The hunt was the ideal opportunity to complete various transactions and to make friends, some of them extremely profitable. It was a social and ceremonial event by special invitation. Participants would show up in their most precious clothes, with their best weapons, with harnessed horses, with expensive, specially trained dogs.

From sources of the time we learn that Prince John Sigismund was a passionate hunter of deer, roe deer, rabbits and birds.

In the Principality of Transylvania, another type of hunting – witch-hunting – was rarely practised. The first trials of Transylvanian ‘witches’ took place in the 16th century. In the Cluj-Dej area, 25 ‘witches’ were convicted, the first mentioned in documents being Ecaterina Szabo from Cluj.