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We're in Southern Transylvania
in search of unconventional places for the Romanian tourists, as well as for the foreign ones.
The beauty that surrounds these villages and their communities is given by nature,
more specifically by the rare balance between human activities and the unaltered nature,
a combination between human cultural systems and ecosystems.
But what happens when one of them defeats the other?
During the course of our journey we will discover one of the most isolated villages from the Sibiu County,
Engelthal or The Valley of the Angel.
-There are no angels around here, there’s only…
the forest, a couple of people, that come and go, a lot of work and…
That’s it in fact.
Only the name remains as a reference to a certain angel or…
maybe I haven’t met him yet.
Between the towns of Sibiu and Medias lays the Seica Mare commune,
historically documented in 1308,
nowadays with a population of 4000 people.
Many people, especially youngsters that went through different educational institutions,
got into the industrial field and other trades in Sibiu, Copsa Mica and Medias,
commuting or settling down in these towns.
Besides that, in the course of a decade,
the number of the population dropped with 600 people,
weakening the expansion of the commune.
Early on, with the departure of the Saxons from Transylvania,
the community was overwhelmed by their skill, diligence and perseverance,
and this can be seen in the design of every church they raised.
The Buia village belongs to the Seica Mare commune and it is situated 11km away from it.
Until 1968, Buia was a county seat, but soon after,
the village went into a continuous decline, and it depopulated so drastically
that the current primary school has only got 4 grades left.
Nowadays almost 600 people live here,
including Romanians, Hungarians and Romani.
Near the hearth of the village, on one of the western hills,
a lonely structure rises.
It’s a 15th century church,
in which services haven’t been held for a long time.
-There are 3 churches here in Buia:
the Romanian one, the Hungarian one and this one here, the Saxon one.
Once every couple of years this becomes the gathering place for saxons that left Buia.
Besides the joy of seeing these places again,
they also celebrate the patron of the church and other specific fêtes.
-There was a meeting 3 years ago in which many Saxons took part
that gave some money for restoring the church.
They came from Germany.
Buia is a place with an important historic past.
Few know that, during the 1848 Revolution,
Valley of Buia became a resistance point for revolutionaries. 47 00: 04:23,000 --> 00:04:25,000 Ioan Axente, also known as Severus,
was one the leaders of the revolutionary movement
for national freedom of the Romanian people in Transylvania.
He recruited manpower from these Saxon lands to fight against serfdom,
social and national slavery, as said in the lyrics:
“Better to die in battle, in full glory / Than to once again be slaves upon our ancient ground!”.
Immediately after the Great Union in 1918,
the school, the town hall, the stable and the bridge that crosses the Calba creek were build in Buia,
the roads were repaired and water wells were dug.
Money were invested in building and organizing the health institution,
and so the Buia Rural Health Constituency was born,
that incorporates a dispensary for general analyses, childcare and a local maternity ward.
The headquarters for this institution was in the premises of the old castle of Mihai Viteazul (Michael the Brave).
-Michael the Brave lived here, in this castle after the Battles of Selimbar.
It was such a beauty! Full of marble tables and chairs.
It was such a beauty! Full of trees, apple trees, pear trees, it was such a beauty...
Sometime in 1966, they started to renovate it for a couple of days,
then they left it and it crumbled.
The origins of this medieval castle are lost in the mists of time
and there is no certain info regarding its building.
400 years ago, these walls protected the family of the voivode Michael the Brave,
as the castle was a gift given by the prince Sigismund Bathory,
alongside other surrounding villages,
as a reward for his (Michael) victories against the Turks.
-He (Sigismund) gave the castle with its surroundings to Michael the Brave, as his property.
And after Michael the Brave was killed,
his wife and son, Patrascu, fought for its ownership in court at Wien.
As long as they could.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire came and canceled every donation.
In 1918, together with Transylvania, the castle came back to Romania.
Although, even today there are a lot of Hungarians that say:
Why can’t it be retroceded?
But what to retrocede?
