Old places
Trip Start
Jul 31, 2009
1
4
Trip End
Jul 31, 2009
Brasov, Transylvania, Romania
Monday, June 22, 2009
In the villages of this area you find many fortified churches or rather church castles, perhaps the most unique of the tourist highlights of the country
Brasov main square
. They tell a lot about the history of the place. This area was under Hungarian or Austrian rule most of the time but Turks and Tartars were really close and every once in a while liked to pay visit to their neighbours, looting, robbing and killing. If you could hide yourself and the most valuable of your farmer's belongings in a fort fast enough you could outlast them and then rebuild what had been destroyed outside. Not ideal but all alternatives probably were worse. The result of this concept has a neat church inside, which may be early gothic or later, in case the original one was conceived too small or not built solidly enough for the occasional earthquakes. Right around the church runs a wall of up to 5 meters in width and 15 meters in height, at the inside clad with emergency housing and storages, at the outside fortified like a tiny medieval castle, with watchtowers moat and pull up bridge in some cases. In Prejmer/Tartlau and Harman/Honigberg you can visit the best preserved of these architectural treasures.
The churches still belong to the German Lutheran congregation. In Petersberg I got a tour by one of the few remaining members of this old minority, a lady in her late forties with round features and very blue eyes who told me about deportations of her parents to slave labour in the Soviet Union after the second world war, return and expropriations in the fifties, life under Ceaucescu's regime while the community was dwindling and about the sudden exodus to Germany of all but a few ones, after the wall fell in 1989
Mountain view
. Now 110 still use a church which could hold hundreds and almost all of them are beyond 60. Twenty years from now this chapter of history will be nothing but a legacy and she knows it, too.Returning to Bucharest via Rasnov/Rosenau and Bran castle on winding mountain roads through beautiful countryside shows more aspects of this interesting and diverse country. You pass gypsy villages, see really bad roads and poverty, industrial complexes in decay and try to communicate with generous cherry vendors on the roadside. As Romanian is a Latin based language they understand my French more easily than my English.
History for me seems to be the key to develop some understanding of this place. Divided between Turkish domination in the south, Hungaro-Austrian rule in the north and Russian claims in the east, with orthodox as well as catholic, protestant and Jewish influences it got a late start as a nation and remains full of diversities. In a patchwork of different ethnic groups they were fortunate to unite all territories with a Romanian speaking majority within their frontiers in 1920. Later they had to endure the communist years. All this did not give them enough time and force to take off to something really great. Nonetheless they developed and preserved numerous small treasures and for an experienced traveller are well worth a visit.
There is more to discover here. I'll have to come back one day for more of Transsylvania, the Moldavian monasteries the Danube delta and an excursion to the Black sea coast.
