Transylvania and Beyond E-Book

Dervla Murphy

• Herausgeber: Eland Publishing
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Shortly after the execution of Nicolae Ceaușescu, Dervla Murphy travelled to Romania and found a nation both exhilarated and bewildered by revolution. Eager to explore a country that had hitherto been inaccessible to outsiders, Murphy describes in lucid detail a journey on two planes: cycling and ambling through the rural Carpathians, and exploring the mind-set of a post-Communist society in the grips of an identity crisis. She is treated to tremendous hospitality wherever she goes, and in urban blocs, small towns and traditional villages she gets to know the ordinary Romanians – the teachers, farmers, professors, factory-workers, writers, engineers, vets, army officers, shepherds, students and doctors. Transylvania and Beyond is the story of their hopes, fears and prejudices, a passionate insight into what Murphy calls 'one of Europe's least European countries.'

Leseprobe

DERVLA MURPHY

TRANSYLVANIA AND BEYOND

To my many good friends in Transylvania and beyond– Rumanians, Magyars, Szekelys, Jews, Gypsies, Saxons, Swabians and Serbs

Contents

Title PageDedicationAcknowledgements Historical Note Map Foreword   1 Dispossessed on the Frontier   2 Hospitality from the State   3 Disabled on the Road   4 Bucharest under Black Ice   5 Indirectly to the Painted Monasteries   6 A Nasty Video in Timisoara   7 Jimbolia, Jollifications and Forebodings   8 A Minor Mishap in Maramures   9 Klausenburg/Kolozsvar/Cluj-Napoca: Transylvania’s Capital 10 Wheeling and Dealing 11 Village Contrasts 12 Footless in Moldavia 13 Two Wheels in the Carpathians 14 The Flavour of ’91 Historical Chronology Copyright

Acknowledgements

Many Rumanians gave me valuable advice during the writing of this book, especially certain Cluj academics and those friends who came to stay with me in Ireland while work was in progress. (For obvious reasons, all personal names have been changed.)

In Budapest Rudi Fischer read the first draft and made many essential corrections and constructive suggestions.

In Cimpulung Moldovenesc my doctor and his wife and daughter, and the staff of the local hospital, made a nasty experience much less so and did their best, against grotesque odds, to succour the maimed foreigner.

From Skopje my daughter Rachel uncomplainingly undertook three wearisome journeys to assist her accident-prone mother.

In Hampstead the long-suffering (twenty-eight years long) Diana and Jock Murray attended what proved to be a rather difficult birth with their usual patience and skill.

To all, my thanks.

Historical Note

Modern Rumania consists mainly of three territories previously separate though sharing a common religion, Greek Orthodoxy, and the Rumanian language. These territories are known to English-speakers as Moldavia, Wallachia and Transylvania. In 1859 Moldavia and Wallachia were united to form the state of Rumania, to which Transylvania was ceded by the Treaty of Trianon in 1920.

During the Paris Peace Conference, in 1919, most of the British delegation found Balkan politics intolerably confusing and Lloyd George was heard to ask irritably, ‘Where the hell is that place [Transylvania] Rumania is so anxious to get?’ Probably only Harold Nicolson, Britain’s Balkan expert, could have told him that – for the Conference’s purposes – Transylvania was the land between the bend of the Carpathians and the Apuseni Mountains, plus Crisana, Maramures and part of the Banat – some 40,685 square miles.

Map

Foreword

On New Year’s Day 1990 we were all euphoric. Within months the Communist Bloc had become Europa Felix, countries suddenly made happy by freedom. And I was revelling in my own freedom to explore regions hitherto inaccessible.

A long time ago Fate had ordained that my first Europa Felix journey should be through Transylvania. The year must have been 1940; I can dimly recall my parents discussing the Vienna Diktat, when Hitler forced Rumania to surrender the northern half of Transylvania to Hungary. I was aged eight and had been temporarily weaned off Just William, Biggies and the Coot Club by Walter Starkie’s Raggle-Taggle – grown-ups’ books did not usually have such tempting titles. At least half of it was way beyond me, yet by the last page I had decided that one day I, too, would wander with the Gypsies through Transylvania: the very name seemed a one-word poem. But the region’s contemporary fate didn’t interest me; for the next several years the Transylvania eventually to be explored and the Transylvania on my father’s flag-pocked map remained two quite separate places.

Then Churchill did his infamous swap with Stalin – ‘You can have Rumania and thereabouts if we can keep Greece within our sphere of influence’. By 1950, when I set off on my first European cycling tour, Rumania had been a Communist state for three years. Transylvania, like Tibet and Central Asia, had sadly been written off as a Never-Never Land.

Towards the end of the 1970s Nicolae Ceausescu became – it is now generally agreed – mentally ill in a peculiarly unpleasant way. And his wife Elena became more and more ruthless, avaricious and domineering. Throughout the 1980s increasingly grim reports trickled out from the Ceausescus’ ‘State of Terror’. A harsh censorship had mentally isolated the population. Too much food was being exported to repay Western loans and many were starving. To stymie any samizdat movement, every typewriter had to be registered with the police. Five children were demanded of each couple, abortion was outlawed and Elena founded the ‘Baby Police’ to screen women monthly. When the President revived an old plan to raze more than 7,000 villages, churches and all, and to force the peasant (mainly elderly) into cramped blocs, the Western media gave widespread coverage to this brutal campaign. In April 1989 the EEC belatedly suspended trading relations with Rumania because of its deteriorating human rights record. But for far too long the West had fawned on the Ceausescus, choosing only to see Rumania as a lucrative trading-partner and cherished anti-Soviet ally within the Warsaw Pact.

