May I? Thank you.

It’s a curious thing that in the world at large, traditional kinds of ethnic diversity declined through the twentieth century, at least in the advanced nations. Anyone born in the middle of that century has seen this with his own eyes.
In my own student days forty years ago I traveled through Transylvania, a region occupying the northwestern part of the modern nation of Romania. I couldn’t speak Romanian, but didn’t need to. Every town and village in Transylvania had a German-speaking population as a consequence of Saxon migrations in the high Middle Ages. Since I knew German, language was no problem.
The German-speaking population of Transylvania was 360,000 when I passed through. It is now less than 60,000 and still dwindling, the rest having migrated to Germany, where they have the right to immediate citizenship on ethnic grounds. Why live among strangers when there is an ethnic homeland you can move to? Once the Iron Curtain came down, Transylvania’s ethnic Germans were out of there …
— We Are Doomed, p.34

Those little Saxon villages in Transylvania were lovely. Everything was built of wood**, often beautifully carved and painted, especially in the churches. The people were stolid, kindly German-peasant types — I enjoyed much hospitality hiking through the region. They told me stories about wolves and bears coming down from the Carpathians in winter. The men would go on wolf-hunts, they told me: every homestead had guns for the purpose — pretty remarkable, in a tight-ish Communist dictatorship, but the alternative was to surrender their livestock, and likely the occasional child, to wolves. The landscape was right out of Grimm’s fairy tales: mountains, dark forests, icy torrents, lonely woodman’s huts, an occasional turreted castle on a rocky ridge. I’d turn in late, after sitting round talking with the men over little cups of brandy sweetened with sugar, then be woken in the morning with milk, warm and fresh from the cow. Oh, Transylvania.

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** ”Converted from wood to stone in the 17th century,” says this recent news story; but I remember only wood.