M.A.Moiz
Transylvania One most of Europe
looked like this. Once upon a time the visits of Romania Where low key tourism is helping to
preserve an increasingly threatened way of life
Major the
blacksmith was worried. A Romanian gypsy, he was usually in lively good humor, but
today he was distraught. Recently men from a television company had come to his
village, offering to install satellite dishes for free, and his daughter had
taken one. Now he had been sent a bill for renting it, and he didn't have the
money -or a television. His daughter had gone to work in Hungary and
taken it with her. So he feared the worst. Would the police take him to Prison?
His neighbor local councilor read the
contract and reassured him. All he had to do was tell the company he didn't
want the satellite dish, and they would take it away. Major beamed. Life was
simple again.
The incident a couple of weeks ago
highlighted a clash of cultures deep in the rural heart of Romania, where a way
of life that has been virtually unchanged for centuries is struggling to adapt
to the demands of a new age. In Major's village, five miles from the nearest
paved road, rush hour begins soon after dawn when people lead cows and horses
from cobbled yards out side their kitchens, past gaggles of geese, ducks and
chickens to where a herdsman waits to take them to communal pastures for the
day. At dusk the process is reversed, to the tinkling of bells shuffling of
hooves, as the animals are led back to their byres and stalls for the night.
In between, not much happiness in the
village. Depending on the season, most people are in the fields tilling or
harvesting small plots of hay, oats and potatoes with horse-dawn implements
handed down through generations. The most common form of transport is the horse
and cart, designed to carry corps, logs, people, else that needs to be moved.
Like England before the land
enclosures of the 18th century there are no walls of fences, and the hillsides
are common land, the scene and in truth it lays fair claim to being a fragment
of a rural idyll lost in most of modern Europe.
This is southern Transylvania, a gig
plateau of wooded hills and valleys shielded by the Carpathian
mountains, where Saxon settlers and their descendants have farmed,
traded and fought to preserve their land and traditions for more than 800
years.
They came in the 12th century from Flanders, Luxembourg
and the moselle valley at the invitation of a Hungarian king, to defend the
mountain passes from marauding hordes from the east, and they built fortified
towns and more than 200 villages that safe guarded their communities until the
second world war.
Then the Russian came, 30,000
German-speaking Saxon men and women were bundled off to Siberian labour camps.
And barely half returned. Another exodus followed in the 1990s with
repatriation to newly unified Germany,
and today about 50,000 remain in villages with Romanian and gypsy neighbors.
Now their polyglot communities face fresh
challenges with Romania's
entry into EU earlier this year. In hamlets where women still draw water from
wells and shepherds guard their flocks by night from wolves, there is confusion
and concern over impending rules and regulations that threaten their
livelihoods.
Subsistence farmers with a couple of cows
are worried by reports that they must buy milking machines, they may not sell
their home-made (and highly prized) cheeses beyond a 0-mile radius, and they
may no longer keep livestock in their back yards. One bizarre suggestion was
that shepherds be issued with GPS devices to ensure they kept flocks away from
planned new high ways. When a local journalist showed one to a shepherd, he was
told:" go away with this thing. You are scaring my sheep.."
None of this is apparent to the few
visitors who ignore the over-hyped Dracula myth and explore genuine vestiges of
an older Europe, far from the madding crowds of Bran Castle.
The road to the Major's village, Viscri, is a rough track that passes through a
gypsy settlement and then meanders through country side that those of us of
certain age remember from childhood, when wild flowers brightened meandows
untainted by chemicals.
Over a hills the red tiled roofs of Viscri
appear in a valley beneath the distinctive towers and ramparts of a fortified
church, a common feature in a land exposed for centuries to the slings and
arrows of outrageous neighbors.
