Scotland (Glasgow) and Romania (Sibiu, Vallea Viilor, Alma Vii, and Viscri).
For a transcript, see
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1970784
For photos, see greatmirror.com
Scotland (Glasgow) and Romania (Sibiu, Vallea Viilor, Alma Vii, and Viscri).
For a transcript, see
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1970784
For photos, see greatmirror.com
Part 1. Glasgow
I can’t say exactly when it happened, but sometime before I put my liquids, gels, and pastes into that little Ziploc bag we stopped fitting into the world. My carry-on was in one tray, my shoes and belt were in another, and my RFID-blocking wallet was in a third, along with my passport and the Ziploc bag, stuffed full. Despite these valiant preparations, one of the trays was kicked out for secondary inspection. An officer asked if the tray was mine, but he was asking only because I was looking disgusted. I replied, “unfortunately,” in a surly tone. He asked me to step back.
A woman in a special uniform came over and asked if she could help. Her jacket even said something like “Need Help?” She was brilliant, and in a minute I was ignoring the tray and engaged in pleasant conversation. As I was leaving, I complimented her and relayed the officer’s explanation: “random screening.” Writing these words, I almost wrote “random screaming.”
That was Heathrow. A few days earlier, I had rented a car in Glasgow so I could visit a few places outside the town center. The car-rental clerk was a young Pole, quietly worried about the upcoming Brexit. She pushed hard for optional insurance, and I felt slightly guilty declining. I told myself that she was only doing it because her boss pushed her. He or she was only doing it because—and so on.
Late that same afternoon, I pulled into a nearby parking garage. I would rather have parked on the street, but I wasn’t sure how heavy the fine would be if I got ticketed, and governments now have no trouble reaching through rental-car companies and credit-card issuers to get scofflaws on the other side of the planet. I pulled into the garage, waited in my lane to get a ticket, then saw the sign saying “Cash Not Accepted.”
I couldn’t back up but figured I could use a credit card to get out. My mistake: a few hours later, the payment station demanded a credit card with a PIN. My credit cards don’t have them. There was no attendant, no number to call. What to do? Fortunately, the machine turned out to like my ATM card.
On my last evening in Glasgow I was looking out of my hotel-room window. It was a new hotel, which meant of course that the windows could not be opened. Fine way to treat guests. The sky was dark at seven, and there was an office building across the street. The tenant was one of the big American investment banks, and a few men were at their desks studying screens presumably covered with financials. That is a word.
Over the previous few days, I had been poking around the city with a very tart Pevsner guide, one of a series of books covering the architecture of Britain’s major cities. Describing the Westergate office building of 1985, the authors practice criticism as a blood sport. They call the building a “huge and crushingly dull office block… with a smooth wall of polished beige granite, monotonously studded with brown window units. Oblivious to its surroundings, it is perhaps the most deadly building in the City Centre.” Wow. British Telecom, the original tenant, was gone, and Yotel, a budget-hotel chain, was now asking for permission to convert the building into 254 so-called “guest cabins.” Yotel said that it would remove the granite façade and replace it with metal and glass. Apparently that would make all the difference, or perhaps the city fathers didn’t like Pevsner. I see now that the hotel has opened, and the granite façade is still in place. What’s that phrase? Oh, yes: bet on the money.
Not that I would sing the praises of Glasgow in the 1830s. Nine men had been appointed to inquire into the condition of hand-loom weavers in the UK. The commissioners had each been given one part of the country, and South Scotland went to one Jelinger Cookson Symons, later an official inspector of English mines and Welsh schools. In his report, Symons wrote:
the wynds of Glasgow comprise a fluctuating population of from fifteen to twenty thousand persons. This quarter consists of a labyrinth of lanes, out of which numberless entrances lead into small courts, each with a dunghill reeking in the centre. Revolting as was the outside of these places, I was little prepared for the filth and destitution within…. No pains seem to be taken to purge this Augean pandemonium, this nucleus of crime, filth, and pestilence existing in the centre of the second city of the empire…”
Friedrich Engels read the Symons report and in The Condition of the Working Class in England quoted this Dickensian passage:
I have seen human degradation is some of its worst phases, both in England and abroad, but I can advisedly say that I did not believe until I visited the wynds of Glasgow, that so large an amount of filth, crime, misery, and disease existed on one spot in any civilized country…. These places are, generally as regards dirt, damp and decay, such as no person of common humanity to animals would stable his horse in.”
Passages like that are a good reminder of where Marxist wrath comes from.
It took Glasgow thirty years to pass a City Improvement Act and begin demolishing the wynds. They’re gone now, but much of the housing that replaced them survives. A good example, built about 1900, is on High Street a few blocks south of Glasgow’s twelfth-century cathedral. What looks at first like a building with five hundred feet of street frontage proves to be seven almost identical buildings pressed together. At first glance, the ground floor appears to be a string of shops: Glasgow Appliances, High St. Sandwich Company, J.J.’s Off Sales, Tesoro Mio Italian Dining, Friends Chinese Café, and so on. On closer inspection, the ground floor of each of the seven buildings resolves into two shops separated by a door leading up to three floors of flats, which here are called tenements, without the American connotation of slum. The façades above the shop signs are of a handsome red sandstone with frequent bay windows under decorative gables. The Pevsner guide turns all sweetness and light, praising the buildings for their “happy Arts and Crafts design.”
