In Valea Viilor the wall is six or seven meters high. I follow. It forms a ring, punctuated at the top, timidly, by some embrasure or machicolation. There is a discreet bastion in three cardinal points. Except for that, only the wall and a small door that seems to be for the service. I don't know whether to call, although I already know what awaits me inside.
Ten days ago in Hărman I went around another wall, this one whitewashed and twelve meters high. From time to time a tower stood out, up to six. In the past, the fortification was surrounded by two more rings and a moat with water. Major measures, in the face of major threats, when hordes of Mongols and Cumans were running through the eastern steppes, or the Turks of Anatolia threatened from the south.
Hărman's was the first of the peculiar Transylvanian fortified churches that I visited. To enter there was only one access, a covered curved passageway, which was closed with different gates. And finally, inside the ring, I came across an imposing church with three naves that began in Romanesque and ended in Gothic. Attached to the wall that surrounded it, and also taking advantage of recesses in the façade of the church, rooms were arranged to house the besieged.
Like other settlements, the Teutonic Knights founded Hărman. They were soon expelled. His military power was more frightening than the Asian gangs. But the Saxon colonists who accompanied them remained. The King of Hungary Geza II, in the 12th century, promoted further settlement in Transylvania, a particularly exposed flank of his kingdom. His call drew people from the Rhine basin, from Bavaria, from Thuringia. Enough for them to be taken into consideration when sharing, with Hungarians and Sicels, the political power of these lands, from which the Romanian peasants were excluded.
The Saxons maintained their privileges until the end of the 18th century. That they had adhered to the Protestant Reformation did not favor them, in a fervently Catholic Austro-Hungarian empire. And already in the 20th century, the redefinition of borders, the rise of Nazism, the Romanian socialist regime and its fall, pushed many Saxons to seek refuge in Germany.
But they did not all leave, and the fortified churches are still there. From Hărman, it is enough to go thirty kilometers to the north to find Prejmer. Its access is more complicated, with a first covered corridor, which leads to a circle of buildings that protect the entrance to another corridor, which leads inside the main ring. In the middle, a church with a cross plan. And around, attached to the wall, a network of beams and stairs allows access to three floors of cells that look more like a beehive.
In Transylvania, there are more than one hundred and fifty fortified churches, all different. The one in Viscri stands as a privileged watchtower on the top of a hill. The one in Saschiz has lost its wall. The last one I visit, Valea Viilor, only has that door. I finally call. Wait. And a kind lady who attends in German opens for me. She proudly shows me the apple trees she has planted next to the capital church. I ascend the bell tower by a spiral staircase, which ends in a steep ladder that creaks suspiciously. Finally at the top, I look out over the scaled roof of the church, which looks like the back of a mythological animal enclosed by the wall fence. I go downstairs and, before leaving, the lady brings me a basket full of apples. They are all touched, but of course, I have to take one. The lady waits for me to bite her, and then it occurs to me that, in the tales of the Grimm brothers, there were castles, dragons, and also something of affable ladies and apples.
