Episode 10 (Transylvania)

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

Transcript

                              Episode 10  (Transylvania)

I recognize Glasgow’s importance in shaping the modern world, but I can’t say that I saw anything beautiful there.  To put it a different way, I saw no freedom there.  Sure, so long as my credit cards weren’t declined I could sleep comfortably, eat all I wanted, and buy stuff, if that was what I wanted.  I don’t think it was.  In any case, freedom in Glasgow, like freedom in Sydney or Harare was “contingent” or “conditional” or just plain fake, because it depended on compliance with a million terms and conditions.  All in a good cause, you may say, and you may be right–it’s nice to stroll the Sydney waterfront–but I wanted a better sense of the price we have paid for Chatterjee’s “tutelary deities.”  You remember them: “Comfort and his brother, Respectability.”

The normal way to find freedom would be to throw myself into the wilderness: go diving, or caving, or mountaineering.  But Great Zimbabwe had taught me that freedom has existed not just in wilderness but in places made by people, and that’s what I was after: freedom in a cultural landscape.

So I flew to Sibiu, a town on the north slope of the Transylvanian Alps and just about in the center of Romania.  With a metro population of about a quarter million, Sibiu has a small but efficient airport with daily 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. Residents 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 are 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 them 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 but none too enticing 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 about thirty miles north of Pittsburgh.  The son has in effect ghostwritten his father’s autobiography.  

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 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 most Americans would like, 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.  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 that when a Nazi convoy first 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 zero 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 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 was shaped with hand tools. 

This makes me think 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 remember 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 that were stood upright and thickly plastered to even out the corrugations.  It worked like a charm, so long as you weren’t fussy.

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 had no soul.  I am not sure what she meant by “soul,” but I think it boils down to this: the link between her fingertips and her acoustic piano’s hammers was as intimate as the link between a cat and 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, 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 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.  That word was always spoken in a benign but condescending 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 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 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 had 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 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, by which I mean irrational, but I was also like the pianist who feels the hammers on her piano as an extension of her fingers.  I’ll take a chance and call it pseudo-fusion, a momentary awareness of the body extending into a bit of the outside world.  It’s weird, but I remember a woman who didn’t bother with her dishwasher.  She said she liked washing dishes by hand because that’s where she got some of her best ideas.  Weird, huh?  

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, years ago purchased (and perhaps still 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 “our war offering,” unserer kriegsopfer.  That’s a sobering plaque if I ever saw one.

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 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.  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 pit saws 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 a tub myself, though mine is 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 did not see 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 from Pasadena to 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.  She was the woman who I mentioned in an earlier episode.  “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 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.    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 blinking modem, which as 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 antiques we will never use but which remind us of the world where we naturally belong.