Terrifying, rationalized, romanticized. Retrospection on the rural cultural landscape on the current territory of Cluj County, Romania

This paper aims to analyse the transformations that the landscape of the hilly and lowland areas of Cluj County has gone through throughout medieval and modern history. The natural landscape, the landscape anthropized by agriculture or other works supporting human survival and activities, as well as rural settlements are considered. The transforming factors can be natural, such as the plague that caused population decline, or anthropogenic, such as property control, mobility, industrialization, deindustrialization or globalization, economically and politically driven. The changes were somewhat cyclical in the medieval period, so that, depending on population dynamics and occupations, the landscape became either more anthropized or wilder. In the modern period, from the Enlightenment onwards, the landscape became more and more anthropized, and attempts were made to make rational use of it in the context of population growth and desired living standards.