He decided to settle in Romania from
\nthe Netherlands in 2011, he married in Sic, a village in Transylvania located
\n40 km from Cluj Napoca, to a woman who owned a saltwater lake, so his most
\nrecent project is to organise trips and accommodation in the area, including
\nswimming in the lake and dancing at the Dance Museum he set up in the village. The
\nRomanian story of Michel van Langeveld, however, began much earlier: <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\n
\n
\n
<\/p>\n
I’m a fanatic folk dancer and I
\nstarted folk dancing when I was 20 years old, in Holland. I finished my school
\nand in September 1980 I went to a dancing club and I liked it so much that that
\nsame evening I became a member of the dance community and every week I learned
\nthe dances of Europe, Israel, America, everywhere. In 1984 I went to Amsterdam
\nand in a second-hand bookshop I saw a book about Transylvania and Hungary. In
\n1990, for the first time I went to Sic.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
<\/p>\n
Michel van Langeveld is not the
\nfirst foreigner to fall in love with Romania and stay here, most often
\nbreathing new life into the places where they set up home. He says it was the
\ntraditions and the beauty of the village of Sic and its authentic rural
\nlandscape that convinced him to settle here: <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\n
\n
\n
<\/p>\n
It was also for me a great surprise
\nbecause after 1990 I went to Romania every year after the Revolution and
\nTransylvanian Hungarians started to organise dance camps and also you could
\nlearn the Hungarian music and songs. I went to a lot of dance camps in
\nTransylvania, but also across the Carpathians, to the Moldavian way of dancing,
\nand that’s also very nice. And more and more, because I attended these dance
\ncamps, I went to places that were so beautiful that I always said to myself:
\nput a gate around Romania and you have an open-air museum. I like the
\ntraditions, I like the people very much and in 2004 in Sic I saw a blue Transylvanian
\nhouse with a roof that I thought was very romantic and I decided to buy that
\nhouse.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
<\/p>\n
And from buying a house here and
\nturning it into a museum it was only a small step. The Dance Museum in Sic
\ncurrently houses 460 pairs of boots using in traditional dancing, as well as
\nmusic instruments. Michel van Langeveld: <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\n
\n
\n
<\/p>\n
I have a very big collection of
\nviolins, double basses. A lot of tourists are coming thanks to the Tourist
\nOffice in Cluj Napoca. In the surroundings, in Sic, we have, after the Danube
\nDelta, the second largest field of reeds which is called in the Romanian
\nlanguage stufaris. A lot of Japanese tourists are coming and people from
\nIsrael. Near Sic you have the city of Gherla, it’s an Armenian city but it has
\nalso a Jewish synagogue. A lot of people from Israel come to visit this
\nsynagogue and on the same day they also like to come my place because I once
\ntold the guide that I can dance 200 Israeli dances and spontaneously I started
\nto sing an Israeli song and within a couple of seconds everybody was dancing.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\n
\n
\n
<\/p>\n
The rooms of the museum house still
\nretain their traditional look, with one room decorated with hand-made
\nembroidery and rugs. We also find here painted pottery and a small collection
\nof old radio sets, reminiscent of a time when people used to dance to the
\nmuseum they heard of the radio. <\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Transylvanian village of Sic is home to dance museum set up by a Dutch expatriate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":137617,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[42520],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-137616","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-inside-romania"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n