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"These farms need to be integrated into vertical supply chains," the report stated. "Efficiency can be increased only by adopting policies that facilitate the structural reorganization of agriculture by allowing inefficient farms to close down . . . and removing obstacles to the expansion of new and more efficient farming units."
Just beyond a crooked wooden marker that read "Crit," I turned from the main road onto a gravel lane that led to the village's only thoroughfare, a dusty clay street with neither a car nor a soul in sight. The one- and two-story hip-roofed houses on either side of the road had connecting lime-washed facades, some fading white, a few recently painted in pale blue and pastel orange. The houses were set back some 20 feet, separated from the road by a continuous swath of green lawn rife with dandelions. A knee-deep drainage swale ran along each side of the road, bridged at intervals by wood plank crossings that marked the entryways to the houses. Most of the windows were shuttered. An untethered horse grazed. Geese with goslings scurried up and down the swales. Hens and roosters strutted about. The sun setting behind the green-pastured hills cast an amber glow over the entire scene.
Then I heard what sounded like a firecracker, and then another, and soon a lumbering procession of cows came into view, accompanied by roughly dressed young herders snapping long switches in the air. From another direction came a small herd of goats, scampering and baying. A horse-drawn cart carrying herders seated among the hay bales in the back came cantering through. In 20 minutes rush hour had passed, the dust had settled, and quiet returned with the twilight.
It seemed not only a lost world but also an abandoned one.
The next day I met Caroline Fernolend, a town councilor in Viscri, and together we drove the three miles from Crit along a narrow, rutted dirt road to her picturesque village, its layout nearly identical to Crit's. Diminutive, dark-haired, blue-eyed, and voluble, she confirmed that no one lives in many of the homes in Viscri, Crit, or the 15 other Saxon villages whose restoration she, as Romanian director of the Eminescu Trust, is charged with overseeing.
World War II and the subsequent establishment of the Socialist Republic of Romania altered the Saxons' fortunes. Some were deported to the Soviet Union to assist in its postwar rebuilding; others were labeled Hitlerists and deprived of their political rights; others lost their land to "agricultural reform." Many sought to leave. Between 1979 and 1988, the West German government paid the government of Nicolai Ceausescu hundreds of millions of dollars in exchange for allowing up to 13,000 ethnic Germans a year to emigrate. As the Saxons left, Ceausescu began resettling the region with Romanians and Roma, or Gypsies. Later he conceived a grand "systemization" plan, under which Saxon villages such as Viscri would be bulldozed into oblivion, but his ouster and execution in 1989 put an end to that.
In 1990, with Ceausescu and the Berlin Wall both gone, the Saxon exodus began in earnest. Today Viscri has a population of some 450 souls, and only 26 of them are of Saxon descent. Five of those are members of Fernolend's immediate family.
In an effort to preserve sustainable farming and restore the village economies, Fernolend, along with the Eminescu Trust, has been promoting agrotourism. (During our time together I heard her converse with tour operators in Romanian, English, German, and French.) Tourists stay in restored homes, and a few families in the villages have refined their cooking and hospitality enough to host the visitors for meals prepared with local meats and agricultural products. While her efforts have begun to show results, she admitted that only so many projects can be supported. And increased tourism has done little to allay her larger concerns about the E.U. and its regulations.
Last Easter, Fernolend told me, herders found out they could no longer bring their lambs to market without a livestock transport license. Since most couldn't afford a license, they had to sell their lambs to someone who could, getting a lower price than the lambs would have fetched in the market.
"Soon our cows won't be allowed in the streets," she said. "What is now common land will have to be fenced. Animals will have to be milked by machine, but you need 10 cows to make a milk machine worthwhile. Most of these farmers have only two. They won't be able to sell their milk. Processing dairy products will require an expensive installation that one person can't afford."
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