Transylvania - land of Dracula and barefoot German children (1992) [i]
The Transylvania of Bram Stoker's novel and the horror films may be a mythical land where Count Dracula, dressed in black cape, pierces the necks of sleeping maidens with his fangs, where werewolves roam desolate heaths at night, where vampires suck blood, and no one dare venture abroad after sunset. There was, though, a real Dracula, Vlad Dracul, a fifteenth century Wallachian prince, known in Romania as Vlad Tepes, or Vlad the Impaler, because of his custom of butchering people by binding them spread-eagled and hammering thick stakes into their rectums. They were then lifted up by the stakes and left to die in agony.
There is also a fortress on a rocky outcrop in the mountains at Bran, known as Dracula's Castle, although its connections with Vlad the Impaler are tenuous - he may once have attacked it. It is one of the few places in Transylvania which coach loads of tourists visit. In contrast to the legends, they find a pleasant, rather homely white washed building, with half timbered balconies and red roofed towers. For many years, one of Queen Victoria 's grand daughters, who married a Romanian prince, lived there.
Transylvania too is real, although it bears no resemblance to the country portrayed in horror films. Much of Transylvania is an area of gentle hills, with woods and meadows, enclosed on three sides by the Carpathian Mountains . There may be bears and wolves in the forests, but it is very much part of Central Europe . Indeed, until 1919 Transylvania was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It is the geographical centre of Romania , but not its cultural heartland. It has an ethnic mix of Hungarians, Szecklers and Germans, as well as Romanians. Many towns had German and Hungarian names as well as Romanian versions - so Brasov, which architecturally could be a run down town in Southern Germany or Austria , has also been known as Kronstadt and Brasso. Sighisoara (aka Schassburg and Segesvar) has a fairy tale citadel, its walls climbing up and down the hillside, with thick square towers at strategic intervals, and, inside, pastel tinted houses with rust coloured roofs. At sunset its spires, domes, battlements and turrets are silhouetted against pinkish hues.
One of the sturdiest bastions is the clock tower where the town museum includes photos taken on 22nd December 1989 by Ceausescu's Securitate showing crowds marching from the workers' flats on the edge of town to the local seat of government. They are faded, slightly out of focus, taken with long lenses and strangely, paradoxically, reminiscent of photos taken during the Russian Revolution of 1917.
Many of the villages in southern Transylvania were built by "Saxons" who emigrated from Flanders and the German Rhineland during the twelfth century. Despite the passage of time and the ethnic vicissitudes of Central and Eastern Europe , they have retained their German identity. German is still spoken and war memorials show the names of the local Germans who fought against Romania during the First World War.
In Maierus, behind the church there is a large cemetery, where, among the carefully tended flowers, the graves bear first names such as Wilhelm, Johann, Karl and Friedrich and surnames such as Schmidt, Roth, Hermann and Neudorfer. Inside the church, although there is an elaborate reredos, there are plain benches and wooden galleries, which, if it were not for the blue paint and white crosses could be the interior of a Welsh Presbyterian Chapel - all slightly incongruous in an area where, incorrectly, I expected all church architecture to have either the fussy ostentation of Catholic Baroque or the richness of Orthodox frescoes. Indeed, most of the churches in these villages are Lutheran, solid and plain.
In the church in Agnita, a dark suited man, with a resonant, booming voice, speaking in German, was telling thirty rapt school children the story of Abraham and the Children of Israel. Like many of the churches, it is strongly fortified, surrounded by thick walls with defensive towers, the size of Norman keeps at each corner. They had to be built this way, as a defence against the Tartars who swooped over the Carpathian passes, and plundered and pillaged the countryside as late as 1788.
The villages may be picturesque, with their single storey houses, colour washed in various shades of ochre, pink and pale green and flocks of geese and ducks roaming about, but they illustrate the economic problems in the countryside bequeathed by Ceausescu's government. Few of them have any running water supply. Villagers use wells, with large spoked wheels, to wind up and down buckets to collect water. Some are dug alarmingly close to streams or small rivers which carry all kinds of effluent. Hardly any streets in the villages are tarmacked, apart from main roads which pass through them. Most village streets consist of bare earth and stones, dusty in summer, muddy in winter. There are virtually no tractors, apart from those on the former Collective Farms. The main source of transport is still the horse and cart - occasionally carts are drawn by buffaloes or bullocks. Even if there were tractors, diesel and petrol are not generally available for farmers. There are few petrol stations and these are all situated in towns, apparently part of Ceausescu's policy of trying to force peasants either into towns or onto collective farms.
The most striking manifestation of this rural poverty is however the state of the children - blond haired, German speaking, yet walking around barefoot in shabby dirty clothes, probably the poorest Germans in Europe. Not surprisingly, there is an increasing trend for these "Saxons", after many centuries, to move back to Germany . The more villages I saw, the more I thought about the children listening to the story of Abraham and the Children of Israel. If ever there was a Lost Tribe in Europe , this was it.