An American in Romania : Biertan Fortified Church

I don't even know how to explain the incredible weekend I just had. I signed up for an MWR trip to Sighisoara, in Judetul Sibui, but I had no idea everything I'd experience (not that it matters because every trip is memorable).

We departed Deveselu at 0800 on Friday morning, heading north to Sighisoara with a stop first at the Biertan Fortified Church. The trip was going to be around five hours with a few brief stops I'm sure for potty breaks and lots of coffee. If you remember from two weeks ago, I CAN'T DRIVE for another 90 days! So instead, our dutiful CO, CAPT JD Knick, steered the ship to our destination.

The Last of Transylvanias Saxons
Great article done by BBC on the following subject - The mass emigration of Romanian Germans.

So, we're driving towards Biertan and the CO notices as we travel through several small villages - there are no people out on the streets. We drive for dozens of kilometers and are surprised to see entire villages apparently abandoned. Some houses in the villages were beautifully restored and others were, well - dilapidated. They all had the dates they were built (I assume) either on placards, painted, or formed in concrete on the front of the homes facing the street. They dated from the 1600s to the 1980s - but where were all the people? Where were the stores and the markets? Here's some pictures I took from the passenger seat (the CO was driving still) of the cool villages with no people.

Here's how quaint the houses look, some have been renovated and others not so much! Felix later told me these empty houses are for sale for around 60,000 Euro or $66,175. I'm up for a summer home in Romania! Unfortunately, Gypsys are arriving and squatting; causing problems for the people who do live here.

When we stopped at Biertan, we asked Felix our guide and he explained to us something I NEVER expected. When I got home, I had to read more about it. If you want to read the incredible story for yourself about the deportation of HUGE numbers of Germans from Romania, visit this site.

THE VANISHED ROMANIAN GERMAN COMMUNITY THROUGH HITLER'S POPULATION TRANSFER, SOVIET DEPORTATION, & MASS EMIGRATION.
http://expelledgermans.org/transylvaniasaxons.htm

In the meantime, I'll briefly sum it up with information I gleaned from the website and what I learned from Felix and his assistant, Wana (sp). The website I provided above is amazing in its explanation of the Germans plight in Romania.

After centuries of living in Romania after fleeing Germany, hundreds of thousands of Romania's Germans were increasingly relegated then to flee Romania. They had lost their largely independent societies and local self-government in Transylvania. They lost the property their ancestors had spent centuries developing. Pressured by these factors, massive waves of emigration of Romania's Germans occurred from 1944 until the collapse of Communist Romania causing the 800-year-old Saxons' and the 300-year-old Banat Swabians' communities to almost completely vanish.

Communist dictator Ceauşescu's 'Rational Eating Program' from the 1960s through to the 1980s to help pay off his huge national debt, restricted the Romanian diet to detrimental rations further compounding the exodus of German emigrants. This was exacerbated by a fast growth in anti-minority sentiment against the Hungarians and Germans in Romania after the fall of Communism in 1989. The Romanians were scrambling to define their new identity as a capitalist economy and exercised extreme liberal political leanings. Tens of thousands of Germans and Hungarians petitioned for exit visas to emigrate to Germany, Austria, and Hungary and failed. While still under Ceauşescu's regime, they were charged an inordinately high cost for visas outside of the Communist Bloc, which these people (who had no money) could not afford. Many families were described as having their luggage packed for years awaiting their turn to leave, if it ever came.

Many Germans and Hungarians intentionally failed at school and did as little work as possible so as to force the Romanian government to give them passports to alleviate a social drain (this explains a lot actually). Toward the end of the Communist era, the difficulty of attaining visas was gradually lifted as Romania tumbled into economic decline. Ceauşescu answered West Germany's offer to pay 7,000DM (about $12,350 at the time) to Bucharest in return for granting exit visas to Romanian German families. Romania was anxious to grant passports to Jews in exchange for money and their departure. Romania essentially "sold" German families to West Germany for several thousand dollars each at negotiated rates per family. This was also the case in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) by the 1980s. While this is often used as evidence of the chronic bankruptcy of socialist regimes, it must be understood Bucharest and East Berlin were also anxious to get rid of unreliable, potentially suspicious emigrants who wanted to leave the country and essentially betray the government in the first place.

Upon being deported or approved for emigration, German families were allowed to keep only what they could carry. Their property was forfeited to the state or Romanian farmers, or fell into delapidation before being occupied by Gypsies (who trashed them - they trash everything but that's a different discussion I'm doing for an upcoming blog posting). In 1978 alone, 11,000 were allowed to leave in this fashion. After 1980, more than 10,000 Germans left per annum; 300,000 Germans emigrated between 1950 and 1990. In general, the Germans who stayed behind were the old or infirmed and past the years of fertility - Germany didn't want them. This exacerbated the decline of Romania's Saxon community. Romanian Germans already had a very low birthrate. Less than 30,000 Germans live in this Romanian region today, a gross decline from nearly 400,000 before 1945.

So there you have it, as a result of the liberal Socialist (aka Communist) ideology at the time, the people who built the most beautiful architecture in Romania, were 'sold' and forced to leave the land they had been in for centuries.

Ok, back to the trip - the village of Biertan (just to the south of our ultimate destination) was first mentioned in an official document in 1283. It is home to one of the largest and most impressive medieval strongholds in all of Transylvania.

As we approached the village, the sight of the church was breathtaking. Surrounded by quaint streets, cute cottages, terraced mountain landscape, and vineyards, the 15th century fortified church is set high on a hill in the middle of the village. Three tiers of 35-foot tall and in places four feet thick defensive walls, connected by several towers and gates, encircle the complex, which made the church almost impossible to conquer during medieval times.

