Colin Cutler

I first went to Romania with the US Army in 2017, on a NATO mission near Fagaras, and I had wanted since then to return to Transylvania out of uniform. I was honored to be accepted by the Fulbright committee as an ETA in 2019 and placed at “Lucian Blaga” University in Sibiu, near my old stomping grounds.

The next 6 months were a whirlwind–Romania’s ETA program is one of the few where ETAs are given their own university classes to plan and teach. It was an excellent opportunity for me to start putting curricula together, as I got to teach classes in American history, culture, and literature, and oral communication. I also got to build relationships with my colleagues both in the English department and in the Romanian literature department. They included me on several projects, including the Poets in Transylvania Festival and as a language editor for Ruralism and Literature in Romania. I linked in with local arts groups, as well, planning events with the MusicHub and the Festival of International Theater in Sibiu (which was, unfortunately, cancelled due to the pandemic), and performing at the Romanian National Museum of Literature with Lilly Drumeva O’Reilly and Ovidiu Mihailescu, fellow folk musicians from Bulgaria and Romania. My fellow Fulbrighters were also inspiring with the breadth of their interests and enthusiasm.

The Fulbright Commission was generous, sending my colleagues and me to conferences in Bulgaria, Belgium, and Luxembourg (and one in Berlin was cancelled due to the pandemic). I was also able to travel within Romania, visiting monasteries in Transylvania, castles in the Prahova valley, and the square in Timisoara where the 1989 revolution began. Furthermore, the Commission was extremely supportive of us when the pandemic hit and cut the program short. They advocated for us, quickly passed information, fought for our funding, and supported both those of us who had to leave and those who elected to ride it out in Romania.

My time in Romania is a stained-glass window of images–the rush of the Bucharest metro, road-tripping through the Bulgarian mountains as a thunderstorm swept up from the Danube plains, afternoons building furniture with a German expat named Brunhilde, the Moldovan ballerina and Ukrainian didgeridoo player who couchsurfed with me on their way through Sibiu, the attic windows staring like eyes over the squares and alleyways of Sibiu, and frosty evenings in the Piata Mare as Christmas music mingled with the scent of vin fiert—and I’m grateful for all of it.