Early on the morning of 22 December 1989 the World Service broadcast a report from one of the threatened villages. Gently the interviewer asked how this perverse exercise in social engineering would affect the peasants. ‘In a bloc we can have no pig, no hens, no cows’ – the voice of that elderly woman trembled with despair, yet also held a note of incredulity. How to imagine life without pigs, hens, cows? An elderly man sobbed while beseeching the interviewer to try to save the village’s 400-year-old church; its frescos, he said, were famous throughout Europe and what about all the foreigners who used to come to study them? Could these important people not now rescue the church from the bulldozer? The interviewer’s own voice trembled as he described this ancient Transylvanian village (unnamed: the Securitate were still in power) with its still vigorous tradition of folk art – wood carving and weaving, song and dance. Waves of grief and angry frustration surged through me; at breakfast-time my daughter found her tough mother almost in tears.

‘Cheer up!’ she said. ‘Those villagers will be OK. Haven’t you heard the latest news? In Bucharest the army is turning against the Ceausescus!’

On Christmas Day I resolved to go to Transylvania as soon as possible; I felt impatient to share in Rumania’s happiness. Of course I must also expect to find much hardship, tension, dissension, suspicion: once the challenge of learning how to use freedom had been confronted, the prevailing euphoria could not long survive. As a political zombie, it would ill become me even to try to understand the consequent machinations – which would anyway be an urban phenomenon. I was only eager to travel among the ordinary countryfolk of ‘the other half’ of my own continent during the dawn of their New Age.

Just as ‘everyone’ leaves London in August, ‘everyone’ was converging on Timisoara and Bucharest during January 1990. Apparently I too was being attracted by Rumania’s new aura of tragic glamour, and friends refused to believe that I was going simply to enjoy a Transylvanian trek – not to gather material for a book. In their eyes, travelling and writing were – for me – part of the same process. They said, ‘A holiday? It’s not possible!’ And events proved them right.

On the bus to Munich I tardily recognised that I was taking quite a risk. The pursuit of fifty-year-old dreams is a dangerous sport. Was it reasonable to expect more than a faint resemblance between Walter Starkie’s Transylvania and post-Ceausescu Transylvania? Yet already I knew, in that cellar of the mind where we store our illogical certainties, that my journey was not a mistake.

1

Dispossessed on the Frontier

I paused, startled, in the doorway of Budapest’s empty West Station restaurant. Had I strayed into the 1890s section of some Central European Victoria and Albert Museum? Gilded chandeliers shed a mellow light on immaculate damask table-linen. The tables stood far apart on a floor of inky blue and carmine marble. The mahogany dining-chairs, rather pompously carved, were upholstered in dark green velvet. Slowly I moved to the centre of the room, passing fluted porphyry pillars. Burgundy and silver tapestry wall-hangings shimmered beneath golden rosettes sprouting from the cornice. Silver candelabras gleamed on square marble corner pillars and on either side of intricately bevelled window embrasures. One expected several archdukes to appear at any moment.

Instead, the door was pushed open by a tall, thin, slightly stooped young man with longish mousey hair and pale blue bloodshot eyes. He too seemed momentarily bemused by this imperial left-over. Then, taking courage from me and my rucksack, he asked, ‘OK just to sit?’

I nodded. ‘There’s no staff around to object.’

Noticing my London–Arad luggage label, Klaus suggested, ‘Reporter?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘just a tourist.’

‘A tourist? Why? There is no tourist comfort in Rumania, no food or heat in the hotels – nothing!’

‘But I have a tent – and lots of dehydrated food.’

‘A tent!’ snorted Klaus. ‘Don’t you know there’s snow? And the Securitate won’t let you camp, they hate foreigners. You go home!’

‘Mine is a Himalayan tent,’ I soothed. ‘And aren’t the Securitate gone – disbanded, defeated?’

‘Only foreigners believe that,’ said Klaus. ‘They still have the best weapons and could be more dangerous now. The other Ceausescus could be organising a counter-revolution. Last week my cousin ran from Timisoara, he doesn’t like to live in a country without a government. He wants the army to take over until the election. Now all the criminals – Securitate, Party activists, policemen – can do what they want.’

Klaus, a Swabian from a village near Timisoara, had been working in Germany since illegally crossing the border near Kikinda in 1988. That escape route, across the flat Banat, was not too difficult by night yet required courage. If caught, Klaus could have been sentenced to three years’ imprisonment. His only sibling, a fourteen-year-old brother, had been badly wounded during the uprising on 17 December and though his farmer parents were against his returning, he felt they needed him. His arrival would be a surprise – ‘I wish they won’t get angry. Now they have passports and I want to take them to Munich. There my brother can have good medical treatment to help him walk again. We are two hundred years in that village but since Communism came – and especially since Ceausescu came – most of our neighbours have gone back to Germany. I wanted my parents to escape with me but they were frightened. Not frightened to make the journey but frightened to live outside, in Germany.’