A dream come true : The Dance Museum in Sic

Transylvanian village of Sic is home to dance museum set up by a Dutch expatriate.

Daniel Onea, 30.05.2023, 14:00

He decided to settle in Romania from
the Netherlands in 2011, he married in Sic, a village in Transylvania located
40 km from Cluj Napoca, to a woman who owned a saltwater lake, so his most
recent project is to organise trips and accommodation in the area, including
swimming in the lake and dancing at the Dance Museum he set up in the village. The
Romanian story of Michel van Langeveld, however, began much earlier:

I’m a fanatic folk dancer and I
started folk dancing when I was 20 years old, in Holland. I finished my school
and in September 1980 I went to a dancing club and I liked it so much that that
same evening I became a member of the dance community and every week I learned
the dances of Europe, Israel, America, everywhere. In 1984 I went to Amsterdam
and in a second-hand bookshop I saw a book about Transylvania and Hungary. In
1990, for the first time I went to Sic.

Michel van Langeveld is not the
first foreigner to fall in love with Romania and stay here, most often
breathing new life into the places where they set up home. He says it was the
traditions and the beauty of the village of Sic and its authentic rural
landscape that convinced him to settle here:

It was also for me a great surprise
because after 1990 I went to Romania every year after the Revolution and
Transylvanian Hungarians started to organise dance camps and also you could
learn the Hungarian music and songs. I went to a lot of dance camps in
Transylvania, but also across the Carpathians, to the Moldavian way of dancing,
and that’s also very nice. And more and more, because I attended these dance
camps, I went to places that were so beautiful that I always said to myself:
put a gate around Romania and you have an open-air museum. I like the
traditions, I like the people very much and in 2004 in Sic I saw a blue Transylvanian
house with a roof that I thought was very romantic and I decided to buy that
house.

And from buying a house here and
turning it into a museum it was only a small step. The Dance Museum in Sic
currently houses 460 pairs of boots using in traditional dancing, as well as
music instruments. Michel van Langeveld:

I have a very big collection of
violins, double basses. A lot of tourists are coming thanks to the Tourist
Office in Cluj Napoca. In the surroundings, in Sic, we have, after the Danube
Delta, the second largest field of reeds which is called in the Romanian
language stufaris. A lot of Japanese tourists are coming and people from
Israel. Near Sic you have the city of Gherla, it’s an Armenian city but it has
also a Jewish synagogue. A lot of people from Israel come to visit this
synagogue and on the same day they also like to come my place because I once
told the guide that I can dance 200 Israeli dances and spontaneously I started
to sing an Israeli song and within a couple of seconds everybody was dancing.

The rooms of the museum house still
retain their traditional look, with one room decorated with hand-made
embroidery and rugs. We also find here painted pottery and a small collection
of old radio sets, reminiscent of a time when people used to dance to the
museum they heard of the radio.