RSS
Click for full-size image A dictator wanted to raze it with bulldozers. Investors wanted to turn it into a theme park called Draculaland. In a forgotten pocket of Central Europe, villagers struggle to preserve a way of life that leaves only the lightest of footprints on the land.
The steeply rolling hills of the Transylvanian plateau lie within the gnarled grasp of the Carpathian Mountains, which curve down through Central Europe into the heart of Romania. Although the Carpathians' highest peaks rise only some 8,000 feet, rugged, irregular ridges, difficult to traverse, have always isolated the plateau from the capital city of Bucharest and the sprawling Danube-Black Sea delta to the south. Transylvania did not become a part of Romania until 1918. Even today, only a few roads cross the mountains, and the one I was on coiled in ever-tighter switchbacks as it wound through the cold, deep forest. I accepted the rigors of the passage, however, partly because my car had four-wheel drive, but mostly because I had been promised that through the woods (which is the literal meaning of Transylvania) I would have a glimpse of a lost world.
"In Transylvania you will see a preindustrial, self-sufficient agricultural system," Jessica Douglas-Home, the slim, soft-spoken founder and chairwoman of the Mihai Eminescu Trust, assured me when I visited her London office. Since 1997, the trust, partnering at times with the United Nations Development Program, the World Bank, and the European Union (E.U.), has worked to restore and maintain the region's ancient villages, homes, churches, and, especially, agricultural traditions.
The region, Douglas-Home told me, is the very model of an integrated, sustainable world that consumes only what it can replenish, that treads lightly on its environment and leaves barely a carbon footprint behind. "When fuel shortages begin to make things bad for the rest of us," she said, "Transylvania will hardly have to cough."
With its small common grazing meadows and forested hilltops, this preindustrial landscape also holds great reserves of biodiversity, where rare wildflowers, insects, birds, reptiles, and amphibians thrive. According to the E.U., some two-thirds of Europe's threatened and endangered bird species are found on such lands. In fact, it was the very lack of efficiency and expansion-hand threshing, communal grazing, home processing-that shaped these ecosystems and ensured their survival. In Transylvania, a local biologist told me, it is nearly impossible to separate the landscape from the culture.
The creators of Transylvania's lost world were known as Saxons, descendants of settlers from northern Europe: Germanic and Franconian miners, tradesmen, farmers, and knights who migrated to the region in the twelfth century. (Legend has it that their forebears were the children the Pied Piper led out of Hamelin.) Granted near-autonomy over the region by King Geza II of Hungary -- Transylvania was then, as it would be time and again, part of the Hungarian empire -- the Saxons lived in small villages huddled along valley streams. Each household had a horse, a pig, a cow or two, and a garden. All shared the common grazing lands. Ensconced in these river valley refuges, the Saxons retained their Luxembourgish dialect (more Old German than modern), upheld their Reformation religious zeal, preserved their distinctive architecture, and managed to remain apart from the misrule that characterized Balkan geopolitics.
The effort to preserve these Saxon lands has become all the more urgent since Romania's accession to the European Union in January 2007. E.U. regulations designed to standardize and modernize farming methods, milking and dairy production, as well as the breeding, grazing, transport, and slaughter of cattle, have created difficulties for small farmers throughout the E.U., but especially in countries such as Romania, Bulgaria, and Poland, where subsistence farms number in the millions. For many of these farmers, membership in the union is proving to be, as one writer put it, a "Trojan pig," a once welcome gift that has released market forces that could decimate the region's small, sustainable economies.
If, as Douglas-Home believes, these farmers are the last, best hope for preserving "a way of life which produces food as a culture rather than a business," it has become evident that time, and the tide of globalization, are running against them.
"Although Romania has fertile agricultural land, vast tracts of forest, and a rich network of rivers," World Bank analysts wrote in a 2006 report, "its rural areas suffer from inadequate infrastructure and inefficient agricultural production." The average size of a farm in Romania is 7.5 acres, and two-thirds of the country's farms are smaller than five acres. The average size of an E.U. farm, by comparison, is 47 acres. But the larger problem, the World Bank said, is that Romania's farms have extremely low yields in crops, livestock, and, especially, milk production, on which most farm families rely for at least half their income.
Share
Mowing the Lawn