Between the Woods and the Water

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  * * *

  Uplands of holt and hanger soon put this pinnacle out of sight as we drove south through vineyards and hop fields. It was a solemn sweep of country with snug hamlets tucked among woods by the banks of rivers. When we asked what they were called, the villagers always gave a Saxon name—Schaas, Trappold, Henndorf, Niederhausen. (Experts find a kinship between the layout of these settlements and villages in mediaeval Franconia, when that region stretched far across Germany to the west and the north; and it seems that kinship between the Transylvanian Saxon dialect and the speech of the Franks of the Mosel bears this out.) They were built in a rustic farmyard style with flattened cart entrances, shingled lych-gates, hipped roofs and rows of gables that gave on the village street. The masonry was sound, made to last and adorned here and there with a discreet and rather daring frill of baroque. At the heart of each village, sturdy churches reared squat, four-sided steeples with a tough, defensive look. We pulled up in the little market-town of Agnetheln near a church as massive as a small bastille. Pierced by arrow-slits, the walls rose sheer, then expanded in machicolations; and, above these, rows of short uprights like squat pillars formed galleries that hoisted pyramids of steeple. They were as full of purpose as bits of armour and the uprights between steeple and coping gave the triangular roofs a look of helmets with nasal pieces and eye-slits. All the churches were similarly casqued.

  We were looking at the one in front of us from our bench outside an inn. At the next table a wheelwright, curly with shavings and with sawdust on sandy eyebrows, had just left his workshop for a drink. He sat with one arm round a lint-haired daughter who stood between his knees and silently drank us in through limpid blue eyes. “What do you think of it?” he asked us in German.

  “Ein feste Burg,” István appositely replied. A safe stronghold.

  “It had to be,” the wheelwright commented, and I wondered why. None of the churches since crossing the Hungarian and the Rumanian frontiers had worn this fierce look; but then, none had been so old. Yet there had never been sectarian strife in these parts on the scale of France, Ireland, Northern Europe and the Empire during the Thirty Years’ War. Had it been to protect them from the Turks? The wheelwright shrugged. Yes, against the Turks; but there had been worse than they.

  “Who?”

  He and István answered in unison.

  “Tataren!”

  I understood, or thought I did: the armoured churches must have sprung up after the onslaught of the Tatars of Batu Khan; those Mongols, that is, who had laid the Kingdom in ashes, burnt churches and castles, massacred many thousands and led whole populations captive. The devastation of Batu and his sudden return to Karakorum, when the death of Kublai’s heir had put the Mongol succession at hazard, took place in 1241. What a mercy they never came back!

  “Never came back?” The wheelwright’s glass of wine stopped half-way to his lips and returned to the oak; and I realised, as I listened to him and to István, what gaps yawned in the past three months’ mugging up in country-house libraries. The last Turco-Tatar raid didn’t get as far as most of its predecessors, but it had taken place as recently as 1788; and in the vast period between 1241 and 1788, smaller raids by the Tatars and other marauding bands had been endemic. Most of them came from the Tatar settlements on the Budjak steppe in southern Bessarabia. (They must have been an offshoot of the Nogai, or Krim Tatars. After Tamerlane had destroyed the Golden Horde, the remainder, under the Girai descendants of Jenghiz Khan—probably more Turkic than Mongol by now—had founded an independent Khanate in the Crimea, and another in Kazan.) These raiders would ride across Moldavia, penetrate the Buzău Pass at the south-east corner of the Carpathians—‘the Tatar Pass,’ as the locals called it—and sweep down on the prosperous Burzenland; (this region near the old Saxon town of Kronstadt[7] was the fief originally bestowed on the Teutonic knights).

  But massive church architecture was no defence against a determined attack. At the approach of raiders, the villagers took to the woods and drove their horses and cattle up into the roomy caves of the Carpathians. The whole range is a stalactitic warren; and there they would hide until it was safe to come out and inspect the cinders. Finally, a century or so after the building of the churches, more serious steps were taken: great fortified walls were flung up round them and there they still stand, astonishing circles of stone tiered inside with wooden shelters and reached by ladders that ascend like boxes in a rustic opera house. Each one was the quarters of a different family and in times of trouble they would stock them with salt meat and hams and cheeses against a sudden siege. These defensive rings are amazing, even in a border region that bristles with castles. The raids have left few other traces, except perhaps genetically: people say that the former frequency of rape has stamped some of the villagers of the region with a Mongol look. Others think it may be a passing heirloom of the Cumans before they settled and evaporated on the Great Hungarian Plain.

