'In Romanian villages the houses are small, dirty, made of timber with straw roofs; often consisting of only one room. Stables are quite few. During winter, the livestock is kept in poorly maintained sheds.' (In rumänischen Ortschaften sind die Häuser aus Holz , mit Stroh gedeckt, klein, schmutzig, oft nur aus einer Stube bestehend. Stallungen kommen wenig vor; das Vieh wird im Winter in die schlecht verwahrten Schupfen eingestellt.) [1]

So goes a description of Romanian settlements in late 19th century Transylvania according to a textbook compiled by the army's land-survey office. The rather unflattering nature of this account is even more pronounces when looking at the entire paragraph. It starts by describing Saxon settlements, followed by the Magyar/Szekely [2] ones, and, finally, their Romanian counterparts. The dwellings of the first are 'spacious', built of bricks or stone with tiled roofs. The second category are made of 'wood with shingle or straw roofs', clean, yet crammed. The third, described in the beginning, sit at the bottom of this inventory of building practices.

This best-to-worse sequence sang a very familiar tune to me, as it reminded me of an old joke. In a mixed Transylvanian village, the local drummer announced a public gathering in a manner fitting to each community's timeliness: 'Romanian ought to be there by 2 pm, Magyars by 2:30 pm, and Saxons by 3 pm, because that's when the meeting actually starts.' [3] Popular humour aside, this pretty much sums up the general perception I grew up with when it comes to the three Transylvanian 'peoples'. Obviously, this triad leaves out the other communities that left a mark upon the region through the centuries: Romani, Jews, Armenians, and many others. This is not to mention that the cultural landscape has shifted extensively in the past 120 years. There are very few Saxons left, Jews even fewer, and most urban landscapes are dominated by the Magyar language. But somehow, even nowadays, many of my fellow citizens hold the Saxon villages and towns in such high regard, just as they were back in the late 1800s, when military authorities were looking for dwellings suitable to accommodate soldiers and horses.

With the exception of some loud and culturally insensitive (i.e. chauvinistic) Romanian nationalists, the majority of my fellow citizens view the Saxon settlements as a reminder of an orderly, prosperous, and put-together civilisation. This is often put in contrast to Romanian rural settlements, less so with Magyar/Szekely ones, which are generally also considered tidy and aesthetic. Some Transylvanian Romanians with a strong (if not too inflated) sense of local patriotism would go as far as to extend the comparison between their villages and those of their brethren across the Carpathian Mountains — a bid to mark their adherence, (be it even partial) to the 'superiority' of a Central-European Transylvania.

At this point I feel compelled to mention that these perceptions are built by culturally-codified interpretations of the past and its material culture. I heard the concept of 'Austro-Hungarian architecture' being used freely when referring to Transylvanian city-centres built up during the early 1900s, even though the concept is at best a vague umbrella term. But if we are to return to villages and small towns, the differences are visible. Saxon villages are indeed different from Magyar/Szekely ones, not to mention those of the Romanians. Architects, ethnologists, and heritage workers could point out the main characteristics of settlements and buildings pertaining to certain communities. Period pictures and representation might confirm great disparities between the living conditions of different nationalities throughout the regions. However, unlike the military categorisation, these 'peoples' (and their material base) were not heterogeneous.

If one is to analyse the primary source I cited in the beginning, it does not take long to suspect the authors of gross generalisations. What I consistently called 'Saxon' throughout the text, the original refers to as 'Germans' (Deutsche), which was accurate as long as the statistics were concerned. [4] Then, although Szekelys speak a dialect of Magyar, they are an ethnological and cultural distinct group, not to mention that the wooden houses mentioned in the military textbook are only specific to the mountainous settlements, but not the Magyars living in the Transylvanian plateau, not to mention the Szekely enclave of Aranyos/Arieș.

Notes:

[1] Beschreibung der Unterkunfts-Verhältnisse von Siebenbürgen (k.k. Hof- und Staatsdruckerei, 1899), 1.

[2] In my English academic writing, I use the term 'Magyar' to refer to the language and nationality, while 'Hungarian' refers to citizenship and state. My reasons are not pedantic, not ideological, but mostly out of convenience in the context of my research. Hopefully, there will be a post about this as well.

[3] My own personal repository of Transylvanian jokes.

[4] The Transylvanian Saxons (and Landlers) spoke their own Germanic dialect(s). When questioned by the Hungarian census takers what was their mother tongue was, many replied with Saxon, Landler or simply unsure Sprache ('our language'), despite German being the only accepted category. See Ágoston Berecz, The Politics of Early Language Teaching (CEU Press: 2014), 25.

Images (in order of appearance)

Nagypestény/Peşteana, County Hunyad, 1906 (Fortean #262995)