Cluj Night Trains

This is the sixth part in a series about riding night trains across Europe and the Near East to Armenia — to spend some time in worlds beyond the pathological obsessions of President-elect Donald Trump. (This week Trump’s MAGA Republicans are arguing about immigrants as if they were corporate chattel.)

Only on the ride from Wagram (the Napoleonic battlefield) back to Vienna did it begin to rain. By the time I had crossed over the Danube and was approaching the 1st district (old Vienna, inside the Ringstrasse) water was collecting in my shoes. I thought of a late afternoon tea in the Café Bräunerhof (opposite the Spanish Riding School) but even its shabby elegance seemed too refined for someone dripping head to toe.

Instead I pushed on to a cafe that I didn’t remember from 1975, Café Jelinek, where just inside the curtained front door I found a table and chair next to a wood burning stove. There I discreetly hung my socks and jacket on a railing next to the fire, and spent several hours noodling on my computer and getting ready for my night train to Cluj-Napoca, once the capital of Transylvania when it was part of Hungary.

Now a regional city in Romania, Cluj-Napoca—so I had decided—is one of the best places (along with Wroclaw, Poznan, Vilnius, and Thessaloniki) to study the seismic shifts in 20th-century European history.

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The night train from Vienna to Bucharest, which was to stop in Cluj the next morning, left from the Hauptbahnhof at 19:42. After drying out in the Jelinek, I still had time to meet a friend for a drink at the Wien Westbahnhof, shop for train supplies, and detour past a new English bookstore.

On the subsequent bike ride to the station, I poked around Beethovenplatz, just off the ring. I was looking for the Schloss Rotenturm, an apartment building where two friends had grown up in the 1930s before their parents decided to flee the Nazis and take the family (which was American) to the United States.

Until my friends left Vienna in 1938, Beethovenplatz was all they had known of the world, and it was easy to imagine them playing in the square that contains a large statue of the composer.

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On the website of ÖBB Nightjet, I had booked a single sleeper for the overnight run to Cluj. ÖBB is the national railway corporation of Austria, and almost single-handedly it has revived night trains across Europe, using both Vienna and Zurich as its hubs.

The sleeping cars in some instances are not the most modern, although they are spotlessly clean, as was my compartment to Cluj. The porter cared not at all that I was traveling with a folding bicycle (which slid under the berth).

After I checked in, the porter explained that the train was operating with a dining car to Budapest. That meant I could eat dinner in the next several hours, and I was in the dining car when the train made a brief stop at the border town of Hegyeshalom, just over the line into Hungary.

There in spring 1975, not knowing the rules for passing behind the Iron Curtain, I had tried to secure a visa to visit Budapest. I was turned away by rude Hungarian border guards, who said that a visa could only be had at the Hungarian embassy in Vienna and that it would take several weeks to be granted.

I returned to Vienna, angry over divided Europe; this time I sailed on to Budapest in the night while eating the soup of the day and drinking Austrian beer.

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There were several reasons why, on this occasion, I wanted to stop in Cluj-Napoca, although the simplest was that it would afford me a comfortable night’s sleep in my compartment, and that, after spending a day in Cluj, I could take another night train to Bucharest. (Napoca was the name of the city in Roman times.)

My goal was to spend as many nights as I could work out on overnight trains heading east and to end up in Armenia. I also wanted to see the Transylvanian city that since 1900 had shifted its alliances between Austria, Hungary, Romania, and Nazi Germany, before being tucked away behind the Soviet Union’s Iron Curtain.

From 1000 to about 1570, Cluj was part of the Kingdom of Hungary and the Eastern Hungarian Kingdom. After that, until 1804, it was the capital of the Principality of Transylvania (a semi-independent state but still allied with Hungary).

Between 1804 and 1918, Cluj was a vassal of the Austrian and subsequently the Austro-Hungarian empires. When those entities collapsed at the end of World War I, Transylvania and its capital, Cluj, were awarded to Romania, where it remained until the arrival of the Nazis in 1940. The occupying Germans returned Transylvania to Hungary, then in the raptures of National Socialism, much as today it is under the sway of Putin Mini-Me Viktor Orbán.

Nazi rule only lasted until the end of World War II, when the Allies yet again stripped Transylvania from Hungary and returned it to Romania, which halfway through the war had managed to switch its alliances from the Axis to the Allies—in time to see Transylvania included in the Socialist Republic of Romania and its successors.

