Blue River, Black Sea

by Andrew Eames

  Atel turned out to be pretty quiet, and it was constructed in a way quite unlike the villages I’d seen before. Each house was end-on to the street, either sharply peaked or blunt-roofed, often with some kind of motif under the eaves: a date, a cross, painted flowers, ears of wheat. Between it and the next house ran a wall, sometimes with a flourish of tiles, into which was set a normal-sized door and a large double gate big enough to drive a horse and cart through. Only when that gate was open could you see the extent of the property inside.

  The house sat to one side of a cobbled courtyard, where it dwindled away into low barns and storage. Opposite it stood the haybarn, of crucial importance in the difficult Transylvanian winters. Beyond it were animal pens, a well, wood piles, a large vegetable garden with geese, and an orchard, sometimes with a horse or two in a paddock.

  The only variation to this pattern were the houses of the merchants or the community leaders, which would present their full frontages broadside on to the street in an uninhibited declaration of wealth. But these apart, there was a feeling of conformity in the ground plan of the village; each householder had been allocated the same sized plot, hundreds of years ago, and it was still sufficient, today, to lead effectively the same life as their medieval ancestors had done. A life based on a couple of cows, a couple of pigs, some geese and chickens, a horse or two, shared maize-cropping and lots of vegetables. Effectively it was a 500-year-old housing estate of smallholdings, so self-sufficient that communism had made little impact. They didn’t need central government in any form, so when the new system had come knocking the villagers could afford just to shrug their shoulders and turn the other way, which is what had so irritated Ceausescu.

  The day was drawing on as I wandered up Atel’s main street, so I was thinking in terms of finding somewhere to stay. I made enquiries at the ubiquitous Magazin Mixt (as the name suggests, rural shops stock everything) but the proprietress shook her head. Outside, I followed a horse and cart and queried the owner when he stopped. A pension? Yes, I said, a pension. He looked uncertain, but yes, he said, there was a pension here, and there, and over there. And he knocked on a gate, hard and loud, until eventually a little old lady, half blind, stumbled out into the daylight, like a dormouse that had been rudely woken. I apologized as best I could in my broken Romanian; plainly, the man had thought I wanted to meet pensioners. I mimed what I really wanted, and happily the old lady, once she’d understood, seemed relatively amused at the misunderstanding. Being hauled out on to the street by a foreigner was plenty of entertainment for one day.

  And then I met the village policeman. Not only was it a surprise to find a policeman in such a small, sleepy place, but this one hailed me in English, from a street corner. When I explained what I wanted, he walked me across to knock on the door of the old people’s home, where the traditional courtyard layout had been in-filled with new construction. Here a ruffianly looking man with a bunch of keys, who spoke fluent German, took me under his wing. The church had a parochial house where guests sometimes stayed, he said. I could sleep there. It would cost me 5 euros, was that OK?

  And so I found myself in occupation of my own house, with my own cart-gate (locked), my own vegetable patch (neglected), my own fruit trees (ripening nicely) and my own well (full), and I could sit in my own window, as the old ladies did, and watch the occasional horse-cart tripping by. The only thing I lacked was my own cow. I felt I’d been pretty lucky again.

  The house was sparsely decorated, but I didn’t need much. There was an old German hymnal on the fridge, and a motto on the kitchen wall which read:

  Wir kochen und braten mit Fleiss und Geschick

  Wenn’s köstlich Euch mundet, das ist unser Glück.

  Which roughly speaking meant ‘We cook and we fry with skill and talent and if you like it we feel happy.’

  There were, it seemed, just thirty Saxons left in the village, and twenty-seven of those were in the old people’s home. They hadn’t wanted to leave with all the others, so money had been invested in the home by the younger generation, the generation who returned every year in their smart German cars to check on their houses and their relatives.

  This snippet of information came courtesy of Hans, a seventy-something dipsomaniac wearing a leather blacksmith’s apron who had plainly been lying in wait for me when I stepped back out of my gate on to the street. Did I want to visit the church? he asked.

