Transylvania: Welcome to the Future

(Page 5 of 5)

"I am old enough to retire and enjoy my pension," Holban told me. "But this work keeps me active and interested and confident about the future."

This is not easy, considering he works on his own most of the time and has trouble covering basic office expenses, let alone finding the equivalent of $10 a day to pay an assistant.

And even if he gets E.U. funding, the larger question is, who will make use of it? "All the young people from these villages who are supposed to rebuild them, to take part in all the new projects, are going away to work abroad," he said.

For Holban, tourism is not the answer. While it can create "small islands" of "a kind of utopia" that are interesting to tourists, he said that "more than these small islands is not possible." Only foreign investors can afford the cost of restoring and heating the houses, and Transylvania is already being touted in Britain as the best "next place" to purchase property abroad. A British woman I met in Crit had been so taken with riding horseback across the fenceless, Gainsborough landscape that she purchased a house in the village four years ago for the equivalent of $3,000. After renovation and restoration, she estimated it was now worth five times that. Still very cheap by standards in the rest of Europe, but the increase in property values will price it out of the market for many local residents.

What is needed, Holban said, is to give Transylvanians the resources they need to preserve the natural as well as the economic viability of their land.

Few people, I was told, had as much knowledge about the landscape as the biologist Tibor Hartel, who, with the help of the Eminescu Trust, was surveying the biodiversity of the southern part of the Transylvanian plateau. We met just outside of Sighisoara and began the hike he'd planned at a hillside cemetery crowded with early spring wildflowers. This place, he told me, had five years ago been slated for destruction. Roads and parking lots were to replace the oaks, and the ancient plain was to become Draculaland, a theme park designed to attract millions of tourists. The defeat of those plans by a coalition of local, national, and international groups was a first slim hope for Romania's environmental future.

As we climbed a well-worn trail through a forest of young hornbeam, oak, and beech, clearings gave us glimpses below of the walled medieval town of Sighisoara, whose warren of ancient streets sloped steeply toward the banks of the narrow Tarnava Mare River. Hartel's long strides-he is a tall, lean, Ichabod Crane figure of Hungarian descent who looks like (and is) a local schoolmaster-brought us quickly to the summit, where, with surprising suddenness, we emerged from the woods onto the level expanse of open grassland that is the Breite Plateau.

Only huge oaks, their trunks three feet and more in diameter and their dense and thickly branched crowns in early leaf, interrupted the view. These, Hartel told me, are some of the most ancient oak trees in Europe, 400 to 600 years old, a few perhaps even older, some stag -- headed with age, some scarred by lightning, several gutted by fire -- I stepped into the charcoal-black hollowed-out trunk of one and stood with plenty of room to spare-but all key to the survival of this now rare ecosystem.

But the landscape is not a natural one, he explained. The way in which it was farmed and grazed for a thousand years-field size limited by what a horse could plow and what a scythe could cut-created a mosaic of landscapes that enhanced biodiversity. Wildflowers could survive the scythe. Hilltop forests were maintained as buffers between grazing lands. Deer, bear, and even amphibians could move unhindered from one place to another.

We heard a cuckoo's echoing calls and saw signs in the trees of some of the nine resident species of woodpecker. Hartel kneeled beside a muddy pool that had formed after the previous day's rain in a depression made by a tractor tire and scooped up a handful of jumping frog tadpoles. In the depression next to it, separated only by the width of the tire tread, he pointed out an orgy of yellow-bellied toads: males latched on to females in ardent vernal amplexus. Transylvania, he said, probably holds the largest population of these toads in the E.U. Here they're often called St. George's toads, since their unkeh mating calls are heard around the time of St. George's Day, celebrated in Eastern Orthodox countries on April 24.

"If someone wants to see what it means to live with nature, they should come here," Hartel said.

But sooner, I thought, rather than later. The last foreign visitor Hartel had escorted through a Transylvanian forest was Britain's Prince Charles, whose interest in historic preservation had prompted him to purchase and restore a house in Viscri. What, I asked, was he like?

"He was very much like you," Hartel told me. "A very nice man who asked a lot of questions." That was, I thought, a diplomatic way to put it.