Charles Moore on how to renew and maintain life in the deserted villages of rural Romania
To understand this story, one must go back nearly 25 years. As Soviet Communism moved towards collapse in the late 1980s, people were in danger of forgetting Romania. Because of Romania’s relative independence from Moscow, the West played down the insane policies of its despot, Nikolai Ceausescu.
The Spectator, I am glad to say, did not. We sent in journalists under cover, and started a scheme, paid for by kind readers, to send free copies of the magazine, much sought after by print-starved intellectuals. The world finally took notice of Ceausescu’s horrors when he began a policy of systematically destroying all villages, housing peasants in concrete blocks of flats. The Prince of Wales eloquently pleaded for a unique rural culture. Ceausescu was overthrown at Christmas 1989. He had not yet managed to complete his work of destruction. Most of the villages were still standing.
During the dictatorship, no English person did more to help save Romania than Jessica Douglas-Home, artist and widow of Charlie, the editor of the Times. The Mihai Eminescu Trust, which she helped set up, succoured dissidents and writers. The Spectator scheme was a small part of that.
But the fall of Ceausescu created a whole new line of work. One of the most fascinating parts of Romania is the area known as the Siebenburgen, populated since the 12th century by German-speaking people, usually referred to as ‘Saxons’. They developed their own distinctive culture, turning Lutheran among neighbours who were either Orthodox or Catholic, and building astonishing fortified churches, whose curtilage could, in emergency, contain the entire village population, their livestock and supplies.
To this day, these strange buildings, whose wooden-capped look-out towers resemble the studio sets of early German expressionist films, dominate scores of villages in the green, hilly, wooded Transylvanian landscape.
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