Glasgow has a great many such tenements, many of them almost identical, and building them took a staggering amount of labor. Of labor, however, the Scots have never been shy. I was reminded of this while wandering around the fifty thousand graves in the Glasgow Necropolis, next to the city’s cathedral. In some parts of the world, tombstones are limited to names and dates; in others, they herald the virtues—real or imagined—of the deceased. In the Necropolis, the men who lived through the Industrial Revolution are remembered first and last for their work. I met John Walker, a biscuit manufacturer who died in 1862. I met Thomas Tattersall, a cotton spinner who died in 1878. I met John Wardrop, a master slater who died in 1890. Walter MacFarlane of the Saracen Foundry had an impressive monument. If you’ve been to Durban, you may have seen his Vasco da Gama clock. In Brazil, the cast-iron railings of the grand staircase in the Manaus public library came from the MacFarlane foundry. Wandered around the Raffles Hotel in Singapore? MacFarlane did the verandas. He also, of course, did the ironwork on the facades of the commercial blocks in old Salisbury.
I came upon the grave of David Elder, “Engineer.” That’s a splendidly understated epitaph for the man who designed the steam engine for the East India Company’s first paddle steamer. Close by lay son John, “Engineer and Shipbuilder” and inventor of the compound or double-expansion steam engine, which made long voyages under steam possible without refueling. John Elder also established the John Elder shipyard, in his day among the biggest in the world. Today, as part of BAE Systems Maritime, it is one of the two shipyards still operating in Glasgow. It survives on contracts from the Royal Navy.
John Elder’s compound engines were adapted in the 1870s to railway locomotives. One of the men building them was James Reid, who began as a blacksmith’s assistant and rose to be managing director of Europe’s largest locomotive factory, the Springburn shops, located less than two miles north of the Necropolis. An obituary from 1894, when Reid collapsed on the St. Andrews links, describes Reid as a man of “iron will, indomitable perseverance, sterling integrity and most methodical business habits…. He seldom made a mistake, though in all cases he imperatively insisted on implicit obedience to his orders.”
I chuckle at the thought of the poor public-relations consultant today pleading with Reid to smile for the cameras. He certainly doesn’t smile in the statue that stands in Springburn Park, just north of the former locomotive shops. Full-bearded, he gazes forward with an I’ll-brook-no-nonsense expression. One side of the plinth carries a bronze plaque indicating that he found time to serve as Glasgow’s Dean of Guild, a position responsible for approving all new buildings in the city. The other side has a bronze plaque with a graceful young woman in flowing robes. She holds a sign that reads, “President Royal Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts, 1891-1894.” Apparently there was more to James Reid than calculations of cylinder pressure and drawbar pull.
The Springburn shops disappeared in the 1950s and were eventually replaced by a Tesco, a Costco, and a Lidl. Less than a mile south of the Necropolis, the River Clyde has changed, too. As late as the 1960s, the view downstream from what is now a bridge on the motorway to Edinburgh included what looked like the teeth of a rake, with a set of six straight and parallel rivers. One, approximately in the middle, was the river. The others were artificial channels separated by docks lined with warehouses. The channels and warehouses are gone now, and the river, channeled between stone walls, is fringed by an exhibition center, an arena, a couple of museums, theaters, hotels, and studios for BBC Scotland. It’s Sydney’s Darling Harbor all over again. Glasgow still has a port, but it’s a minor one, and it’s miles downstream.
I drove two miles downstream from the motorway bridge to the former headquarters of the John Elder shipyard. The building, now the Fairfield Govan Heritage Centre, is faced with the same red sandstone used in the High Street tenements, but in this case two sandstone longboats protrude a few feet from the façade on both sides of the entrance. Guided by dolphins, the boat on the left holds a shipwright, identified by the ship’s wheel behind him. On the right, an engineer stands in a longboat in front of a spur gear as big as a manhole cover. I infer that what Glasgow’s industrialists lacked in their finesse at smiling for cameras they made up for with blunt, direct self-respect. I imagine them telling me, “Your world wouldn’t exist without us.” I could and would assure them that I agree and that I admire their achievement, which I do, but they would not be mollified. That’s because they’d know that I also found fault with their work in the same way I find fault with the legacy of Guillaume Delprat, back at Broken Hill, or even the work of St. Clair Wallace at Great Zimbabwe.
Collectively, these men—and overwhelmingly they were men—made it possible for me to speed down a road faster than any horse could run and do it while listening to the music of my choice and in a space heated to whatever temperature I like. Of course I do stop if I have a flat tire or if I run out of gas or if the timing chain breaks or if a bridge is out or if there’s no electricity at the gas station or if I can’t pay for gas or can’t pay my insurance premium. Whizzing down the highway, I’m dependent in a hundred ways on systems that I don’t control. True, there’s a counter-argument, which is that a thousand years ago people bitten by poisonous snakes couldn’t call an ambulance. But those people were standing on or, more likely, lying down on the Earth that, not so figuratively, made them. They weren’t suspended in our ingenious artificial network that leaves us forever detached, separated from the same world that made us, too. Sure, I’ll take the ambulance, but I also recognize that we pay a price.
