Life continues to return to the empty churches and villages of Transylvania, writes Jonathan Gaisman.
If you want an authentic literary experience of Transylvania, the one connection to avoid is anything to do with Bram Stoker. A better entrée would be Miklós Bánffy’s Transylvanian Trilogy, in spirit the last great 19th-century European novel, though written in the 1930s. This Hungarian nobleman, whose estates (like the rest of the province) were transferred to Romania under the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, evokes better than anyone the landscapes of a province whose name still seems charged with a magical, even mythic essence. Its actuality has captured the imagination of many English people, including His Majesty the King.
The villages of Transylvania lie in secluded, often remote valleys. Their brightly coloured houses straggle along a main street, and behind them farmsteads and fields slope uphill towards forests in which bears and wolves still roam. There are a few more cars than ten years ago, and it is harder to find the distinctive conical hay stooks in the meadows, as machine balers replace pitchforks, but change has come slowly to the villages. The cows return from the upland pastures at evening, each finding the way back to its own byre. The wild flowers are superb; home-made jams burst with flavour.
Almost without exception, the villages are dominated by their churches; but these are no ordinary places of worship integrated into and harmonising with the buildings around them. On the contrary, they tend to be massive, fortified structures: steep-roofed, barn-like and encircled by defensive walls and towers, quite out of proportion to the adjacent homesteads. What makes the Transylvanian churches of especial interest is the twofold fact that they are not Romanian or even Hungarian but German, and that they are all but abandoned.
The reasons span eight centuries, and take one back to the early years of Hungarian occupation, itself a hotly contested topic between the descendants of Magyars and Vlachs. Following the occupation of Transylvania by King Stephen of Hungary in the 11th century, his cousin Geza II invited German-speaking settlers to come and live in the sparsely inhabited province, in particular to help defend it from invaders from the East: Cumans, Tatars, and later Turks.
These early immigrants, known by an inaccurate synecdoche as Saxons, were joined by others of their countrymen over succeeding generations. The new arrivals built great churches in the Gothic style and surrounded them with fortified enceintes, so that in the event of attack by marauders the villagers could retreat within their walls with grain and livestock, and withstand a lengthy siege. Many churches have a “bacon tower”, where a stock of cured meat would hang and supply the wants of the villagers until the invading force lost interest and moved on.
The German Reformation spread to Transylvania; the Saxon churches became Lutheran. Some were frescoed; Renaissance altar polyptychs and sculptures were added as decoration and Lutheran texts were inscribed on walls. When one stands within the encircled churches of Viscri or Biertan, the line “Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott” carries enhanced meaning. The rural Saxon communities worshipped here, as their urban counterparts did in the local towns. These now carry Romanian names like Sibiu or Sighișoara, but explain the province’s German name: Siebenbürgen, or “seven cities”.
The Saxons have nearly all gone. When World War II began, there were about 800,000 Germans living in the country, but Romania faced an invidious choice whether to ally itself with Hitler or Stalin. In November 1940, the then-leader Ion Antonescu, an anti-Semite and Fascist sympathiser, chose the Nazis and many Saxons joined the German Army. As the Allies gained the upper hand, however, Romania changed sides. It was duly occupied by the Red Army and fell within the sphere of the USSR. The Saxons could not easily change their allegiance and were stranded.
A permanent fissure opened up between the now-Communist Romanian state and its German minority. Many were removed to camps in the Soviet Union after the war, and the memorials in the Transylvanian churches add the victims of the 1945-1949 deportations to the lists of the fallen of the World Wars. During the Ceaușescu era, tens of thousands of Romanian Germans were “bought back” by the West German government under a programme to reunite families. A further exodus occurred following the collapse of his regime in December 1989. Many Saxons may only have left in the 1990s, but their bags had been metaphorically packed for decades.
There are now only a few tens of thousands of German speakers left in Romania. This major depopulation of Transylvania had a profound impact on the social and cultural life of its villages, many of which began to decay. Romanian (and in some parts Hungarian) inhabitants remain, it is true. There is a large Roma element, and these traditionally marginalised people have moved from the edges of villages into the centres, where they continue to encounter discrimination; in the most generous view, they do not constitute the vanguard of the local conservationist movement.
Instead, it has fallen to charities like the Mihai Eminescu Trust (founded in London in 1987 by Jessica Douglas-Home, and long supported by the former Prince of Wales) and Pro Patrimonio, the Romanian equivalent of the National Trust, to restore houses and reinculcate traditional crafts. The Transylvanian Book Festival, which has taken place since 2013 under the auspices of Lucy Abel Smith in the village of Richis, draws in interested visitors who are able to stay in increasingly well-appointed accommodation there and in nearby Copsa Mare or the strikingly picturesque Alma Vii.
The descendants of the original Saxon inhabitants will never return in numbers, but Romanian incomers seeking the rural life and recent German, Italian and English settlers bring with them economic benefits, artisanal patronage and ecological awareness. There are occasional services or concerts in those great, empty churches. This is not a re-creation of the old ways, but it is new life of a sort. It brings hope in part of a country that has a wretched recent history. The curious should come and see for themselves, for as long-time champion Nat Page has truly said of Transylvania, “When visitors come here, they love it because they feel that this is how the world ought to be.”
Jonathan Gaisman KC is a member of 7 King’s Bench Walk
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