  István looked at his watch and jumped up. A fatherly whisper sent the little girl dashing off to the yard behind his workshop, and, when we were in the motor, she leaned in panting and put a nosegay of roses and tiger-lilies in Angéla’s lap.

  * * *

  No mechanical vehicle except ours desecrated the quiet of these byeways. For miles we met only cattle and a cart or two drawn by the sturdy local horses. Another village with a spiked church loomed and fell back, and ahead of us, rearing like a wave, the enormous mass of the Carpathians climbed into the sky. It was the highest stretch of the Transylvanian Alps, and the highest peaks are only overtopped by the crests of the High Tatra, far away south of Cracow on the borders of Slovakia and Poland; over three hundred miles north-west, for an eagle bent on a change of peaks. They are also called the Făgărass mountains, the old chronicler’s wild forested region of the Vlachs and the Pechenegs, it had often been a domain of the Princes of Wallachia; like the ranges we saw to the north-east from the Szekler country, it was full of bears and wolves; and the old eponymous town and castle lay at its feet. I had expected a daunting perpendicular stronghold, but, apart from the donjon inside, it turned out to be a massive rectangle of ochre and brick-colour, almost a quarter of a mile square and slotted by embrasures, with a circular bastion jutting at each corner. Medallions with indecipherable scutcheons crumbled over a great gate. It was an illustration for Vauban or the middle-distance for a stately battle-painter and crying aloud for a forest of beleaguering tents and cannon-smoke and counter-marching perpendicular groves of packed lances, all seen beneath the foreground hoofs of a frantic dappled charger, pawing the air under a cuirassed seventeenth-century captain, sombre and imperturbable in his moustache and feathered hat, baton on sashed hip. Most suitably, it was the famous Bethlen Gábor who gave the the fortifications their final shape, and its best-known besiegers were the janisseries of Achmet Balibeg against a desperate garrison of five hundred Magyars and Szeklers. I feel that the Ali Pasha, who laid siege to it in 1661, must have been (though I can find no corroboration) the one who came to grief on his elephant at Segesvár.

  The moment we had struck the highroad after those hushed Saxon lanes we had run over a nail and had to change a wheel. Once in Făgăras,—Fogaras to István and Angéla—we waited in a garden restaurant by the fortress while it was mended and Angéla went to telephone. István was a little perplexed. Our leisurely mornings and late starts—my and Angéla’s fault—had set our programme back. He had wanted to drive on east to the important old Saxon town of Kronstadt near the Tatars’ Pass, to feast and look at the Black Church there and spend the night. But too little time was left; we would have to think of turning westwards. Then Angéla came back from the telephone with a worried look. The subterfuges and stratagems on which our journey depended were in danger of breakdown; the only remedy was to head westwards, and by train, that very day; eventually she would be travelling much further than either of us could accompany her. István explained the change of plan. A branch line ran through the town, but the journey would involve
two changes and long waits and we were appalled by the prospect of these static vigils and the break up of our trio and the anticlimax. While we were talking, a Gypsy mechanic was strapping the mended tyre into its recess at the back of the front mudguard. István’s eyes lit up at the sight, as though inspiration had descended. “We’ll stick to our old plan,” he said, “but make it a day earlier.” Angéla wondered whether we would be cutting it too fine. “You wait and see,” István said, emptying his glass. “To horse!”

  We climbed in and started off. When István pressed the scarlet bulb, the brass trumpet let out its melancholy delayed-action moo. “Not quite right for the Third Honvéd Hussars!” Angéla said. We sloughed Făgăras,-Fogaras-Fogarasch like a snake-skin and were soon scorching along the road we had come by until we passed the Agnetheln turning and broke new ground.