Close to the shipyard, I stopped at several blocks of company tenements built of the same red sandstone used for the High Street tenements. It’s a rock created three hundred million years ago, when Scotland was as barren as central Australia today. The sheer age of the rock gives the buildings a gravitas, a sense of permanence, but it doesn’t make them attractive. These tenements have no ground-floor shops. Instead, four floors of flats are stacked up along the full length of the block. Once again, the lineup is actually a set of separate and contiguous buildings, but seen from above, the lineup proves to be one side of a quadrilateral rimming an entire block. Bay windows and evenly spaced doorways break the monotony a bit, but the street still looks like a prison courtyard.
There was a similar story near Walter MacFarlane’s Saracen Foundry in Possilpark, a company town about a mile north of the Glasgow city center. The foundry closed in 1967 and was replaced by an industrial park with a dozen companies, but Walter MacFarlane and Walter MacFarlane, Jr., a nephew who took over the business after his uncle died, once employed ten thousand men. The tenements built for their workers have mostly been cleared away, but the survivors are more four-story red sandstone blocks, in this case with ground-floor shops including a mix as exotic as the destinations to which the MacFarlanes shipped their ironwork. Along one block I saw the Saracen Bar, the Sultan Super Market, 3Dee African Taste, the Layalina Middle Eastern bakery, and at least two Turkish barbers.
And housing for the rich? To my surprise, it turned out that their housing was the model of the Glasgow tenement. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, there isn’t much difference in the shape of a car that costs thirty thousand dollars and one that costs a hundred thousand. We all wear jeans.
Examples of Glasgow’s housing for the rich line up along Great Western Road, a road surveyed in 1830 straight as a die from Glasgow most of the way to Loch Lomond, about fifteen miles to the west. The road is an extension of Sauchiehall Street, once a premier shopping street. Times have changed, and in the space of one depressing kilometer on Sauchiehall I walked past a Boots pharmacy, a Starbucks, a Pret A Manger, a Burger King, a McDonald’s, a Marks and Spencer, a T. K. Maxx (a UK subsidiary of T.J. Maxx), another Boots, a Primark, a Tesco, a Sainsbury’s, a Taco Bell, a third Boots, a Subway, and a second Starbucks. As I say, we all wear jeans.
Close to where Sauchiehall crosses over the motorway to Edinburgh, the Great Western Road starts and continues west through what once was the property of the Kelvinside Estate Company. The estate owners in 1846 decided to make some money. To that end, they hired Decimus Burton, fresh from designing London’s prestigious Regent’s Park. Burton drew up a plan, but the company rejected it because Burton didn’t pack enough houses onto the site.
Several architects replaced Burton. One was the eminent Alexander “Greek” Thomson, most famous today for two Glasgow churches. One is the Caledonia Road Church, which was destroyed by fire in 1965 and demolished except for its façade. The other is the St. Vincent Road Church, close to Sauchiehall Street and still used as a church. Both churches have facades reminiscent of the Parthenon, which helps explain Thomson’s nickname, but both were perched on high sandstone platforms in the assumed style of Solomon’s temple. The entrances in both cases are, or were, through doors set into these massive platforms. Seen from inside, the roof of the church on St. Vincent Road rests on cast-iron columns painted red. The capitals are a riot of cast-iron stars, shells, pointed leaves, and curls that together form what might as well be called chickens poised to peck. The pews are carved from golden oak shaped by craftsmen who gave the pews backs as sensuous as a shoulder.
Thomson came from a fiercely religious family—a brother at age 50 went to Cameroon as a missionary and survived for seven years until malaria finally nailed him. Thomson himself once gave a lecture in which he said that “long before the foundation of the world, at the very beginning, in the councils of eternity, the laws which regulate this art [of architecture] were framed.” He asked his audience “to abandon with all convenient expedition the whole mass of accumulated human traditions under which we have been, as it were, smothered, and take earnestly to the study of the Divine laws….” Thomson’s Buck’s Head Building in downtown Glasgow is a fine example of doing just that. Historic Environment Scotland describes it as “a watershed in structural logic…” because the building comes as close to a curtain wall as the technology of the day allowed.
The question facing Thomson on the Great Western Road project was whether he would be allowed to break free from the “mass of accumulated human traditions” that “smothered” his contemporaries. Thomson himself anticipated the wretched answer: “The great difficulty… is not the inability of architects… but the obstructions which are placed in their way by their employers; for, instead of giving encouragement to progress as a thing essential, or even desirable, the custom is to forbid it as a thing intolerable.”
Thomson gave the Kelvinside Estate Company ten townhouses stretching cheek by jowl for five hundred feet along the Great Western Road. Completed in 1869, the buildings were and are set back from the road about eighty feet. That marginal strip is occupied now by a narrow band of road-hugging shrubbery and grass, then a paved lane wide enough to allow residents to enter and park with their vehicles nosing toward the façade. House entrances are spaced every forty feet, a distance marked by four evenly spaced double-hung windows. Every entrance is up a flight of about ten stairs leading to a porch supported by four Ionic columns. That makes a total of ten porches and forty double-hung windows on the ground floor. The upper floor is a line five hundred feet long of identical windows at ten-foot intervals.
In an effort to break the monotony, Thomson included two three-story sections at the second and ninth townhouses. Each of these larger townhouses has a double-wide staircase leading to two doors behind Ionic columns. Critics agree that this spacing is superior to the more typical placement of pavilions at the ends or middle of other terraces along the Great Western Road. Andor Gomme and David Walker, authors of one major study of Glasgow architecture, write that the Great Western Terrace’s “superb sense of scale and proportion raises it above all the other terraces in the road.” Perhaps they are right, but Americans mock cookie-cutter tract housing because every house on the street is nearly identical. They do it even though within a generation many of the homes are heavily modified. The façade of the Great Western Terrace is equally monotonous but hasn’t been touched in well over a century. The only reason it’s not mocked is that we learn to envy the rich and remain respectful even when, as here, their stately homes have been broken up into apartments. We react to classical columns and architraves and entablatures as predictably as Ivan Pavlov’s dogs reacted to bells.
