Charles, the Terror of the Villagers in Viscri

A Prince from the West, who, like any other Prince, likes to hunt in the woods of Levant, was passing by. He goes for a tour, with a lot of photo-reporters behind him, gets on the first page of the newspapers, appears on all the prime-time news bulletins and leaves. The villagers he left behind wonder about this media monkey business.

"He stays there, in front of the first German church. Probably, the Romanians don’t feel quite comfortable about this, but when the first German colonists came here, they met Catholics". The woman shows me the baptismal font, telling me it was from before 1200 A.D. The Germans that came in the area of the Transylvanian plateau were Catholics. It was only after Honterus, the scholar from Brasov, showed Transylvania the first signs of church reform, that the people started to believe in the new religion, the Lutheran one. The Papacy wanted to keep its treasury, and there were others that were trying to undermine the Christianity. Luther’s law met a fertile environment, because the ordinary people had already seen the distance between them and the Catholic clergy.

CATER COUSINS. The consequence of the detachment from the Papacy is the thing that my interviewee is trying to emphasize now: there isn’t such a strong bond between the reformed Germans in Ardeal and the ones in Banat, who are still Catholics, even though they come from the same ethnical group, which is smaller and smaller, which leads to self-conservative gestures. Of course, it would be a lot simpler to blame the language differences. In Ardeal, we find the ones called "Sasi", which claim some characteristics from the Luxemburg Saxons. They speak "letzeburgisch", a totally different language than the language spoken by the Germans in the plains or the hard-to-define dialect, which is closer to "Hochdeutsch", the literary German, spoken by the ones in the mountains of Banat. Beyond the vocabulary-based cleavage, we have to deal with a stronger rupture, determined by the religious affiliation.

However, it seems to be history-related. Actually, they seem to be an informational gap and a lack of communication. My interviewee is pleased at finding out I have German roots from Banat. She looks like she has been stricken with happiness. Happiness and a little bit of amazement. She tells me about the community’s difficulties. The evangelic one only has a few members, not more than 30, and it is situated in a region in which the Roma are the majority, not the Romanians. It is not only about the insufficient funds for the restoration of that architectural monument. The church is used as the House of God very rarely, because the priest has to take care of four more other villages. This means that there is a ceremony once every two weeks in Viscri, the village whose name comes from the German Weisskirche (the White Church).

VISCRI-LIKE MODERNIZATION. In fact, the evangelic community is more of a museum exhibit, because it is treated like a specie in danger of extinction. One of the last European Princes, which is far from the mythical image of the fairytale heroes who came and saved sleeping princesses or Cinderellas thrown by their step-mothers in the kitchens’ store-rooms, a prince looking for the lost glow gets away from his worldly peregrinations. He does this to follow the (so-called) traces of a blue-blooded Hungarian-Transylvanian ancestor of his, in order to appear as the benefactor savior of a European civilization which is about to succumb.

I am looking for the house that Prince Charles, Crown Prince of the Throne of the United Kingdom, bought in the village from the end of the world. "It is the bottom of the world", corrects me a villager who lives near the place I pulled over, right across the street from the "royal property". Her story makes me think the visit of the Prince in Transylvania is annoying. After a visit in 2002 (the only visit), he bought a few houses in the name of the Mihai Eminescu Trust foundation, which he governs. He doesn’t live in these houses. There is a "guest-house" right next to it. At the gate, a man tells me there are no vacancies, but guarantees that the interior respects Occidental standards. Downhill, there was a villager that bothered the members of the foundation, because, from time to time, like any self-respectful man from Ardeal, he was preparing tuica (Romanian hard liquor) in his yard. He got convinced to sell. "There is no one living in those houses at the moment. They bought them, they restored them and now, since no one lives in them, they are self-destructing slowly", the Prince’s neighbor tells me. She also explained the concept of modernization in this case: "They built a sewage system with the drainage in the small river that goes through the center of the village. You can picture the smell. For us, the WC is a small room in the back of the yard, ‘cause this is how it is. Who would build such a sewage system? This is an insult".

VISCRI. The village on "the bottom of the world

NO DRACULA. "Prince Charles is interested in the fortified churches in Transylvania". Or: "Prince Charles bought a house in Viscri". A forgotten village, at approximately 8 kilometers away from the road that connects Brasov and Sighisoara, where one can reach after driving through places in which herds of gipsy children use their fingers to show they expect you to give them some food. One should understand they are hungry. Or, maybe, they are born with this "gift" of begging. As for the evangelic church up the hill that dominates the Viscri village, the restoration seems it has never begun. Meanwhile, on the banks of Thames, a Prince that doesn’t look at all like the prince-charming riding white horses in the dreams of the tamely girls, organizes a charity dinner and brags about buying a house in Transylvania and restoring medieval strongholds. What Transylvania? The on in which, every year, many curious people come to get disappointed. There is no Dracula!