I thought this was a cool 3D rendering of the Beirtan Church and it's fortifications.

Biertan Fortified Church, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, features late-gothic architecture with heavy wooden doors and double (or triple) thickness exterior walls. The church boasts the largest Transylvanian multi-paneled wooden altar and a remarkable wooden door which once protected the valuable treasures of the sacristy.

The King of Transylvania granted the towns people the right to bear arms when the Ottoman army was threatening the surroundings. Instead of fortifying the entire village, which many neighboring communities in the region did, the Transylvanian Saxons chose to fortify their churches. This church has three rows of exterior fortification walls linked by gate towers, nine in total.

The first row, with four towers, dates to the 14th century; the second row was built together with the church and has a series of reinforcing arches; the third row, also with towers, is from the 16th and 17th centuries.

The Clock Tower, to the north of the church, also serves as a gate within the inner fortifications. At just four stories high (which is short compared to several others I toured this weekend), it has wooden battlements and parapets. The clock is above the pyramid-shaped roof. The wooden Bell Tower is located north of the church, while the Mausoleum Tower (also known as the Bishops' Tower) contains the headstones of the priest who built the church as well as the bishops buried at Biertan. The Catholic Tower was used by the few Saxons who did not adhere to the Lutheran Reformation but kept their Roman Catholic faith. The chapel, built between 1520-1530, features an extremely rare example of 16th-century Transylvanian mural painting. This Catholic inspired religious paintings formed an exception to the austere Gothic aesthetics predominating the new Lutheran following.

From 1572 until 1867, Biertan was the seat of the Saxon Evangelical bishops of Transylvania; we saw the gravestones of the bishops (pictured below).

The church was occupied and robbed in 1704, during Rákóczi's War of Independence. It suffered damage during the 1977 Vrancea earthquake and subsequently underwent restoration work between 1983 and 1989. Since 1990, the few remaining Saxons in the region come to Biertan annually for a festival held to celebrate their heritage. In 1993, Biertan and its fortified church were declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It was later joined by six other Transylvanian churches in 1999 to form a collection of villages with fortified churches. Because of its significance to the German Saxons, Biertan was the featured on two 2011 postage stamps as a joint venture between Germany and Romania.

The door to the sacristy is simply amazing, a true marvel of engineering. It has a particularly ingenious locking mechanism with 15 bolts which the keeper could simultaneously activate by a single key. The mechanism evidently stirred quite an interest at the Paris World Expo in 1900. I tried to get better pictures of the door but had a difficult time as some German tourists wouldn't move out of the way...argh! I got a picture of the lock though so I found some pictures on-line to show you and provide them herein. On the left is the door as seen from a location to the right of the altar. The picture on the right is the inside of the door.

We also got to visit several of the towers surrounding the church; namely the Clock Tower, the Bell Tower, the Gate Tower, and the Bacon Tower. Within the grounds are several other interesting buildings, including the most interesting by far - the Prison Tower, which once served marital counseling purposes.

As we approached the entrance to the church, there was a street vendor selling hand-made wooden products. I watched as he carved a bowl with a small hatchet. I was amazed at his skills and thought about how many fingers I would have lost trying to carve a bowl this way. I'm glad there are craftsmen in the world who can do this - so I don't have to and I can keep all my appendages.

The stairs leading up to the church from the village square.

The following pictures depict the Prison Tower which contains the "matrimonial prison" where couples wishing to divorce were confined and had to stay together in solitary confinement while they make their final decision to end the marriage. The judge would order couples seeking divorce to be locked in the Prison Tower for two weeks. They had to share a single bed, plate, and spoon - that's it!. In 400 years, only one couple decided afterwards to go through with the divorce! They never mentioned though how many husbands killed their wives or vice versa in those four centuries.

The church's organ features 1,290 pipes, as well as 25 registers, and was built in 1869 by the Hessian Company in Vienna, Austria.

The altar, with its 28 hand-painted panels, was built by skilled artisans from Vienna, Austria, and Nurenberg, Germany between 1483 and 1513.

This is a German oven that was built inside the room where they stored all the riches (behind the really cool door). I would like to have gotten a better picture but it was really crowded in there and I snapped this one so I could capture the whole thing. The tile work is exquisite, especially for an oven.

A wood veneer picture of the church made in 1912 from multiple different type of wood for the different colors.

Here's my "not-so-good" pictures of the door (obstructed view).

The pulpit shows religious scenes carved (from a single block of stone) in relief and dates back nearly 500 years to 1523.

If you zoom in to see it closer, there's a date painted on the ceiling of 1633 during which time the interior was refinished and the metal bracing was installed to support the structure.

The wooden bulletin board shows the dates during which the church was built.

I was amazed at the craftsmanship displayed throughout the church. The 16th Century pews show beautiful dovetail construction which was all done by hand. Today, when I want to make a piece of furniture, I have to get out my clamps, adjust dials, set jigs, plug my router in, and slowly carve out the dovetails with my router - 30 minutes max. Imagine the time and effort required to hand-carve each piece of these 75 or so pews with a chisel...I guess they didn't have TV so they had plenty of time on their hands. And then the doors! Each door was intricately carved with amazing skill.

I was particularly drawn to the beautiful frescos in what is known as the “Catholic Tower.” Many of the frescos were painted over during the Lutheran Reformation but this was spared.

In the Bishops Tower are the crypt lids of the Bishops buried in the church. The stone carvings are incredible and one of the things I observed which I thought was interesting were some of the facial features of the bishops - they looked Asian. Felix explained the Mongols had invaded this region many centuries ago and there was a strong Mongolian influence. So some of the people from here had Asian features. If anyone can read Latin, please let me know what the tombstones say, it would be nice to know.