I do not know if Thomson lamented his Great Western Terrace, but a bust sculpted by the eminent John Mossman shows Thomson as a powerful man with a full and commanding beard and a slightly wounded expression. I think it captures defeat. I wonder if Thomson ever read Ruskin on the degradation of the sculptors of antiquity, forced to produce endless copies of set forms. Thomson may have consoled himself with the thought that rich Glaswegians liked the Great Western Terrace well enough to buy a piece of it, but then he might have recalled the sculptor Canova saying that people see with their ears. It’s like the early television comedian Milton Berle, who is said to have asked for a laugh track to be added at a point where a live audience hadn’t laughed. The track was added. “See?” Berle cracked, “I told you it was funny.”
The story has a second act. The Kelvin River passes under the Great Western Road, then flows southwesterly through the Kelvingrove or West End Park. The Glasgow city government in 1853 bought the park for almost exactly one hundred thousand pounds. It was a lot to spend on an amenity, but the city—and Charles Wilson, the local architect behind the scheme—intended to develop a public park along the low-lying land flanking the river, then recoup the investment by subdividing and selling off residential lots on the higher ground, safe from floods.
The scheme was important enough that Joseph Paxton, the designer of London’s Crystal Palace, was commissioned to prepare a plan. There’s some confusion about what Paxton did, but Charles Wilson stayed with the project from its inception until his own death, at fifty-three, in 1861. By that time, Wilson had designed many of the houses in the development. He, or perhaps someone else, gave the development the romantic name of The Woodlands. That’s been the pattern with urban development since the birth of the industrial city. Homeowners want to believe they’ve escaped the city, even if the only signs of escape are the name of the subdivision and a patch of grass.
Instantly recognizable from satellite imagery, where it is buffered on the west by Kelvingrove Park, The Woodlands consists of a central green oval—Park Circus—wrapped by two concentric residential ovals, one facing inward toward the Circus, the other facing west and down over Kelvingrove Park. The development extends to the south in stepped levels connected by grand staircases. Most of the buildings on Park Circus are now offices, and those on Park Terrace have been subdivided into apartments and hostels, but when they were new these homes had three floors, plus attic and basement. Eight stairs led up to a doorway. Next to each door there was a bay window, copied on the second floor but not the third. One after another, the townhouses line up like soldiers on parade. .
The inward-facing Park Circus units skip the bay windows, perhaps because there’s no view except of the oval. Measuring about a hundred feet on its greater axis, the oval park is locked, restricting access to property owners, most of whom seem to make little use of it. Each townhouse overlooking the oval has nine double-hung windows—three atop three atop three, with one at the bottom replaced by a door, varnished or painted white. The facades are all of a gray sandstone, so anyone looking for color must settle for the cars parked in front.
The Pevsner guide calls the Woodlands “the finest piece of town design in Glasgow.” The authors pay special attention to one house. It’s at 22 Park Circus and is a 12,000 square-foot corner unit distinguished by an upstairs bay window that looks away from the oval park toward a regal staircase, a swath of parkland, and, on a good day, the Clyde, less than a mile away.
Small world: 22 Park Circus was designed by Charles Wilson for none other than Walter MacFarlane of the Saracen Foundry. Walter, Jr., inherited the house from his uncle and occupied it until his death in 1932. By then, the house had been transformed, as the Pevsner guide says, into “the richest interior in the Circus, indeed as rich as any in Glasgow.” A club in the 1930s, then a consulate, the house eventually became the property of the Glasgow city council, which put the building up for sale. Two years later, after a twenty-five percent price cut, the house apparently did sell. The estate-agent’s signs were gone when I came by, so I missed the opportunity to see what the Pevsner guide calls “an astonishing upper hall with Corinthian columns and galleries and a scalloped and glazed dome made in cast-iron by MacFarlane’s Saracen Ironworks.”
Perhaps the inside would have stopped me in my tracks, but looking at the outside of all these houses I see homes for people whose goals are security, comfort, and status. Come to think of it, that’s the full monty, the complete justification of the Industrial Revolution. Sitting as I am in a nicely heated room whose temperature I control from a thermostat on the wall, I shouldn’t belittle those goals. I belittle them anyway, because security, comfort, and status aren’t enough.
I recall Bankimchandra Chatterjee, a Bengali appalled by what he called the “tutelary deities” of English civilization. He was talking about “Comfort and his brother, Respectability.” That was 1872, when The Woodlands were at their apogee. I don’t believe that Chatterjee ever left Bengal, but I imagine him coming with me on a walk around The Woodlands. We would joke about the colonial officers who retired to places like this on very generous pensions as a reward for decades of malaria, cholera, and risking getting shot, stabbed, or poisoned by people who hated them. Returning from West Africa or India or Malaya, these men moved into their boxes. A big day was one with a visit from somebody they had known in Nigeria or the Punjab or Penang. The men on their pensions wrote memoirs hardly read today except by sharp-tongued critics. Even when first published, they were read mostly by people who recalled their own colonial adventures. As the Joni Mitchell song goes, you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.
