Transylvanian Lover

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I climb one of the lush green hills surrounding a small village. I am on one shoulder of the Homorod valley in Romania and looking either way I can see a necklace of small villages stretching out for many kilometers. There is an order here you don't see in many places anymore. Each village sits tight and compact on the land. Each is surrounded by fields that sustain the people as they have for hundreds and hundreds of years. You can be lulled into thinking this could never change.

I am in Transylvania; an area of Romania surrounded by the Carpathian mountains and populated by a nationalistic Hungarian minority. Things are peaceful now but for decades the brutal Communist leader Nicolae Ceauşescu threatened to destroy this beautiful necklace.

His plan was to bulldoze these tiny villages. He would move the villagers to large cities of concrete flats. His goal was to create large swaths of farmland for the communes and at the same time break the back of these tight ethnic communities. And he was succeeding. I have seen a village flooded, only the tops of church steeples visible in the large lake that was created, only to destroy strength of the indigenous minority populations. Fortunately he was torn from power before this valley was ever touched.

I come to this valley now as part of a partnership. A partnership that was formed many years ago between a small village church community and a much larger church community in America. It was a partnership that sought nothing more than to tell Ceauşescu and his cronies that we were watching. And for years that seemed like enough.

But fifty years of Communism created its own order. The fiercely independent people strapped to communal life became complacent and fearful. Why work hard when you get paid whether or not you work? Why try to hold on to your ancient heritage when it can only hurt your prospects...meager as they are? Why trust in others when they might be on of the "one in four" people who were part of the Securitate created by the government to keep everyone in line?

Nicolae Ceauşescu was ripped from power in 1989. He has been gone now for many years but his legacy has been hard to overcome. Only now are things beginning to change rapidly in a place that seems locked in another era where horse drawn wagons are still the norm.

When I first visited in 2001 there were perhaps two cars in the village and perhaps one tractor. If you didn't own one of the two cell phones in the village you needed to travel 10 kilometers to make a phone call. Each home had its own well. There was no indoor plumbing. The street was poorly paved. Life seemed to include few prospects for the future. Seven years later this village and others like it have been catapulted into a changing world.

Will it survive intact? The jury is still out on that one but I could see the changes all about me. More about that in future posts.

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Photos

Homorod Szentpeter
The Romanian name is Petrini.