  Transylvania’s Saxon villages are famous for their fortified churches. King Géza had been realistic with his settlers: he needed them to be medieval speed bumps, to slow down any hostile Tartars and Turks heading west, and they accordingly had prepared their settlements with fortifications into which they could retreat when anything fierce and hairy turned up at the gate. Being pragmatic, God-fearing people, they combined their fortress sanctuary with their most valuable building, their church, which would supply them with spiritual strength while the enemy gnashed its teeth without. It would give them physical refreshment, too, because within its massive walls they constructed storerooms in which to hang their air-cured hams. Placing them there must have been the medieval equivalent of putting money in the bank.

  Hans, who had only one tooth and cackled unnecessarily to give it maximum exposure, threw open the gates and led me through the massive entrance bastion under the inscription ‘Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott’ (literally ‘A strong fortress is our God’), the first line of one of Martin Luther’s favourite hymns. The church stood in the courtyard inside. It dated from 1380, although its gates were a comparatively young 1798. Massive, whitewashed walls rose to an ochre-tiled roof plated like a dragon’s back that undulated as if it was breathing, but inside all was quiet apart from a wincing floor. The interior was bewitchingly simple and dusty, but it did have a neo-baroque altar plonked down at the far end, a beacon of colour amongst pale unvarnished wood. Plainly, everything needed work, but equally plainly everything could probably last several more centuries, as long as the roof remained intact. There was a service every second Sunday, said Hans, but the musicians’ gallery, he agreed, was no longer used. He didn’t want to disappoint me with lack of tradition, however, so he added that he rang the church bell at 7 a.m. to encourage the men into the fields, again at midday to tell them to lay down their tools for lunch, and again at night for lights out. And occasionally to ward off thunderstorms. Did I want to climb up? I certainly did.

  A set of glorified ladders zigzagged up through the well of the tower, which smelled of woodworm and bat shit. Each new floor was littered with the remains of owls’ nests, and although the ladders felt sturdy enough under foot, they would never have passed any health-and-safety examination, which was possibly why Hans declared that he would stay at the bottom and wait for me. Eventually I arrived under the pagoda-like tower, in a belfry exposed on all sides and with daylight glinting through between the tiles above my head. On the eastern side the castellated roof-ridge rippled away like a fairground ride, long since having lost all its youthful straight lines. To the north I could look out over the medieval grid plan of the village. To the west rose the next hills, and to the south I could look down on an ox-cart creaking back from the fields. The whole thing looked like an illustration from a children’s book, or a model village from a history museum. I blessed my luck that I had it all to myself.

  Back at ground level, Hans was quick to ask for money for the church and money for him, both of which I gave, hoping that it didn’t all end up in the same pot, being transformed into alcohol. He beamed, an expression which wasn’t lost on another elderly man in a leather apron, this time with two teeth rather than just one. Leaving his bench outside the old people’s home, this second man too asked, in German, for ‘a donation’, in a way that suggested that merely speaking German was a party trick which he would do only for a cash incentive. I gave him a token amount, and later came across him in the Magazin Mixt waving his coin at the shop owner, trying to persuade her to give him a couple of swigs of palinka.

  By
the time I set out next morning I was truly in love with the place. I’d slept on a mattress on the floor, waking to the lowing of cattle heading out for the fields, the murmur of voices under the window and the insistent rhythm of the occasional horse and cart. It was a dull, drizzly day, but I still found my surroundings compellingly beautiful. Life had slowed down around me to match my pedestrian pace, and I felt in harmony with it, savouring everything, even the crunch of my boots on the gravel road. I belonged. As I walked, I exchanged mumbled greetings with every villager I passed, most of whom regarded me with a mix of curiosity and benevolence.

  I headed out of Atel in a southerly direction through orchards heavy with plum trees, chickens in chicken runs and peonies in peony-filled stockades around religious shrines. Whole bushes were vibrating with stonechats and whinchats, the hedgerow was deep in downy round-wort, thickened with tall feathery grasses, and topped with explosions of yellow buds. There was slender yellow rattle hidden in the verges, along with blue creeping bell-flower and purplish pink knapweed, trying to compete with the more brutal ruderals like greater burdock and marsh mallow. Rudus is Latin for rubbish, so these were plants that grew in rubbish land, but they had their uses despite the derogatory name; the mallow’s soft flowers were used against sore throats and the dried seed-heads or burs from the burdock used to be placed on the strings of suspended hams in the church stores to deter mice.