Part 2. Transylvania
Trying to understand the price we have paid for Chatterjee’s “tutelary deities,” I left Scotland and flew to Romania—not to Bucharest but to Sibiu, a town on the north slope of the Transylvanian Alps. With a metro population of about a quarter million, Sibiu has a small but efficient airport with daily Lufthansa 737s to Munich. Visitors can stay at a Hilton, a Best Western, or a Ramada. Residents mostly live in Soviet-era apartment blocks, which is to say mid-rise boxes, cheaply built and poorly maintained. They have a choice of Carrefour, Lidl, or Profi, which is to say French, German, or British grocery stores.
Until 1920, Sibiu, like the rest of Transylvania, was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Sibiu’s central square, the Piaţa Mare, was the Grosser Ring and Sibiu itself was Hermannstadt. The center of Sibiu still looks German, a century after the Treaty of Versailles dismembered Vienna’s empire and gave Transylvania to Romania, but the town’s demography has been completely inverted. In 1920, Sibiu had eighteen thousand Germans and fewer than nine thousand Romanians. Today, the city has almost 150,000 Romanians but only about fifteen hundred Germans.
The Germans in Transylvania were called Saxons, whether or not their ancestors came from Saxony. They started to come in the twelfth century, after Géza II of Hungary laid claim to Transylvania. To hold it, he invited settlers from across the Germanic world. He even promised in writing to let them run their own affairs. There was a catch, of course. The king might have explained it this way: “I will allow you to live in my domain, but I can’t defend you against the Mongols or the Turks, so you must be prepared to defend yourselves. If you are vigilant and lucky, you’ll escape capture and life as a galley slave or harem woman. Now sleep tight, and keep an eye on the hills.” The Saxons were lucky, because the three hundred or so villages they established in Transylvania survived for seven centuries.
Devastating as World War I was to the Saxons in Transylvania, World War II was worse. The Saxons who had not left Romania after Versailles were thrilled by the rise of Adolf Hitler. Their young men went to war in high spirits, their parents applauding until reports arrived from Stalingrad. At the end of the war, the surviving soldiers returned to find that most of their families, terrified of the approaching Russians, had already left on foot or in horse-drawn wagons on the four-hundred-mile journey across Hungary to Austria. Other families, afraid to lose their property, stayed put, only to learn that the Russians were deporting Saxons to work in Russian coal mines.
Some Saxons survived those mines and were repatriated to East Germany. The rest returned to Communist Romania, where they stayed until the lifting of the Iron Curtain. They then moved to Germany, where, after Romania’s entry to the EU in 2007, they were followed by many ethnic Romanians. It took me a while to realize why the villages outside Sibiu were so quiet. About half of the houses were empty.
A vivid account of traditional Saxon life has been written by Michael A. Nagelbach, the American-born son of a Saxon pastor who lived in a village north of Sibiu until he, too, fled the Russians and eventually settled in Ellwood City, about thirty miles north of Pittsburgh. The son has in effect ghostwritten his own father’s autobiography. It’s an odd arrangement, but it works.
We learn that Andreas Nagelbach grew up in Liebling, a town about a hundred miles west of Sibiu. This is the Banat, a region of Hungary adjacent to Transylvania and much less hilly and forested. A pleasant place? Not for Andreas Nagelbach. Recalling the Nazi glorification of calisthenics, Andreas writes bitterly that exercise was the last thing these people needed. He writes about a villager who worked so incessantly that he was said “to kneel in bed so as to avoid falling into a deep sleep.”
Andreas was lucky enough to escape to universities in Riga, Tubingen, and Berlin, but before leaving Liebling he helped with the wheat harvest, “a job which drove me to desperation because my shins would be punctured thousands of times by the small thorns of wild berry vines; my hands bled from handling the rough sheaves—I often cut my face and arms as well; my whole body itched from the thistles and wheat particles that stuck to my moist skin.”
Women in the harvest season cooked huge meals. That was the busiest time of the year, but “all winter long, our women spun…. To save kerosene women would use grease light from the stable.” Nagelbach’s mother was thrilled to acquire a Singer sewing machine. The village men meanwhile bought a steam-powered threshing machine that
produced hundred-pound sacks of wheat for each family’s attic. Nagelbach’s father became part owner of a steam-powered flour mill producing the purest flour the villagers had ever seen.
Most Lieblingers never left the county of their birth—county, not country—and children were taught to fear community disapproval above all else. The ultimate parental reprimand was, “What will people say?” Nagelbach makes this point with an anecdote. “It took enormous strength to swing the scythe all day long; our neighbor Philip Jung held the record; he was able to mow as many as three acres in a day, twice what a normal man could manage.” So far, so good. Nothing was as praiseworthy as hard work: “When a man managed to ruin his health and cripple himself by the age of 35 through fierce, unrelenting labor, he was held in high esteem.” Then the punchline, with “Jung, the champion mower and a tremendous worker, causing a minor sensation by walking down the street openly carrying a bottle of wine he had bought at the beer garden. No one had ever done something so provocative and offensive in public.” Had Jung gone mad? Was he ill? Not at all. He looked around and announced: “Today I am fifty years old.”
At age 26, Andreas Nagelbach in 1939 became pastor of a Saxon village about twenty miles north of Sibiu. Today it’s called Vallea Viilor, “Vineyard Village” in Romanian, but when Nagelbach arrived it was Wurmloch, “Dragon Forest.” The name hints at the very rational fear with which the Saxons saw the hills that bordered their villages. Every one of the villages had a fortified church, a Kirchenburg in German or bisericata fortificata in Romanian.
