain Bridge, and language reform. Without them, the spirit of independence and the proud desire for justice against oppressive profiteers would not have settled in the nation’s soul. 

Thus, in us, the idea of Homeland and Progress merges with the concept of preserving nature.

(Iván)

Would you like to join? Meet us at the location: facebook.com/events/883094163567957