Depending on your view of history, Cluj-Napoca is either a Hungarian city that the Romanians have occupied for much of the 20th century, or its a Romanian city that was rightfully restored to Bucharest after centuries of brutal Hungarian occupation.

Either way, it means that for much of its history Cluj-Napoca has felt like a borrowed city living on borrowed time.

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I had decided to book a hotel rom for the day in Cluj, so that I could take a shower, unpack my saddle bags, and have a base from which to explore the city on my bicycle.

Initially I had thought that an Airbnb would be more flexible and all me to check in around 8:00 and leave at 20:00 but each landlord with whom I corresponded remain adamant that official check-in time was after 15:00.

Nor were hotel desk clerks any more accommodating. I suppose I could have booked a hotel room for two nights, but that seemed counterintuitive for someone who would be in residence for fifteen hours.

In the end I found a hostel (with the name Retro) in the Old Town that sounded warm and friendly, and there I booked a room, adding to my booking forms that I would both check in and leave early.

In my experience, hostels have a 24-hour air about them, and again I figured that no one would care that I would be arriving on a bicycle. I received a confirmation and directions, but no responses to my follow up emails that indicated I would be there in time for breakfast. I didn’t fuss, as hostel clerks around the world, in my experience, are often harried.

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The ÖBB night train left me at the Cluj-Napoca station around 7:30 a.m. The main station in Cluj is worthy of an Austrian prince. It has vaulting arches and numerous gables, done up with red brick and white trim, exactly what you might expect for an important Hapsburg outpost (one, it should be added, that Prince Rudolph would gladly have given an independent Hungary).

Because I was at the station, I checked the departure times of local trains to Bontida, about an hour to the north. My plan was to go there later that morning. Then I set off on my bicycle for the Retro and arrived around 8:30, only to find the door locked and no one answering the phone at the reception desk (I could hear my unanswered calls ringing through the front window). Maybe this explained why no one had responded to my messages?

Biking around Cluj had its challenges, as much of the city is lined with cobblestones, but I got around by sticking to sidewalks and riding between the rails of the tram system.

Without my hostel to pamper me, I went to a café on one of the main streets, ordered a hot chocolate, and plotted my day. A shower would have been nice after the night train, but I would manage.

While poring over my maps and timetables, I noticed a tourist office across the street, and after my hot chocolate I stopped inside to collect some local maps.

The director of the office was amused by my November plans to take the train to Bontida to see (at least from the outside) the Bánffy castle.

Miklos Bánffy was the foreign minister of Hungary in the early 1920s, and I had read his memoir, The Phoenix Land, which is a lament for the Hungary’s loss of Transylvania. He also wrote The Transylvanian Trilogy, a delightful series of novels set in and around Cluj-Napoca, chronicling the Hungarian decline between the two world wars.

In the introduction to The Phoenix Land, the translator Patrick Thursfield writes:

Following the death of his father, Bánffy had retired to his home in Transylvania, the great and beautiful castle of Bonczhida only a few miles north of Koloszvár (now renamed Cluj-Napoca by the Romanians), and was devoting his time to writing. He, together with some others of like mind, founded a publishing house and spent much of his time in the encouragement of those Hungarian writers and painters who had remained in their home province after sovereignty had been transferred to Romania.

The tourist office had brochures and maps that covered everything that I wanted to see. Then when I recounted the story of the closed Retro hostel, the director said, “I know the owner well.”

Immediately, he called Radu Padurean on his cell phone, and ten minutes later, I was back at the hostel’s front door, and Radu was apologizing for not having responded to my messages. (If you are tempted to travel in Transylvania, get in touch with Radu and have him arrange everything.)

As it turned out, there were no other guests that day at the Retro (who comes to Cluj in November?), so he simply gave me keys to the front door and a bathroom.

For all that day I had the run of the spacious lobby, where I could take a shower, boil tea, use my computer, and dally over maps of Transylvania. I paid him and all he asked was that, on leaving, I put the keys through a slot in the front door.

It all worked like a charm, and I felt a million miles away from TrumpWorld, except when I came across this quotation in The Phoenix Land: “Artificially to incite hatred is not only supererogatory in politics and foreign relations, it is also positively harmful.”