The Nazis didn’t have to fight their way into Wurmloch. Nagelbach writes of a celebratory convoy that drove into town as “the Saxons stretched out their arms” in “the single worst moment of my ministry.” Four years later, Nagelbach would join another convoy, this one of villagers fleeing on foot or in wagons to Austria. It’s hard to sense their fear today, when Vallea Viilor is one of forty-eight villages collectively designated by UNESCO as a World Heritage site called Villages with Fortified Churches in Transylvania. The UNESCO documents make no mention of the Nazi past.
I arrived at Vallea Viilor in October, and the weather was perfect. The forested hilltops were raining golden leaves, and in the valleys millions of leaves of crispy-dry corn plants rustled in the slightest breeze. It felt timeless, which is ironic because corn arrived in Transylvania from Mexico via Italy about 1750, two centuries or more after the village’s founding.
In the center of town, where the main road meets a branch, I parked close to the wall around the Kirchenburg. The wall enclosed an area measuring about one hundred by two hundred feet, and though the wall was polygonal, the angles were so nearly flat that the wall seemed to be an oval. The bottom five feet was built of naked blocks of roughly coursed stone. The top eight feet was plastered, painted, and blank except for loopholes every ten feet. The top of the wall was protected by a peaked roof supported by wooden posts massive enough to carry a load of baked-clay tiles. The tiles were about the size of my hand with fingers together and extended. The tiles hung loosely on horizontal slats that caught a little knob or finger projecting from the underside of each tile. These tiles were the roofing material everywhere in the Saxon villages, from churches to houses to barns. Making them must have been a major industry.
There was no one around, but on a locked door in the wall around the church there was a note with a phone number. I called and in a couple of minutes a woman appeared. She unlocked the door and before leaving said, “You can go anywhere you like. Just be careful.” She didn’t say anything else, and I never saw her again.
The Kirchenburg’s oval wall was more complicated on the inside, where a catwalk ran about eight feet off the ground and provided access to the loopholes. The wall below the catwalk was so thick that rooms had been scooped out of it. Each village family had one of these rooms in which to store ham and grain for use during a siege. There was a well, too. Every fortified church had one.
The entrance to the church was a simple door in the side of the nave. Inside, the church was a rectangle about thirty feet wide by ninety feet long, all under a barrel vault slightly higher than wide and ornamented with plaster like piping on a cake. The color scheme was dead simple: tan on beige. The church had no aisles or transept, and the floor was rough and dusty planks. Parishioners were lucky that the bench-style pews had backs. Children had benches running along both side walls, and there was still more seating for children directly above those benches. This upper seating was squeezed into narrow balconies whose wooden face panels, painted gray, ran the length of the nave. The balcony on the left side was cantilevered from the wall, but the one on the right was supported by stout wooden columns, tapered but rising to plain, square capitals. One side was presumably built before the other.
At the rear of the church, a loft held a fine organ, its pipes grouped to form three columns, each under a decorative crown. A much larger crown was suspended over the pulpit, which projected from the left wall at the other end of the church. The most elaborate ornament in the church was a triple-decked Baroque altarpiece from about 1780. Wurmloch had grown prosperous enough to hire a craftsman from Sighisoara, a town about twenty-five miles to the northeast and in Saxon times called Schässburg. The craftsman gave the villagers an altarpiece rising almost to the ceiling on marble columns with gilt Corinthian capitals.
So far, there had been no need to be careful, but at the altar end of the church I found a circular stone staircase, alternately window-lit and almost pitch-black. The stairs led to a dark void above the bricked arch of the nave and below the much higher, steeply peaked roof, which was supported on rough-hewn timbers that were held together with a museum-quality collection of dados, pegged laps, and mortise-and-tenon joints. I was back in the pre-industrial world, where everything as shaped with hand tools.
This makes me think of a church built a few years ago not far from my own home. The steeple arrived prefabricated and was quickly hoisted from a flatbed truck to the steel framework that would be its base but was not yet clad. Come to think of it, I remember a fraternity house whose façade had to be trimmed with massive columns that proved to be road culverts that were stood upright and plastered to even out the corrugations. There are advantages to these innovations, mostly having to do with price, but they remind me of a pianist praising her electronic keyboard before adding, almost apologetically, that unlike her acoustic piano the keyboard of course had no soul. She meant, I think, that the link between her fingertips and her acoustic piano’s hammers was as intimate as a cat’s reliance on its whiskers.
Ladders rose into the massive choir tower. I had never seen ladders like these. They were simply square timbers laid at a forty-five-degree angle, with triangular blocks notched into the wood to form steps. Should I scamper up, when there was plenty of room to fall thirty feet? I preferred the new ladders with rungs and rails provided for visitors, and I climbed up on them to a catwalk that rimmed the interior of the tower near its peak. Once again, thick wooden posts supported a heavy load of tiles on a pyramidal roof, rising as steeply as an elf’s cap into another dark space laced with heavy beams. A three-foot-high band of the wall at this level was open at breast height. Standing between posts supporting the roof, I could look outside. Tiled roofs lined the houses on both sides of all three streets leading away from the church—the main road and the branch.
