Balkan Ghosts by Robert D. Kaplan

Author:Robert D. Kaplan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Picador

CHAPTER NINE

Transylvanian Voices

It is on the plain that the regime really sank its teeth into the population. As in the Middle Ages, the mountains provided a measure of defense. Crossing westward over the Carpathians from Bucovina, I saw few signs of collectivization. The landscape was defined more by wood and natural stone than by concrete and scrap iron. I walked for long stretches downhill and even rode in the back of a leiterwagen for a few minutes, before realizing that I could make faster progress on foot. Only occasionally did a car pass on the road. I knew I was catching a glimpse of the Romanian countryside in a deliciously exciting moment of history: in the aftermath of a revolution, enabling me to travel freely, but before the process of modernization had begun.

Tirgu Mures was the first town in Transylvania I stopped at. I arrived in the morning, when the sun was burning off the mist from the surrounding hills, revealing the outlines of steep roofs, spires, leaden domes, and statues around a spacious green expanse called the Square of the Roses, lined with baroque and gothic facades. Unlike in Jassy, there were Catholic churches; and not only Romanian, but Hungarian, too—a tongue that conjured up Central Europe and not the Balkans—was being spoken in the streets. Surveying the square, I found an intimacy and a lack of strangeness that derived from a strong and generally uninterrupted process of cultural development, symbolized by the verticality of the architecture. Here was a coffeehouse culture, even though there had been no coffee for many years. I was back in Central Europe, albeit at the very rear door.

In the West, the very word Transylvania conjures up images of howling wolves, midnight thunderstorms, evil-looking peasants, and the thick, courtly accent of Count Dracula, as portrayed by Bela Lugosi. In fact, however, the historical figure on whom Dracula is based, “Vlad the Impaler,” had his castle on the plain of Wallachia. Stoker’s story, meanwhile, falls more into the realm of Bucovina and Moldavia than of Transylvania.

I am not being pedantic. Wallachia, Bucovina, and Moldavia belong to the East: the world of Orthodox Christianity, of peasant superstitions and mystic ecstasies. But Transylvania is, in essence, part of the same world that has had nothing but derision for the East: the West.

In the impassioned view of historian John Lukacs, Transylvania’s Western identity is “the key to its history” and its “human fauna.” Lukacs pleads:

Transylvania had its high Middle Ages, cathedrals, Cistercians, a whiff of the Renaissance, its Baroque, its Enlightenment—the historical ages that made Europe … that did not exist in Russia or in Rumania, Moldavia, Oltenia, Wallachia, Bessarabia, Bulgaria, Serbia, Macedonia, Albania, Thrace, Greece, the Ukraine.

As Lukacs and others have pointed out, the Turks conquered all of the Balkans and half of Hungary in the Middle Ages, but they did not conquer Transylvania. While the plain of Athens below the Parthenon—not to mention Moldavia and Wallachia—dozed under an Oriental, Ottoman sleep, Transylvania was proclaiming the Enlightenment, with freedom and equality for both Catholics and Protestants.

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