Have you been there and saw what’s inside?
This is not how this castle looked like...
People that lived here say it was well kept.
There was a dispensary there, a church.
It was very well kept.
-In 45 years this castle degraded this much...
I was born here, 50 years ago it was a maternity, go figure...
A hospital, hospital!
All clean and luxurious, with doctors, nurses.
The castle had numerous high rank owners.
Besides Michael’s short staying here,
this place was home for Hungarian noblemen families,
Transylvanian princes and other Saxon dignitaries from Sibiu.
During the first half of the 17th century,
under the patronage of the Hungarian Catholic nobleman Szilvás Boldiszár,
the castle and its chapel are decorated with Renaissance style paintings.
Nowadays, their traces are almost gone.
Only small fragments of the murals can now be seen,
several inscriptions and a representation of the Archangel Michael on the exterior of the western wall.
After 1918 the castle becomes property of the state,
gets turned into a dispensary, then, during the communist era,
it’s transformed into an Agricultural Production Cooperative.
In 1975 the castle is abandoned,
and its irreversible decay starts soon after.
Pieces of great architectural value are now gone,
giving way to a whole range of legends about
underground tunnels that link the neighbour villages,
hidden treasures or mysterious disappearances.
-The legend says that there was a deep well near those fir trees.
And in that well a treasure was hidden,
wrapped in bull skin.
-There was a time when there were some nuns around here,
and some of them wronged God and soon after they dissapeared.
-In the middle of that room there was a pit,
and in that pit scythes were placed and people were thrown into them.
-There was a way of punishing the lazy serfs:
There was a cellar,
a special place for them,
with beams and onto those beams,
scythes were mounted
and the one that had to be destroyed or to dissapear,
was thrown into those scythes.
Another thing about the castle is that it has
a tunnel leading to Mighindoala.
I don’t know where it leads...
-Some say it opens to Valea Viilor (Valley of the Vineyards),
some say it leads to Mighindoala, no one knows for certain.
It is said that some folks got stuck in it
and turned around because they were running out of oxygen.
As many as they are and possibly true,
it seems that these legends didn’t do any good for the castle.
Plans for restoring the place and making it a museum have been around since 1967.
The project has never been completed,
and same for others after.
-I heard that they keep on coming and film it,
maybe they’ll finally start to repair it.
Who can do that?! It can not be rebuilt...
Beyond the disengagement of the authorities,
the locals seem to be also ignorant.
Many of them stole bricks from its walls,
leaving behind only a ruin.
-They took some from here, not long ago...
I don’t know how they had the guts to take them!
We continue our journey on an unpaved,
graveled sandy road.
As we go up and down the hills,
the sun scatters the morning mist,
banishing it in the valleys.
4km away from the Buia castle, near another village,
there are a few edible chestnuts
that are growing at the unusual altitude of over 600m.
-This was a wooded area and during the Collectivization,
it was cut down and shared among the people.
And right then, they discovered this chestnut.
It was young.
Now it has to be 40 years old,
because I know when it was discovered.
This is the way it grew and apparently it still stands.
Anyone can cut it down at any time for firewood.
-I think this was thunderstruck!
Its bark is all torn up and fissured.
It’s cracked in between all the way down.
This one’s done,
in a couple of years it’s all dried up, it’s done..
Near these chestnuts, in a hidden valley,
bounded by highly inclined slopes and high peaked hills,
we discover the village of Mighindoala,
one of the most isolated villages in the Sibiu county.
Even the name itself comes from the first documented evidence in 1381,
Engodal or Engenthal, the German for Narrow Valley,
a name that links to the village’s geography.
Numerous landslides, the lack of fertile grounds, and isolation
lead to the complete depopulation of the village.
Until 1975 there were over 50 houses and 200 people living here,
Romanians and Saxons.
Only 10 buildings are left standing today,
and the village has only one fleeting occupant.
In a curious way, the village has another name since 1854:
By changing only one letter,
Engenthal became Engelthal,
which translates to Valley of the Angel.
