Episode 10 (Transylvania)

The transcript of this episode is available at Buzzsprout.com/1970784.
For photos of the places discussed, see greatmirror.com

Transcript

The normal way to find freedom, I suppose, is to find some wilderness where you can be more or less alone–no point in getting in line at Kilimanjaro.  Great Zimbabwe, however, had taught me that freedom can also be found in landscapes made by people if they themselves are free. Not a hundred percent free–there’s no such thing–but free while they work.  Every city has artists who should  qualify, but they rarely shape landscapes.  For that, I headed to the city of Sibiu, in the part of Romania called Transylvania. I wasn’t after Sibiu itself.  I was after the villages around it, the so-called Saxon villages.  

The term Saxon here is synonymous with German, and until World War II there were lots of Germans here because Transylvania had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until the end of World War I.  Until then, Sibiu’s central square, the Piaţa Mare, had been the Grosser Ring,  and Sibiu itself was Hermannstadt.  The center of town in 2018 still looked German to me, but there weren’t many Germans left.  In 1920 there had been about eighteen thousand; now there were 1,500.  In 1920, Sibiu had had fewer than 10,000 Romanians; now there were almost 150,000.  

I found a small but efficient airport at Sibiu.  There were daily flights to Vienna and Munich but nothing to Paris or London.  It goes to show how sticky empires can be.

Germans had begun arriving in Transylvania in the twelfth century.  Géza II of Hungary, who had just laid claim to the country, invited them.  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 Germans were lucky, because the three hundred or so villages they established in Transylvania survived for seven centuries.  Then came World War I and, even worse, World War II.  I say worse because many Germans had survived the first war.  Twenty years later they were thrilled by the rise of Hitler.  The young men soon 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 approaching Russians, had already left on foot or in horse-drawn wagons on the four-hundred-mile journey across Hungary to Austria.  

Some families, afraid to lose their property, stayed put, only to learn that the Russians were looking for Germans to work in Russian coal mines.  Some Germans survived those mines and were eventually repatriated to East Germany.  The rest returned to Communist Romania, where they stayed until the lifting of the Iron Curtain.  Then they moved to Germany, where, after Romania’s entry to the EU in 2007, they were followed by many 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 German life in these remoter parts of the Austrian empire has been written by Michael A. Nagelbach, the American-born son of a German pastor who lived in a village north of Sibiu until he, too, fled the Russians and eventually settled about thirty miles north of Pittsburgh., Pennsylvania.  The son has in effect ghostwritten his father’s autobiography.  

We learn that the father, 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 says bitterly that exercise was the last thing these people needed.  We learn of 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. 

It doesn’t sound like a life Americans would welcome, and it gets worse.  Most Lieblingers never left the county of their birth—county, not country—and people 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. 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 Nagelbach delivers 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.  Jung looked around and announced: “Today I am fifty years old.”  

At age 26, Andreas Nagelbach in 1939 became pastor of a German 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 sensible fear villagers had of invaders.  Every one of these hundreds of German villages had a fortified church, a Kirchenburg in German or bisericata fortificata in Romanian.

The Nazis did not have to fight their way into Wurmloch.  Nagelbach writes that as the first Nazi convoy drove into town “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 down in the valleys 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 feet 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 extended.  The tiles hung loosely on horizontal slats that caught a little finger or knob 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 there was a note with a phone number.  I called and in a couple of minutes a woman appeared. She unlocked the door and said, “You can go anywhere you like.  Just be careful.”  She didn’t say anything else.  She left, and I never saw her again.

The Kirchenburg’s wall was more complicated on the inside, where a catwalk ran about eight feet off the ground and provided access to the loopholes.  Below the catwalk, the wall 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.  There were no aisles and there was no transept.  The floor was rough and dusty planks.  The bench-style pews did have backs, and the benches were padded.  

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.  I suppose one side predated 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, but 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 built 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 was shaped with hand tools. 