Each house had about forty feet of street frontage. The left half presented to the street a high wall punctuated with a solid gate high enough and wide enough for a loaded hay wagon to pass. The gate opened into a courtyard that extended perhaps fifty yards to the rear of the property, where there was a barn. The right half of the property was a series of buildings that fused into a single line with the ridge or peak perpendicular to the street. Behind the barns there once had been gardens, and behind the gardens there had been small vineyards, introduced to the village by a nineteenth-century pastor, Pastor Hoch. He had encouraged the importation of disease-free California rootstocks. The villagers balked at planting them until Hoch himself planted those rootstocks on land belonging to the church. As agricultural-extension agents sometimes say, there’s nothing like a good demonstration plot.
A half-dozen cars were parked around the village, but nothing was moving. Tangled power lines on old poles were a reminder that this village, once prosperous from wine sales, was Transylvania’s electrification pioneer. Thank Pastor Hoch. From the church tower the only thing I saw that looked like vineyards was a cemetery. Later, I went up there and made a note of one grave. It read, in German: “Father and children cry their pain at the silent grave. You are freed from both but always in our hearts. Rest in peace.” Katherine Weber had died in 1913 at sixty, and I wonder if in the war’s aftermath her family occasionally thought that she had been lucky.
The next day I went to Alma Vii, a village the Saxons called Almen. It’s only eight miles from Vallea Villor, but Google told me to take a twenty-mile detour. I’m not complaining: I came down into Alma Vii’s valley from hills where the loudest sound was a rain of crisp leaves. On the valley floor, a paved, one-lane road ran alongside fields of corn. There were no other vehicles.
Alma Vii was poorer than Vallea Viilor. Some houses needed new roofs, and some barns had lost their doors. Not so the church, which had five towers spaced along its wall. There was no road to the church, only a long flight of low steps up a hill. At the top, the church was adjacent to a cemetery and an elementary school. That’s not surprising, because the pastor in Saxon villages usually doubled as the village teacher.
The solid door in the Kirchenburg wall was closed but unlocked. The wall itself was thick enough to contain a gift shop, where a handsome tablecloth caught my eye. The clerk said it had been woven by a gypsy woman but that the pattern was Saxon. Some Transylvanian villages are inhabited today only by gypsies or Roma, but I never heard that word. It was always “gypsy,” spoken in a neutral, almost benign tone.
Once again, the entrance to the church was on the side of the nave. The door was plain but framed by two stumpy stone columns, about six feet tall and bulging too much at the middle. A small plaque read, in German, “This stone porch dedicated by the Protestant Women’s Association, 1890.” The interior of the church was a white-to-light-mustard shoebox, and the pews, though they had backs as well as benches, had no padding.
The towers housed a museum. I asked if the people of Alma Vii had organized it. The answer came with a chuckle, “People here don’t have money to spend on such things.” Besides, there weren’t any Saxons left in the village, and the chief connection to Germany now was the bus that picked up people every morning and took them to a German-owned factory in nearby Mediasch. It turned out that Iceland, Norway, and Liechtenstein had funded the museum. Set into a tower wall, a working clock was displayed with its mechanism. The museum also contained a fine old barrel churn the size of a sixty-gallon wine barrel. There was Saxon clothing, too, including a spectacular sheepskin coat worn fleece-side in and with floral patterns embroidered on the outward-facing skin. Fleece must have felt good during church services in January, when daytime temperatures here peak within a degree of freezing.
The stone walls of the towers were at least two feet thick. The windows, if you can call them that, were openings that tapered from small on the outside to large on the inside. There was no glazing. The view was minimal. How did people keep warm with such holes in the walls? I would have guessed that they put on their sheepskin coats or put another cube of wood into the masonry stove. Those heavy stoves are very efficient, but cutting the wood to size takes so much work that you hardly need the fire. Here, however, someone had cut blocks of wood into the shape of a pyramid, then attached a small wooden handle so you could stuff the block into the window opening and pull it out as you liked. I pulled one block out, then slapped it back into place.
Once again, like patting Uluru or circumambulating the Great Enclosure at Great Zimbabwe, I was doing something silly, by which I mean irrational, but aimless actions sometimes steer us toward understanding ourselves, and I think now that my chunking the window block was something like the pianist who feels that the hammers on her piano are an extension of her fingers. Such connections can help us think. I know people who cannot imagine living without a dishwasher, but I also once knew someone who told me that she liked washing dishes by hand. She said she got some of her best ideas at the sink.
I’ll mention one more village, Viscri, formerly Weisskirch or White Church. It’s thirty miles east of Alma Vii, and it used to be on the main highway between Sighisoara and Brasov—in the old days, Kronstadt. The old highway had been demoted to a country lane by the construction of the E60, that is, European Route 60. That new road stretches all the way from Brest to the Chinese border. (Americans think Interstates 80 or 90 are long, but the E60 is two thousand miles longer than either of them.) I was on the E60 for just a few miles near Sighisoara and remember chiefly the brave sex workers who stood, one at each pullout, in short shorts next to camper vans.