  The rain-scoured landscape and the flocks of clouds rushing across the sky had made us lower the hood. On our left the huge mass of the mountains heaved itself up in a succession of steep folds. Wooded gorges pierced the foothills and the higher slopes were darkened by scarves of forest until the bare rock emerged in a confusion of rugged humps and peaks. High above, we knew, a score of small lakes and tarns gazed up at the sky and we thought we could discern a glint of snow here and there, but it was too late in the year; it must have been a chance discolouring of the rock. On our right hand the trees which followed the course of the Olt river[8] swayed towards us and veered away many times, half keeping us company until the river twisted due south and coiled away between the chasm that led to the Red Tower Pass. (Once through this great cleft, it broke into the Regat—the pre-war Rumanian kingdom—and began its hundred-and-fifty-mile journey through the southern foothills and across the Wallachian plain, giving its name, on the way, to the whole province of Oltenia; then it flowed into the Danube like every stream in this vast blind-alley of the Carpathians.) A few miles before we lost it, István pointed across the river to a point where a thirteenth-century Cistercian abbey, the oldest gothic building in Transylvania, stood in ruins. “King Matthias suppressed it,” he said, “because of the immorality of the monks.”

  “Oh?” Angéla and I said together. “What immorality?”

  “I’m not sure,” István answered, then added cheerfully, “everything, I expect”; and the sinful precincts, one with Sodom and the Agapemone, fell behind us stubbornly mouldering in the fields.

  Another momentous landmark followed: the battlefield where Michael the Brave of Wallachia had beaten the army of Cardinal Andreas Báthory, Prince of Transylvania, cousin of the Sigismund whose victories against the Turks had ended in abdication and madness. After the battle, some turncoat Szeklers presented Prince Michael with the Cardinal’s mangled head: a sad finish to the great house of Báthory. Their uncle Stephen—Transylvanian Prince, then King of Poland—had prised the armies of Ivan the Terrible out of captured Lithuanian cities and driven him back into Muscovy.

  The gentle hills rolling to the north were scattered with Saxon thorpes; then all the villages were filled with Rumanian sounds once again. István charioted us with skill and speed, braking in plenty of time in the village streets for geese to hiss their way across; then shooting forward again. Stretches of road soared up and down like a switchback, swooping into hollows and breasting uphill into new vistas while Angéla lit cigarettes for us all and handed them left and right.

  When we approached the outskirts of Hermannstadt—Sibiu—Nagy-Szeben (the last name, of course, is the one he used) István groaned aloud. In the Szekler capital the day before we had clean forgotten to look at the Teleki library; now, in this ancient Saxon town, there was no time to look at anything at all. Churches rose in plenty and fabulous old buildings beckoned; above all, there was the Bruckenthal Palace where the library was packed with manuscripts and incunabula; there was a gallery with room after room of Dutch, Flemish and Italian painters. As a tease, István enlarged on these splendours, “Memling, Frans Hals, Rubens...” he said, his hand leaving the steering wheel with an airy flourish.

  Angéla said, “You read that in a book.”

  “... Titian, Magnasco, Lorenzo Lotto...” he went on; then he described the charm of the inns, the wonders of local Saxon cooking, their skill with sucking pigs and ducks and trout, sighed, “No time! No time!” and drove on down cobbled lanes and across market-places and great flagged squares. We might have been in Austria or Bavaria. Once more, the names over the shops were all Saxon. Zoological and heraldic inn-signs hung from stanchions along massive, shady arcades and no rustic discretion hampered the baroque buildings all round us. Tall casements rose between louvred shutters with twirling hinges; there were triangular and bow-topped pediments and houses plastered yellow and ochre and saffron and green and peach and mauve, and at either end of the serrated roof-trees elliptic mouldings elaborated the crow-steps of the gables; these were pierced by lunettes adorned with flourishes and scrolls, and the serried juts of dormer-windows broke up the steep slants of rose-coloured tile. It was the perfect urban counterpart to the rustic masonry of the villages. Half-timbered buildings appeared, stalwart towers barred with string courses were faced with the gilded numbers of clock-dials, crowned with onion-domes of tile or sulphur-green copper and finally topped with spikes fitted with weathercock pennants. All the upper storeys were buoyed on a froth of unpollarded mulberries and chestnut trees. Angéla had never been there before either, and our excitement and frustration ran deep; and as the motor-car threaded its way through a maze of stalls and cart-horses, a new thought smote: as far as my journey went, these houses and streets and towers were the last outposts of an architectural world I was leaving for good.