I think now of a church built a few years ago not far from my own home.  The white-painted 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 know of a fraternity house whose façade is trimmed with massive columns.  I saw them being built.  Forget stone or even fake stone.  The columns were ordinary road culverts set upright, then thickly plastered to even out the corrugations.  I’m reminded now of a pianist who praised her electronic keyboard before admitting that, unlike an acoustic piano, the keyboard had no soul.  I am not sure what she meant, but an acoustic piano’s hammers are an extension of a pianist’s fingers.  With the electronic keyboard, there’s no extension; between the keys and the speakers there’s a void.

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, conventional ladders 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 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 house proper was on the right side of the property and was a series of buildings fused into a single line with the ridge or peak perpendicular to the street.  

Behind the barn 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 some 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, but 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, the grav of Katherine Weber, who had died in 1913 at sixty.  It read, in German: “Father and children cry their pain at the silent grave.   You are freed but always in our hearts.  Rest in peace.” 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 Germans 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 unlocked.  I opened it and found a wall thick enough to contain a gift shop.  A handsome tablecloth caught my eye.  The clerk said it had been woven by a gypsy woman but that the pattern was German.  Some Transylvanian villages are inhabited today only by gypsies.  That’s the word I  heard, always spoken in a condescending but benign tone.  

Once again, the entrance to the church was on the side of the nave.  The door was plain but framed by two 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.”  Inside, the church was a white-to-light-mustard shoebox.  The pews, though they had backs, had no padding.  

The towers on the wall housed a museum.  I asked if the people of Alma Vii had put it together.  The answer came with a chuckle, “People here don’t have money to spend on such things.”  Besides, there weren’t any Germans left in the village, and the chief connection to Germany now was the bus that picked people up 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 German clothing, too, including a spectacular sheepskin coat worn fleece-side in and with floral patterns embroidered on the outward-facing side.   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 splayed windows tapered from small on the outside to large on the inside.  There was no glazing, and the view was minimal.  How did people keep warm with such holes in the walls?  I would have guessed that they had put on their sheepskin coats or put another cube of wood into the masonry stove.  Those 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 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.

Like patting Uluru or circumambulating the Great Enclosure at Great Zimbabwe, this was a silly thing to do, but I was also like the pianist who feels the hammers on her piano as an extension of her fingers, a momentary sense of the body extending into the external world.  I think now of a woman I knew who didn’t have a dishwasher.  She said she got some of her best ideas while washing dishes by hand.    

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 road had been demoted to a country lane by the construction of the E60, that is, the European Route 60.  That new road stretches all the way from the Atlantic coast of France 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 Transylvanian German house with a garden courtyard and a lawn, Viscri is your place, because Charles, at the time of my visit still Prince of Wales, had years earlier purchased a house here.  It was now a bed-and-breakfast, the Casa Printul de Wales.  It was low-key: no big signs, no royal insignia, no paparazzi.  It was 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 from World War I listed forty-two young men as “our war offering.”  The names 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 boys who were gone.                           

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 it.

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 pit saws to cut planks for the walls of their homes.  At work, they stripped down to their shirts even in January.  

I stepped out onto a balcony strong enough to support an elephant.  The two sides of the roof dropped at an angle of about seventy-five degrees, and 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 had been long and very thin—the ratio of length to width could easily be fifty to one—but consolidation had recently 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 had 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 a tub myself.

Several houses 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 did not see wheat growing in Transylvania, I saw Viscri bakers making wheat bread.  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.  Leaving a city with a quarter-million people, she had chosen to move here, to Viscri, with maybe five hundred people.  She had bought an old German house and put in plumbing and electricity. I suppose she was doing what Californians do when they decamp from Pasadena to small-town Oregon.  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 loaf of bread, knocked-clean.  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.  She 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.  

In one room of her house this woman had something that looked like a sawhorse with a hole in the body through which a pin or axle held a swinging beam that swung 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 one of your feet, and bring the top down until it touched a point on the body just in front of your crotch.    The woman 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 blinking modem, which was in the same room?  To ask the question is almost to answer it.  We make ourselves physically comfortable with things we do not understand, then make ourselves emotionally comfortable with things we will never use but which remind us of the world where we naturally belong.