  The track quickly decayed, fraying at every twist in the valley and sending off confusing side-branches to probe every fold in the hills. The tread on my boots clogged up with mud, and I slipped regularly, to the amusement of a mewing bird of prey. My map insisted there was a proper road to the next village, 7 kilometres away, but it was clearly wrong. So I hauled out my compass again, and discovered that its polarities had been completely reversed by sitting in the rucksack pocket alongside my rechargeable torch. It was still effective in its upside-down way, and with its help I stuck to the trail whose heading conformed closest with the direction I wanted to go. It was worryingly under-used for an arterial route between villages; I could see only one set of cart tracks since the overnight rain, but once I’d crested a set of hills and descended the other side, union with another track produced a horse and cart loaded with hay and children, who found the sight of a foreigner with a rucksack very amusing. Tagging along behind them, I entered Richis with the tolling of the noonday bell, the sign to down tools and eat lunch, so I sat outside the Magazin Mixt and hacked into bread and salami.

  From Richis it was an easy afternoon’s walk down a river valley, along a proper metalled road, to the village of Biertan, aka Birthelm, one of the best known of the Saxon villages.

  Biertan, which has a UNESCO-listed church, is in all the guidebooks, whereas Atel is not, so I arrived full of expectation. And certainly it had a feeling of importance, with a handful of grander buildings around the main square, where the largest market in the region used to be held. The square was dominated by the multi-turreted church (effectively a cathedral in its day), castle-like on its own little hill, surrounded by sentinel towers.

  But there were tourists here, and money, a craft shop, an information centre and a restaurant, plus a regular flow of cars, which completely changed the feel of the place. There was even a white line in the middle of the road. After the innocence and the virginity of unknown Atel, Biertan felt commercial and worldly wise. People arrived here at 30 m.p.h., spent a couple of hours and a couple of dozen lei, summed the place up, and left. The village was indifferent to their passing, which was fair enough, but by this stage I’d been getting used to the idea of being a walking curiosity in an unsullied land, where life was led at medieval pace. However, Biertan’s lack of interest in me worked both ways; two could play at the indifference game.

  Its image in my eyes wasn’t helped by the first two accommodation options I tried being (a) unfriendly and (b) full. But then, in the village’s themed ‘medieval’ restaurant, I found myself talking to someone who was plainly a manager, well versed in customer care, who persuaded me that I should stay in the newest opening, which turned out to have a TV, minibar and hydromassage shower. Lovely, but inconsistent with my experience thus far. And so I ended up wandering around inside Biertan’s celebrated church feeling out of sorts, out of kilter and unappreciative. As for the latter, it was too big for a church, too small for a cathedral, and its tracery-veined ceiling, oriental carpets and tattered guild flags didn’t do much to rectify a fundamental lack of elegance. Even the news of a ‘divorce room’, where couples intending to separate were locked up and forced to share a single room, single bed and single plate to make them see sense, failed to impress. It also didn’t help that in this, the most famous Saxon church, visitors weren’t allowed to climb up a single one of its multitude of towers, no doubt for very good reasons of health and safety.

  Happily, normal service was resumed next day, as I found myself climbing another rickety set of ladders in the tower of the fourteenth-century church at Copsa Mare, aka Grosskopisch. Here there were gaping holes in the plankwork floor that would have been lethal on a dark night, but there was no suggestion of stopping anyone going up, and the view was if anything better than at Atel. From the tower, Copsa Mare looked like the skeleton of a leaf that had been dropped into the valley many aeons ago. It had decayed a great deal over successive centuries, but you could still see the basic outline. Smoke rose gently from summer kitchens with the sound of chickens and barking dogs, and there was a horse-cart of newly scythed grass standing outside the Magazin Mixt. The farmer emerged, slapped his mare on the rump, and they clopped off home, the mare’s foal skittering alongside. There was nothing in the picture that didn’t belong to any of the last five hundred years, although sharp eyes might have spotted a familiar label on the beer bottle in the farmer’s hand, and even sharper might have spotted the condensation, too. It had just come out of the Magazin’s fridge.