-Mighindoala is a foreign name, Saxon: Valley of the Angels.
And, as an omen, at the village entrance
lies the cross of Chescu Sirian,
the last curator of the Orthodox Church in Mighindoala.
-He was coming from the fair in Buia,
and he layed down to rest,
with his elbow into the dirt and his hand under the head
and that's how he died.
The majority of the locals were Greek-Catholic
and had a church built in 1835
under the patronage of the Holy Archangels
alongside a stone-made rectory.
After 1948, the communist power abolished this confession
and turned the Greek-Catholic church into an Orthodox one.
-After the church’s roof fell
this is where the rectory was and they aranged a room in it in which services were held.
It was a disaster for the whole community.
-I went to services there and I had some cousins
that lived down the valley and it was such a joy when they came to church,
especially on holidays, Easter, Christmas.
Their mother was my mother’s sister.
We got together the whole family and had a festive meal after church.
And then they went back into the Valley.
-I was there when the roof fell.
It was like the whole earth trembled.
It all fell down.
They say the church had a front tower, but it fell years before.
After that, they had nowhere to put the church bells,
so they made a bellfry from 4 wood pillars right in the front of the church.
The bells held on until after the Revolution.
Chescu was a curator for the church in Mighindoala
and he said that this bells will not leave this ground until his own bells toll.
For everyone that died here, they tolled,
so he wanted that also.
But it was in vain, because people changed so much
that they had to move the bells from there,
because they were made out of copper and might have been stolen.
The bells were brought here in the church in Buia.
-I haven’t been to Mighindoala for 7 years.
We haven’t got anything to do there now.
I can see that they made the road,
it was planned for asphaltation.
Now they keep on coming,
I don’t know where from, youngsters.
Another symbol of the village
is the Lutheran Saxon Church,
that lies on a 500 years old foundation.
Subsequently, the church’s roof was decorated
with coat of arms of the noblemen families,
and in 1886 the bellfry was built.
After the old church was demolished,
the artisans Josef Eckenreiter and Mathias Gromer
built another gothic-style church in its place.
The last service in this church was officiated in the 80’s,
under the patronage of priest Dietrich Binder.
Since then the church is abandoned
and was rediscovered in 2009 by an artist from Sibiu.
-The church was empty. The door was open.
There were some shepards around, an old lady and...
then me and my brother had the idea to lease this church
from the Medias Lutheran Districtual Consistory,
for artistic purposes, for restoring
and painting, drawing its wall
with the history of the Saxons from Sibiu and Transylvania.
Simple as that, didn’t take long.
-At its origins, the church is much older,
certificated in 1300,
one of the oldest buildings in the Sibiu county.
Above the altar it’s written 1914,
but that’s the year of the last restoration,
but at its roots it’s much older.
I think the tower is very old,
and the rest of the church was knocked down and rebuilt in 1914
on the old foundations.
Anyway, it's way over 500 years old.
-There was a beautiful statue of Jesus Christ in front of the altar...
The church stood open for years, and nobody took care of it, nobody cared anymore.
There was an old pipe organ also. That’s gone too.
The shrine, dating from 1687
was given into custody to the medieval stronghold of Calnic
for restoration and was to be put on display as a museum piece.
However, in 1999,
the crucifix and the two statues of Mary and St. John
were stolen from the stronghold and were never to be seen again.
The remaining parts of the shrine remained at Calnic
and Tara von Neudorf intends to restore and integrate it into the Saxon church.
It seems that the church is the only building that heroically awaited for this moment,
whereas the houses around it crumbled to the ground.
-I think that people were afraid to touch the bricks of a church.
They were afraid of God, it’s no other explanation.
Here, next to the church, was the community center,
that belonged to the church.
It was knocked down completely.
-Regarding the penultimate priest
or maybe the last lutheran saxon priest around here, Dietrich Binder,
I was told a story that says a lot about the Romanian people,
or that has to do with it.
