Walking with a King on Romania: Day 5

Grand clashing tides of history shaped our world, but it’s hard to feel the normal humans within them. How do you get a feeling for Napoleon when he first woke up in the morning, what Catherine the Great might muse about in that evening lull when only the mourning doves have much to say, and what thoughts rattled around Nelson Mandela’s attention as he waited to go back to sleep after a middle-of-the-night bathroom visit? The person behind a name not nearly as consequential as those, yet known to us all, was on my mind on Day 5 of this year’s tour of Romania.

A short drive from the high noble walls of Sighișoara took us to a countryside village with just one street. Colorful houses stood in an honest row, each with a bench out front where neighbors sat in late afternoon to participate in what community means. This was Viscri, one of the Saxon villages populated by basically-Germans who relocated here in the 1200s after the Mongols nearly depopulated large swaths of Europe, and what was left needed protection.

You may know Germans had what one might call a difficult 20th century. Those clashing tides of history swept the Saxon descendants right out of Romania, leaving villages like Viscri effectively abandoned. Many fell into ruin but Viscri was lucky at least twice over.

First, it had a marvelous example of the fortified churches that protected and shaped the region in the tumultuous Middle Ages, when horrific bloodshed could come at any moment and people built stout wooden walls to survive. Walking those parapets I felt an echo that lingers in our collective genetic memory, or failing that, thrives in the imagination. And I thought about Viscri’s second stroke of luck.

During the long corrosive stagnation of Communism, a young Englishman fell in love with the Romanian countryside, particularly legendary Transylvania. His affection caught on Viscri, and when Communism collapsed under the weight of its own stupidity, he was ready to accelerate his advocacy of the village and its traditions.

So it was that Charles, then Prince of Wales and now King of England, came to Viscri, seeking to find and preserve a world that made visceral sense. The same breeze I was feeling blew over this young man, shaped and (to my mind) a bit crushed by his position, and I understood how he would love the honest, direct, and honorable rural life here, which informs so many national identities. This was the same allure that inspired the Romantics, whose poems and paintings revived Europe’s fading medieval history and saved so many of the places we now travel to see. No wonder it grabbed Charles as he tried to stay afloat in the treacherous currents of colonial scars and modern complications. And it resonated in my blood when I first came to Romania from a modern world trying to understand pandemics and a self-destructive economic order that will kill us all if we don’t kill it first.

In Viscri, water fell into a horse trough where horses drank as they went about their daily work. I bought felt slippers from the woman who made them. And the elderflower syrup for sale next door was gathered from trees on these very hills. Sure, our near futures still held intercontinental jet flights, investors and stock markets were out there pulling each other’s strings, and our species still struggled with blood on its face to surmount our tribal inhibitions, but that afternoon I walked the ancient wooden walls of a fortress we don’t need anymore, ate hearty food grown within walking distance, and looked forward to winter weather when my new footwear would carry me to my cozy couch.

In that broad awareness of complication yet specific experience of simplicity, I was walking next to both Charles and centuries of other clueless men like us, all trying to make the best of an unstoppable world. Such is the gift of travel, to cross so many miles and years to find our commonality with people we used to confuse as foreigners, whether they be medieval peasants, exiled Saxons, or the King of England.