  ‘Your Prince Charles was here.’ The church-keeper had accompanied me up the tower.

  ‘Oh?’ I knew this, but perhaps he knew more. ‘When?’

  ‘Last year, maybe.’

  ‘He has a house over in Malancrav, doesn’t he? I’m heading there, via Nou Sasesc.’

  ‘Ah, Malmkrog and Neudorf,’ said the church-keeper, gently correcting my Romanian names with the original German.

  ‘And I heard he walked this way, like me?’ I’d got it from a reliable source, but the church-keeper wasn’t to be drawn.

  ‘Das weiss ich nicht. But here, I’ll show you the route you need to take.’ And he pointed out a trail that rose through maize fields towards a hill topped with ash, elm, false acacia and willow.

  A couple of hours later I was relying on my skew-whiff compass again. The weather had deteriorated, producing a strangely muted day where birds on the wire were not bothering to sing and flowers on the mallow couldn’t decide whether to be out or in. The hilltop woods were drenched in low-slung cloud, and as I neared them I could hear them slow-handclapping as it started to rain. The track top deteriorated into sticky clay and I was grateful when it merged into a grassland track, although I felt guilty, too, about stepping on wild flowers, some of which might well have been rare, with my muddy feet. Despite the weather, it was impossible not to feel uplifted by just being there.

  I spent ages trying to cross a stream without getting wet, only to emerge into neck-high reeds which drenched me from head to foot as I pushed through them. The compass took me straight up a hillside, along a ridge and down through a crowd of umbellifers, which soaked me once more, and delivered me into Nou Sasesc. Here there were several German numberplates in the village, as expected, and a group of men talking about what exactly needed to be done. The first one I queried for directions spoke only Romanian and suggested the only way into the next valley was by going all the way down to the main road and back up again, a distance of at least 25 kilometres. Another butted in, this time in German. No, he said, there was a Feldweg – field path – over the top and down the ot
her side. It was not far.

  The track led me up through a belt of oakwoods into a beechwood forest of some substance. It was tall, sombre and silent inside. Dark, slender trunks reached up and up, finally flinging out suppliant fingers at the sky somewhere way above my head, trying to grasp enough daylight to survive. Down below, the effect was of walking through a giant cavernous room where daylight struggled to make its presence felt, of threading through an echoing forest of Moorish arches, like in the great mosque at Cordoba. Unfortunately, unrestricted by any ground-level growth, the path completely unravelled, frittering itself away amongst the proliferation of trees. Once again I was left with only the compass as my guide, but fortunately it wasn’t long before the ground started to fall away again and I was back out on to the springy turf of rolling meadows, feeling that I should have a set of panpipes or a flute to hand and do a little jig as I emerged from the trees.

  Malancrav was ringed with apple orchards. By Saxon standards it was a large village, pleasingly arranged around two intersecting valleys with a stream at its centre, and served by a poorly surfaced road that brought very little in the way of motorized traffic. It had an old-fashioned sweep-well, and some of its houses were still the original mud-walled and lime-washed variety, where succeeding coats of paint struggled to cling to the uneven surface, giving the overall effect of trendy rag-rolling. And yet there was plenty of activity here, with talkative children on bicycles and happy geese in the stream, and I knew that it still had an eighty-strong Saxon population, a German-language school and its own Lutheran pastor who’d originally come here on holiday from Germany, never to leave again. And besides the house belonging to Prince Charles, it was also the focus of efforts of an organization called the Mihai Eminescu Trust. Despite being named after the nationalist poet who wrote that stuff about being hostile to strangers, the Trust was actually the brainchild of very posh Brits, with Charles as their patron. Its aim was to preserve built and natural heritage, so it had snapped up a handful of the vacated houses in Malancrav, restored them, and now rented them out on a low-key basis to anyone they considered suitably respectful. I managed to creep in under the bar.