After the fall of the ex-Greek-Catholic, Romanian Orthodox church because of some landslides,
the Romanian peasants came to the Saxon church
and they were staying here, in the hallway,
holding their caps and they didn’t understood German,
they understand only the word Jesus Christus
and they would kneel, holding their caps
and, obviously, Dietrich welcomed them too,
because we have the same god.
Unfortunately, they didn’t rebuild the church,
probably saying "Why would we build it? It might as well fall again. We’re better of at the Saxons."
This question says a lot about many things, right?
Behind the warning sign on this fence
lies the most welcoming house
that’s able to offer the minimum amount of comfort for short periods of time.
Tara von Neudorf, casual occupant of the village of Engelthal
took care of its renovation, investing time, money and a lot of work.
The experience of living in this village put its mark on his looks,
often being described as a very controversial artist.
Through his art, he expresses his hatred towards the horrors around him.
Beyond the hatred wherewith he exhibits in drawings and paintings,
Tara intends to showcase a part of the history, in an unique shape.
His project involves the painting and installing of tens of pannels inside the church,
that will ilustrate the history of the colonized Saxons in Transylvania.
He leased the monument for a period of 30 years,
and has the rights to use it for educational and cultural purposes,
meanwhile respecting its architectural, historical and religious features.
-As I also stated in the restoration project,
it’s a combination between my style and that of the church of Malancrav (Malmkrog),
a lutheran Saxon church, from the Sibiu county,
that’s almost entirely painted with all sorts of religious imagery.
After Lutheranism faded away, as far as I know,
the Saxons didn’t decorated their churches exaggeratedly and adopted a simpler style.
I cannot digress from this idea too much, still I am doing it, because I must.
I need to decorate or to paint the whole interior of the church
to truly express what the Saxon people meant in Ardeal,
their arrival here, their climax and their tragic ending.
-We’re talking about 100 pannels and with the altar 101
that will include imagery regarding the colonization of the Saxons
at the invitation of the Hungarian noblemen (the hallway),
the flourishment and survival of the Saxon people and its climax,
even though they had their hard times with Mongol invaders,
the plague or the countless Ottoman invasions, fratricide battles,
switching to Evangelism from Catholicism (main body of the church).
The entrace to the altar will cover the involvment of the Saxons and Romanians
enrolling, willingly or not in the Austro-Hungarian Empire army,
fighting in the First World War.
A touchy subject will be about the fatal involvment of the Saxons
in the World War II alongside the Waffen SS, part of the Nazi regime, against the Soviet Union.
And the altar area will be about the after war period,
that represents the still lingering agonizing end of the Saxon people.
The altar itself will contain an image of Jesus Christ, same as the altar from the church in Calnic.
We can exaggerate saying that the Saxon people suffered
and died just like Jesus Christ on their ancestors lands.
In his workshops in Cluj, Sibiu and Bucharest,
Tara von Neudorf prepares the pannels that are to be installed on the walls of the Lutheran church.
The close relation to the history of the Saxon people isn’t just an artsy curiosity.
The project that he started holds the mark of the ordeal of his ancestors leaving Transylvania.
-I was now working on some old Saxon prayer books,
that will be drawn onto and placed in the Engelthal church, as part of the project.
This one’s from... 1901.
It’s an Evangelic religious songs book.
This one’s the same, from the the beginning of the last century.
The owners are listed.
It’s from the 19th century, 1884, as far as I can see here.
Its oldest owner.
I founded them there and I’m going to draw on them.
This one’s newer. It’s from there, too.
It’s the New Testament and it was sent to Romania in 1970, printed in Germany to the Saxon people on behalf of Germany.
-There was a road right here,
because the vines were up the hill and they used to go up with the carriages full of barrels with water for watering the vines in autumn.
Now, look, it’s hard to get around here.
-No matter how long you’ve stayed here,
you can’t make peace with nature.
Man will destroy.
In the Saxon graveyard in Engelthal there’s a last cross
on which is written "Gott wollte es" (God wanted it this way).
