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„Show something that you liked about Romania, but show something positive,“ was my order, or: „Take a picture on a sunny day. There are already enough of those dreary November reports.“
Romania, say Florian and Cristina, does not only consist of the very rich and the very poor, the Mafia, beggars and people of unaccountable wealth, or people like the man who built an imitation Southfork ranch, or another who bought the plot of land in front of his splendid new house for the sole purpose of demolishing the house on it, as it blocked the view others could have of his house, although he and his family actually preferred to sleep behind the house in a tent. There is more to Romania than stray dogs and street kids. In fact most people here lead utterly ordinary lives, going to work, looking after their children and going on holiday, they tell me.
Rares Kerekes presents me with a drawing. It is a picture of a church, something nice I could show people, he says. I should also tell people, he adds, that it is perfectly OK to trust a stranger offering guest rooms, and it isn't necessary to look further afield. Rares rents out a room in Sighisoara. He bought it for 200 dollars after the fall of Ceausescu and was able to pay it off in rates of 2 dollars a month. He is embarrassed about the fact that Ceausescu and his wife were executed on Christmas Eve of all days, he says. Rares is very young. Aged sixteen, he was sent off to work in a forestry school in the back of beyond, to become a forester like his father and his cousin. He learned to smoke there. Once someone felled a load of trees in the section of forest his cousin was responsible for. His cousin reported him to the forest administration, which did not reply, but made the cousin pay the damage out of his miserable wages at the end of the month. That's the way things are here with corruption and the Mafia, he says. We also talk about the hunters that like to come here from Germany, Austria and Spain. We saw big groups of them at the border. They come here to shoot chamois says Rares. Shooting chamois is forbidden, but it is permissible to organise a chamois hunt. A friend of his and a man who knows his way around the mountains sometimes go hunting chamois with these men. Once the hunters took the horns, but denied the leader of the group the right to take the meat. They thought the meat was unappetising, seeing as the chamois are a protected species.

I don't know how we got talking about fortune telling, but Rares told me a story about the Romanian President who consulted a fortune teller about when Romania would join the European Union. „When pigs can fly, “ the fortune teller is said to have told him.

Resort in the Bran area

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I have two friends. They are twins and both are beautiful. Their names, as they like to say, were given them in honour of Gerd Müller and Uwe Seeler.
Gerd and Uwe come from Neustadt near Kronstadt. Gerd has told me to look out for the bears that eat out of the bins of Kronstadt every night, a new tourist attraction apparently, and to visit the black church with its Turkish carpets.
The carpets were brought here by merchants from the Orient in the 17th century. Their journey was fraught with dangers. In the cities of the Orient, they used to buy a carpet with the promise to give it to the church upon their safe arrival home. Some people, however, objected to this practice, maintaining that Turkish carpets had no place in Protestant churches. But the spiritual leaders rose to the challenge, declaring that the many years they had hung in the churches had sufficiently christianised the carpets.

We slept in the Neustadt vicarage, in high beds by the tile stoves. It's easy to find, Uwe said, as it has always been the nicest house on the square. Some vicarages offer guest rooms. The guests are almost all Transylvanian Saxons who have since moved to Germany but come back to visit. Hatto Müller sends us up to inspect the belfry. He used to play there with his brass band every year on Reformation Day, he tells us. Eine feste Burg sei unser Gott and Ehre sei Gott in der Höhe were two of the hymns they used to play. They were twenty men and twenty instruments, and very cold it was too, at 8 o´clock in the morning of Reformation Day. Ms. Porr stayed in Neustadt at the time when all the others left, to nurse her father-in-law, who was sick and old. „We haven't had any confirmations or baptisms here for twenty years now,“ she says. Her daughter left too, although she had been about to get married, with the pigs fattened and 600 litres of wine amassed in the cellar. Ms. Porr also talks about what life was like in the village during the socialist era. Every single man and woman had a job in industry. Motorbikes were built in Kronstadt, for example. Horse power four, and two of them drunk, according to Hatto Müller. Collective fieldwork occupied the afternoons after work in the factories, in addition to which people also had their own gardens, chickens and pigs to tend to. Despite that, we like to remember the old times, says she.

A beautiful sentence stands written in one church: „This church was completed with God's help in the year 1488, as a heavy snowstorm broke the fruit trees on St Gerhard's Day.“
Rarely have I felt so Lutheran as in Transylvania.
„Piety is good for everything.“

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