Reghin

Why Reghin is called the city of violins

July 1, 2026

Reghin is not a large town, but it has a reputation that reaches far beyond its size: the “city of violins”. The name does not come from a marketing slogan, but from a craft tradition grown over generations, in which spruce and maple are turned into musical instruments.

A tradition built over time

From the middle of the twentieth century, Reghin became an important centre of musical instrument production in Romania, drawing together workshops and craftsmen specialised in violin making — the building of violins, violas, cellos and, more broadly, of string instruments. The Hora musical instrument factory, one of the landmarks of this tradition, trained many of the town's luthiers over the years, offering them both a technical apprenticeship and access to a setting in which the trade was passed on from one master to the next.

It was here, at the Hora factory, that Vasile Mare began his own path in violin making, in 1970, at the age of eighteen — vocational school and evening high school combined with daily work alongside experienced luthiers. That stage, spent in a place where violin making was the town's core trade, laid the foundations of the craft he would carry forward from 1982 under his own name, building master instruments.

The international competition and recognition

Reghin's reputation was built not only through production, but also through competitions and events dedicated to violin making, which brought craftsmen, musicians and judges from abroad into the town. The International Luthiery Competition in Reghin is one of these landmark occasions — a platform where local luthiers set their craft alongside that of others, under the eyes of specialist juries.

For the Mare family, this competition has been and remains a direct point of reference. In 2001, Vasile received a diploma of merit from Reghin City Hall for promoting the town's image. His son Aurelian went a step further: he won 1st place for viola at the 2012 competition, and in 2014 received a diploma of excellence at a later edition of the same event — two moments that tie the family name directly to the competitive history of the town.

The Mare family's place in this story

What makes Reghin's story distinctive is not only the concentration of workshops, but the way the trade often passes from one generation to the next, within the same family and sometimes under the same roof. The Mare family illustrates exactly this pattern: Vasile trained at Hora, Aurelian trained beside his father, and the youngest member of the family, Eduard, is already bound to the world of music — not as a luthier, but as a cellist, the first generation to play the instruments instead of building them.

That goes a long way towards explaining why the label “city of violins” is not merely a tourist formula for Reghin, but a faithful description of a place where the craft of violin making has become, for some families, a living inheritance, passed from father to son for decades.