An elderly woman watches from her window in Cincsor, a small Transylvanian village some 250 km North-West of Bucharest, Romania, on October 16, 2024. The Medieval village of Cincsor is located in a region at the foot of the Carpathians where Germans settled in the 12th century, recruited by the Hungarian kings to colonize an uninhabited land. Before World War II, there were still up to 300,000 Germans but there are only about 10,000 today, most of them having emigrated since the 1970s to flee persecution by the communist regime of Nicolae Ceausescu. (Photo by Mihai Barbu / AFP)