| A DOUBLE tragedy continues to unfold in Transylvania,
the northwestern chunk of Romania that has been a haven for ethnic Germans for some eight
centuries. First is the fast disappearance of an extraordinary cultural heritage,
expressed partly by the medieval architecture that Germans (known in Romanian as
"Saxons, though in fact they came from far and wide across the German-speaking
world) brought to Transylvania and preserved for centuries against staggering odds.
Second, the Germans are withdrawing from the mess that is today's Romania. This
means the villages and small towns, which have a mainstay of Transylvania's rural economy,
are themselves falling into ever deeper penury and degradation. Some 250,000-strong in 1939, a good tenth of the Germans who survived the second world war were carted off - once the communists took over - to Russian labor camps: almost none returned. Around 180,000 Germans sat tight until the mid-1970s, when Nicolae Ceausecu, Romania's communist dictator, began to let a steady trickle go - at a hefty price in D-marks. Communism's fall in 1989 prompted a huge outward spurt. From 110,000, the number of Germans plummeted to 41,000 in less than two years. Now the figure has shriveled again - to less than 17,000. The Saxon heritage could vanish.
The squalor is striking. The village stands seven kilometers (four miles) from the nearest tarmac road. There is no longer a shop, bakery, clinic or garage. Rickety horse-drawn wagons far outnumber cars. There is no modern sewage system or running water. A filthy stream bubbles through the village's wide, rutted, muddy street. A telephone line was f9ixed up two years ago, but most of the skilled Germans (bakers, butchers, teachers , mechanics) who once kept things ticking over have gone. Fields of hops, once the village's main earner, have been abandoned. Gypsies - the butt of discrimination throughout Romania, and usually ill-educated people with scant farming skills - now count for more than half the population. Ethnic Romanians and a handful of Hungarians make up most of the rest. Viscri's glory is its stunning white medieval church (which gives the place its name) within a high-walled 12th century citadel which - like 100 or so other such German fortifications in Transylvania - fended off Turks and Tatars as well as occasionally warring locals. The village's dynamic mayor, Caroline Fernolend, an ethnic German, is trying to prod well wishers outside Romania, including the World Bank, to dip into their pockets. Otherwise, the village simply cannot survive - in human or architectural terms.
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What is to be done? Take a little village like Viscri
(which Germans still call Weisskirch). Once an almost entirely German hamlet of
some 450 people, its population has stayed stable. But only 30 odd Germans are left
- and the economy, based on farming in tthe lovely rolling plains around, barely exists.