Hidden villages hold centuries of Saxon tradition

Viscri Letter:After bumping for miles along a rough track through a shimmering Romanian heat haze, it is a relief to finally glimpse the little village of Viscri.

Amid the rolling hills of Transylvania, Viscri's ochre-tiled roofs huddle around a magnificent fortified church, in which the village's medieval residents took refuge from invading Tartars and Turks.

The imposing white church was built by German settlers who arrived in the 12th century and gave the village its original name - Weisskirch - and whose distinctive culture clings on in Transylvania, despite Soviet persecution and successive waves of emigration.

On the invitation of its Hungarian king, families from Flanders, Luxembourg and the Moselle valley moved to Transylvania to defend its mountain passes from invaders who arrived with grim regularity from the south and east.

They established seven major towns - which gave Transylvania its German name, Siebenburgen - and scores of villages, many of which are centred on the kind of fortified church that have become the region's most striking architectural symbol.

In Viscri, and even more spectacularly at nearby Prejmer, the German settlers built churches protected by three- metre-thick walls within which the whole village could live for weeks and from which arrows could be fired and boiling tar poured on to their besiegers.

Each household was given a numbered room inside the church walls, to which they would decamp when invaders approached the village, taking with them as many belongings as possible and even, sometimes, the family pet, as cat flaps in the doors of some of Prejmer's rooms attest.

Great quantities of food and drink would be hoarded and life for the besieged villagers would proceed as normally as possible until the marauders moved on. Children even attended lessons that were taught inside the stoutly defended complex.

The Lutheran Germans lived relatively peacefully alongside the Orthodox Romanians and Catholic Hungarians. They sank deep roots in Transylvania, where legend grew that they were descended from the children spirited away into the mountain by the Pied Piper of Hamelin, who re-emerged 1,000 miles east of their homeland.

The walls of most fortified churches bear a plaque honouring local Germans - or Saxons as they are called here - who died in the first and second World Wars, after which the Red Army occupied Romania. As many as 100,000 Saxons left for Germany with the retreating Nazis, while those who remained became a target for communist retribution.

At least 30,000 Transylvanian Saxons are believed to have been arrested and sent to Siberian labour camps for allegedly collaborating with Nazi Germany. While about half returned, they would never regain the semi-privileged status they had enjoyed for centuries.

German schools and universities still functioned under communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu but when his megalomaniac building and social engineering projects plunged the country into bankruptcy, he saw the Saxons as a means of making easy money.

In the late 1970s, Bonn agreed to pay Ceausescu several thousand marks for each Saxon that he allowed to leave Romania for West Germany.

Over the next decade, some 12,000 Saxons left officially each year and by 1989, fewer than 300,000 remained. Most of those moved to Germany following Ceausescu's execution in 1989 and now, only about 15,000 Saxons remain in Transylvania.

More than 400 Saxons lived in Viscri before 1989. Now there are 26 and they share the village with about 85 Romanians and 340 gypsies, who live in the houses vacated by the Germans.

In the welcome cool of the church, however, Sara Doortz (70) insists that centuries-old Saxon tradition is alive and well.

"Germans are coming back to visit and a few have even come to live," she says. "We still have a church service here in German every second Sunday - we share the priest with a few other Saxon villages nearby."

Ms Doortz's daughter, Caroline Fernolend, is the local head of the Mihai Eminescu Trust, an organisation named after Romania's national poet which is refurbishing Saxon houses and funding a revival of the Germans' traditional ways of life and work. A number of the houses are available for rent by holidaymakers.

The trust's patron is Britain's Prince Charles, who has visited Viscri several times, walked the orchid-strewn hills and fields that still swish with the farmer's scythe and has even acquired a house in the village.

"He's interested in nature, architecture and organic farming, and he's helping the village," says Ms Doortz, who fears Unesco-listed Viscri could now be swamped by house- buyers seeking a rural idyll with royal cache. "I think his interest is good, but it's bad that some people only see it as a chance for profit," she said as she retreated behind her traditional, high wooden gate, the last line of defence for centuries of Transylvania's Saxons.