Powered by the stubbornness characterising this class and making their final efforts, this nobility, which was forced to leave Transylvania and all their wealth behind due to the Treaty of Trianon, is now trying to set foot again in the estates they were once evicted from.

Having given up their Hungarian or Western European lives and livelihoods, older and younger members of those families that had formerly influenced Hungarian history for centuries decided to sue the Romanian state, a few years ago, for reinstatement of their confiscated lands and castles now deemed to fall into ruins. In the eyes of the Hungarian minorities in the neighbouring countries, this struggle appears not only hopeless and heroic but also energising.

This exhibition is based on the visual dialectic approach of presenting “the past and the present” of some crucially important memorial places of Hungarian history: castles in Transylvania including monuments ranging from the Brâncovenești-based Kemény Castle through the Bánffy Castle in the Southern Transylvanian town of Ciuguzel to the Turia de Jos based Apor Manor House with its renaissance wall paintings. The exhibition sets out not only to document decay but also to portray the rebirth and the renewed social contextualisation and reintegration of this special social class of aristocrats destined to perish.