If you want to stay in a Saxon house with a garden courtyard and a lawn, Viscri is your place, because Charles, Prince of Wales, has a longstanding interest in preserving the Saxon heritage, and he owns a bed-and-breakfast here, the Casa Printul de Wales. It’s low-key: no big signs, no royal insignia, no paparazzi. It’s on Viscri’s main street, a dead-end branch off the very quiet old highway. I passed the prince’s place and continued to almost the end of the main street, where I turned onto a lane leading uphill toward the church. I parked and walked to the top, where a grim plaque listed forty-two young men as unserer kriegsopfer, “our war offering.” World War II had been so devastating to the Saxons that there was no time for plaques. This one was for boys lost a generation earlier. Like the plaque at the Alma Vii church, this one was dedicated by the Protestant Women’s Association. The names of the war dead might have been listed alphabetically or by age or by rank. Instead, they were listed by village house number: Martin Orend, House No. 2, Michael Fallschüssel, House No. 3, and so on up to Paul Fernolend, House No. 213. It seemed to me that the women who put together the list were remembering the village boys.
I expected the church to have a fancy interior, but no, the interior was another shoebox, its only curve an arch separating the nave from the choir. The floor was planks, and, with two exceptions for the high and mighty, the pews were benches without backs. As at Vallea Viilor, benches for children were set up against the side walls and were double-decked, with narrow balconies running the length of the nave on both sides. The children got back support they didn’t need, while their parents and grandparents, who could well have used that support, didn’t get any.
At the back of the nave, a massive door, apparently sawn as a single plank from a very big tree, was reinforced by horizontal iron straps. It led to a straight staircase that would have been impossibly dark if someone hadn’t laid a strip of LED lights. They revealed stone treads that would last a thousand years. At the top, I looked up into the now-familiar timberwork of a Kirchenburg tower. No two-by-fours here, no plywood.. It was all six-by-sixes, squared by hand. I think of the immense labor of Canadians on the northern fringes of the prairies. Even into the twentieth century, men there used pitsaws to cut planks for the walls of their homes. At work, they stripped down to their shirts even in January.
Then I stepped out onto a balcony strong enough to support an elephant. Below me, the two sides of the roof dropped at an angle of about seventy-five degrees. I thought of the men who had to maintain it.
The balcony offered a fine view over the village and its flur, or arable land. I saw that word later on a carefully drawn map dated 1874. The fields at that time were long and very thin—the ratio of length to width could easily be fifty to one—but consolidation had reorganized the fields into large blocks. The core of Viscri, on the other hand, looked from the balcony just as it did on the 1874 map. Then as now, the main street was perfectly straight and lined by houses built with connecting additions, detached barns at the back, and garden plots still farther back. The main street now did have power lines as well as manhole covers for a new and environmentally sophisticated sewage system, sponsored by Charles. On this particular day, villagers had hauled out wheeled plastic tubs for garbage collection. I have such tubs myself, though mine are green and theirs were shocking purple.
Several villagers had watering troughs made from hollowed-out oak logs like dugout canoes. They weren’t just ornamental, because I saw horses pulling crude wooden carts loaded in one case with manure and in another with household furniture, including refrigerators and oil-filled radiators. I saw carts with solitary carters and others with families on board. The carts themselves were wooden boxes perhaps four feet wide and eight feet long. They were mounted on steel axles carried on pneumatic tires. The horses, working alone under heavy leather harnesses, weren’t old enough to appreciate those rubber tires.
Although I never saw wheat growing in Transylvania, bakers in Viscri made wheat bread. The loaves were round and heavy. At a bakery near the church, a crew was feeding blobs of dough the size of under-inflated soccer balls into a wood-fired oven. Next to it, a dozen or more loaves burned to a carbon shell sat on a shelf. I assumed that an apprentice had made a mistake. Idiot me. This was the way bread was baked here. Once cool, the shell was knocked off with a stick, and a fine loaf was ready for sale.
The baker had no wish to sell half a loaf, and I had no wish for a whole one, but a few minutes later I was chatting with a woman I will call Elena. Coming from a city with a quarter-million people, she had chosen to move to a village of maybe five hundred. I suppose she was doing what Californians do when they decamp for small-town Oregon.
Elena had bought an old Saxon house and put in plumbing and electricity. I asked hesitantly if she had an internet connection. “Of course,” she replied. “You cannot live without the internet today.” She left for a few minutes, then returned with a knocked-clean loaf. Under another arm she carried a half gallon of cream as thick as whipped butter. She cut a slice of bread, slathered cream on it, and handed it to me. I’m not wild about cream and the bread wasn’t sour, but its density and chewiness were excellent. Elena said the wheat was organic. So was the cream. She was driving the next day with a pot of that cream to see a doctor three or four hours away. I couldn’t tell if the cream for the doctor was a gift or a bribe, but nobody I met had anything good to say about the free medical services guaranteed by the Romanian constitution.
In one room of her house Elena had something that looked like a modified sawhorse with a hole in the body through which a pin or axle held a swinging beam that hung almost vertically, a third above and two-thirds below the body. You could straddle the horse, push a cross piece at the bottom of the beam with a foot, and bring the top down until it touched a point on the body just in front of your crotch. Elena said it was used for making tool handles. You placed the piece you were shaping at the point where the top of the beam would touch the horse. You pushed your foot forward, bringing the beam down to hold the piece in place. As work proceeded, the piece could be adjusted much more easily than if it was held in a table-mounted vise, which in the old days would not have been easily available anyway.
What was it about this thing, like the wooden window blocks at Alma Vii, that made me want to touch it? Why, on the other hand, did I have no desire to touch the modem that was blinking in the same room? The obvious answer is that we make ourselves physically comfortable with things we do not understand, then make ourselves emotionally comfortable with antiques we will never use but which remind us of the world where we naturally belong.