That's written on it, it's the last cross.
A road that crosses the village’s narrow valley
links the Saxon graveyard with the Romanian one,
that’s also situated on a wooded hill.
Several wooden and stone crosses are now one with the soil.
-It’s a pity that not even the church in Buia doesn’t seem to care about it, to restore it.
People payed taxes to the church for years and now they left it in decay.
It’s unfortunate.
Some names written on the crosses are now unreadable.
Pieces of rotten wood rise from the ground without mentioning anyone.
Others wake up old memories.
-He was running after us with his bag and we were running too,
afraid that he might shove us in the bag.
He was something, the old man!
He died in 1971, and I was old enough not to be afraid of him anymore, I was starting primary school.
-The school was over here. This is where I did 4 grades.
It was a great building,
built around 1967-1968 and brick by brick was stolen, until nothing was left.
Nobody cared at all.
The elementary school shared the same fate with other houses around.
Stealing bricks was pretty common here.
But what’s the use of building a house, be it from stolen bricks,
if everbody in the village chose to leave?
Mihail Denghel was the last Saxon that decided to remain in Engelthal.
But, in 2009, alchool and loneliness put an end to his life.
-If I start to think about it, he was the first man I met here, the last of the mohicans, the last Saxon resident,
Mihail Denghel aka Mich Denghel.
He seemed mad anyways and probably alcoholic and I did wondered
what was he drinking, as he didn’t seem to be able to make his own drink, he was in an advanced state of ruin.
-I think he died in grave circumstances.
He had nobody, his only occupation was drinking, he wasn’t eating well
and he died in the attic of that house, up there.
They found him dead in the attic.
A brother of his came from Germany, searched for him and found him dead up there.
-He didn’t seem to bother us. I found him in an attic, in a house.
I heard he even died in that very attic or he was found dead there during a summer.
Also, on the Valley of Buia, but in Mighindoala as well,
lived one of the most well known anti-communism militant,
the writer Paul Goma.
-I’ve heard of Paul Goma.
He was living in Mighindoala, in the sheepfolds.
[DIONISIE BADIU] -Yes, but he lived for a while in Buia.
-Yes, but he was in Mighindoala also, near the sheepfolds.
He was running at that time, the communism, how should I say...
He was from Basarabia.
And so it’s said that he use to live in the sheepfolds in the meadow of Mighindoala.
Mighindoala or Engelthal will remain one of the most isolated Transylvanian villages.
The hearth, once full of people and traditions, lost the fight against nature.
The balance stopped, and isolation or landslides transformed the village
from a valley of angels into a narrow and empty one.
-Besides the curse that lays upon this lands,
this place has its own brutal and absurd, unreal and hallucinating charm.
Even so, you got to face your fate.
Death is a part of life too.
-The road is now mainly used for forest activities, hunting.
There’s a jungle out there now.
During summer, youngsters come to these places to visit,
but you don’t have anywhere to stay in this places.
-Because of the church this is also a cultural project,
and I sometimes live there, I have a home there, some lands.
But, as I also said to others:
the church isn’t just an exhibition space,
I also want it to remain a Saxon Evangelic church,
even if there aren’t any people left around.
Probably some will come, but I doubt it.
Many think that this is just an empty shell
that’s about to be decorated with all sorts of oddities
that have no connection to the history and religion of the Saxon people,
which is a stupid thing to say.
One way or another, I am a part of the Saxon people
and I stated from the beginning that it WILL REMAIN a church.
I was peculiarly asked if there are any angels around here,
because of the village’s name and I thought it through...
there’s only the forest, a couple of people, that come and go, a lot of work and…
and that’s it in fact.
It isn't so romantic to live in the middle of the nature,
you stumbled upon all sort of difficulties...
I haven’t met any angels around here.
On the contrary... even if you don’t see them,
you can feel them.
There are all kind of monsters around here. I haven’t seen any angels.
Maybe there aren’t any...
Only the name remains as a reference to a certain angel or…
maybe I haven't met him yet.