The church and most of the farmhouses
around it were built by descendants of Saxons who arrived in 1142,and the lay
out is unchanged a broad dirt road flanked by par trees and houses in medieval
half timbered style, with gates between them wide enough to take a loaded hay
wagon. Throw in water troughs for the livestock, and wooden benches for people
to sit and watch the world go by, and you have the essence of a traditional Saxon
village. Viscri has a couple of small general stores that also serve as bars, one
of which have wooden tables by the door. This is a perfect place to sample
local cheese and observe the owner and her friends knitting socks, a cottage
industry in the village .When people have little money, barter economies
flourish. The current rate or hiring someone's car for the day is three Paris of hand knitted
socks. Before the last exodus there were 300 Saxon in Viscri, now there are 25
in a population of 450. In an old school building there is a faded photograph
of a brass band, featuring 34 men posing seriously with their instruments, an
image of a bygone age when the village would gather for music, dancing and
revelry fuelled by home-made plum schnapps. One of the few who remembers those
days is Sarah soodz, 70, who shows tourists around the church and maintains a
centuries-old tradition of ringing its bells at noon. "We had a very rich
cultural life," she says in the low German dialect of her ancestors.
"The band played at concerts, tea
dances, weddings that lasted for days, and even we had theatre. The actors were
the ones with the big mouths." When the Berling wall fell, a young priest
advised the Saxons to leave for Germany,
saying there was no future for them in their villages. "The old people who
left regret it now, but they are too proud to come back," Sarah says.
But many of them do return, once every two
years, for a week long reunion when old instruments are dusted off and played
at dancing circle around the lime tree in the grounds of the church. British
Romanian charity dedicated to preserving the culture and traditions of Saxon
villages threatened by depopulation and lack of resources. So far, it has
restored hundreds of historic buildings, trained local craftsmen in traditional
building skills, and helped villagers to set up small business ventures.
One of the schemes is low key tourism,
renovation decaying farm buildings for guesthouses. I slept in a room with a
wood burning stove and an antique box bed that slid from a chest of drawers. My
stay coincided with one of two nights of the year when legends warn that vampire’s
prowl, but all that disturbed me was a crowing cock with a befuddled sense of
time. The room was typical of village guest houses, cleans and simply
furnished, with an authentic back to basics air. Hearty soups and stews are the
order of the day at most meals, and there is a farmer's wife in the village
says " the area represents a lost past for most of us a past in which
villages were intimately linked to their landscape". The farmer probably
came to this conclusion after walking a seven-miles trail from viscri, over
pastures and through wondrous woods of oak and hornbeam, to the village of Mesendorf. A less strenuous alternative
to arrange for wood cutter to take you in is cart, and show you scars on a
trees made by bears climbing to nests of honey bees, the footprints of wild
boar, and dens of foxes. From a high ridge in the forest there is panorama of
green hills dotted with sheep, smoke drifting from Shepherds camp fires, and in
the far distance, hazy like a mirage, the snow capped peaks of the Transylvanian Alps filling the horizon. It is the kind of
place where you want to sit in the shade of a tree, melt into fragrant grass, and
not go any where for a long time. Shepherds know this feeling. It is yearning
that comes on him ever spring. When it is time to take the sheep of his village
to summer pastures in the hills, where he remains with them until autumn."
i can't wait to come here, to hear the birds singing in the morning and the
dogs barking at night," he says. So does this land make poets of Shepherds?
A guide takes us to his sheepfold, a
rudimentary hut of wood and corrugated iron that he shares with two other
shepherds and a pack of dogs as fierce as the wolves they fights to protect the
sheep. Shepherds wife has come to prepare lunch over an open fire and her four
course meal of flavorful meats and aromatic cheese would put classy restaurants
to shame. They are vaguely aware that EU regulations may soon intrude on their
lives, yet it could be argued that instead of meddling with these traditional
farming practices - which are as organic as they get -we might learn from them.
Some of the visitors suggest the Old Saxon
ways of Transylvania could be a model for the development of green agriculture
throughout Europe. For now, looking forward to
summer in the hills with his sheep and dogs, is sanguine "we are still
optimistic, life goes on," he says.
A trip to Iceland is a bit like going to
watch the Earth form right under your nose. A landscape of fissures billowing
steam, thermal pools, glaciers, geysers and lava.
