Owlspotting

The posts made over the last few days originated in my hometown of Targu Mures (also called Targu-Mures, Tirgu Mures and more recently Tirgu-Mures; the latter is the spelling used by city officials). This Transylvanian town is the place I was born and the city I lived in until I went off to college. My family still lives here.

Some Targu Mures trivia (if you’re that curious, you can learn more about it from Wikipedia or by asking about it in the comments section):

— The settlement is about 700 years-old but carries its current name since the early 1600s.
— About 150,000 people live here. Population is almost evenly split between Romanians and Hungarians. Hungarians were the majority ethnic group for many years.
— This ethnic division was the background for clashes in the spring of 1990, a gruesome moment in the history of the city, when Romanians and Hungarians performed serious street fighting moves on each other. A few people died, hundreds were injured. Many later scored jobs dispersing spontaneous demonstrations with random acts of violence (that’s me putting a lighter touch on people taking bats to the head).
— The city has a soccer team, ASA, that in less than two decades managed to go from the first league down to the fourth. It spent the bulk of this spiral of doom in the second league. Today it is a horrid team.
— When communism fell in 1989, the city had at least six movie theaters. Now it has only two, both are single-screen.
— Aside from the ethnic strife incident Targu Mures is known to other Romanians for making photo-processing chemicals and leather garments; both those industries are just about dead. The city also used to make 1980s-style entertainment centers dubbed ElectroMures. Their gray amplifier would look sleek even by today’s standards.
— The city also boasts a decent theater scene in both Romanian and Hungarian languages.
— Medical care in this city is also well regarded. The local medical school recently celebrated 60 years. My old high school is closing in on 90 (as you’ll see in a future post, the building does look its age).
— Beginning last year it began playing host to a four-day long musical festival, Peninsula (Felsziget) a smaller sister to the better known Hungarian festival in Sziget. This year’s hostilities will be chronicled on this blog next week.

Below is a picture from the City website — the building in the middle is the theater.