  The reader may think I am lingering too long over these pages. I think so too, and I know why: when we reached our destination in an hour or two, we would have come full cycle. It wasn’t only an architectural world, but the whole sequence of these enchanted Transylvanian months that would come to a stop. I was about to turn south, away from all my friends, and the dactylic ring of Magyar would die away. Then there was István; I would miss him bitterly; and the loss of Angéla—who is little more than a darting luminous phantom in these pages—would be a break I could hardly bear to think of; and I can’t help putting off the moment for a paragraph or two.

  * * *

  I must, anyway. Over-confident after our resistance to the Sibiu-Szeben-Hermannstadt temptations, we found we had time to spare. We halted and stretched our legs and lay on the grass and smoked a couple of cigarettes and I rashly made them laugh by telling them about Sir Francis Drake and the game of bowls. But no sooner had we struck the old highway beside the Maros—a few miles south of the Apulon-Apulum-Bălgrad-Weissenburg-Karlsburg-Gyulaféhervár-Alba Iulia turning—than fate began to scatter our route with troubles. New since our passage there two days earlier, an untimely road-gang with a steam-roller and red flags had roped off potholes which had remained untouched for years. Maddened by frustration, István foiled them at last by cutting a bold semi-circular cantle across a stubble field. Next we were held up by a collusion of sleep-walking buffaloes with a gigantic threshing-machine crawling along a stretch of road with woods on one side and on the other a sharp drop to a water-meadow; and finally, a mile or so short of the last station before our destination, there was a puncture, the second that day; caused perhaps by a broken bottle left in the stubble a month ago by some snoring haymaker. We leaped into action and just as we were tightening the last screws on the freshly patched-up spare wheel, the hoot of a train reached us from behind. Then we saw the familiar smoke-plume appearing along the valley and heard the puffing and the clatter, and there it was; and just as we were chucking the old wheel in the back it passed us and disappeared sedately round a bend. We leaped aboard as nimbly as firemen and István seized the wheel.

  Swing-wells and fields of maize and tobacco shot behind and the dust rose all about us in expanding clouds. The windscreen was one of the old-fashioned kind that divide lengthways, and when István
twisted a milled brass knob at the side, the lower edge of the top half lifted outwards and the wind of our pace roared through us. All at once we were shooting through thousands and thousands of sunflowers; then, far ahead, the guard’s van came in sight. The train was slowing up for Simeria, the last halt before our target; and, just as it was moving on again we drew alongside. As it picked up speed, we were neck and neck; the passengers peered out in amazement and we felt like Cherokees or Assiniboines galloping round a prairie train in feathers and bisons’ horns: we ought to have been shooting them full of tufted arrows while they blazed back at us with their Winchester repeaters... István was crouched over the wheel, shirt-sleeves rolled up, grinning fiercely like a cinder-eyed demon of speed with ribbed black-mackintosh wings; and as we pulled ahead, he let out a joyful howl; we joined in, and the train hooted as though in capitulation. Angéla was hugging herself, shoulders hunched and teeth bared with excitement, hair flying out straight in the slipstream. Sometimes, launched by troughs in the road, we seemed to take to the air; another puncture would have done for us. Then, as the train dropped further behind, we sailed into familiar territory. The tall hill of Deva, crowned with its ruined fortress, haunted by the bricked-up victim of the ancient legend, heaved into sight, with the Hátszeg mountains beyond, where Vajdahunyád lay. The Maros meandered downstream in its mist of poplars, flowing towards Gurasada and the unknown village of Saftă and Ileană, and Xenia’s Zám, and then on to Kápolnás for Soborsin and Count Jenö and Tinka; Konopy and Maria Radna; and Arad, where Iza lived; and to the north of this, the roofs that sheltered Georgina and Jasš and Clara and Tibor and Ria were scattered about among dales and hills.