The Citadel of the Teutonic Knights in Transylvania

Right after you exist the metropolitan zone of Brașov City, heading towards Hungary and the city of Cluj, you have in front of you about 100 kilometers of heavy german influenced villages.

For the interested eye, this area of my country is fascinating. And that is not only because of the architecture of the houses, the centuries old burg-style churches or the different fortresses that pop-up along the way. It is more than that because the historical signifiance of the area in the medieval battles that took place around here, is geo strategic (500-600 years ago that is).

Coming from the South or North makes no difference. You have to cross “the big mountains”. The Carpathians, which when coming from the North they just suddenly unfold in front of your eyes like a wall. From the South is just the same and that’s why they were for centuries a natural barrier that more or less kept the Turkish influence at bay.

Even now, hundreds of years after all of that, you can see the cultural differences between people of the South and those of North.

In the North, starting with Brașov right after you cross the mountains, people were never German (west European) but for sure they have influences. The Hungarian King brought here a big community in the XIth and XIIth Century in order to protect his borders. Transylvania was then part of it. More than that, the western influence was always higher here as it was impossed through administration for centuries. Though the population was in its majority romanian, the fact that it was inside the Austro Hungarian Empire for centuries got it to be organised by their rules. This can be seen clearly even today. And that’s a good thing.

On the other side of the mountains, things were a bit more different. The constant Ottoman raids that were coming from the south of the Danube got the country poor. It was hard to get organised while the turks were constantly coming over, fucking our women and stealing our chicken. I guess that how we got to eat a lot of pig meat. The average peasant would know that when raisig a pig, the turks would not take it because they would not eat that kind of meat. Over here, when there was news of turks gathering to cross the Danube, they were burning the crops and poisoning the wells. More or less like terrorists nowdays. Good thing there was no TV or facebook back then or maybe we’d have USA here.

Right as I existed Brașov and got into Feldioara I noticed the white, citadel style walls somewhere on my right. I couldn’t miss the opportunity to get my drone’s wings unfold so I took the right hand road and went inside the village for the first time.

As you exit the National Road and enter this differently evolved style of german villge, you notice the placing of the houses that are very stricly arranged, forming squares around a main area that was and still is “the centre”. The administration of the time was developing villages taking in consideration the needs of the people and the places of soacial gatherings. They were organised in a burg style way.

The Fortified Evangelic Church is the building that dominates the central square. With its golden clock, up in the tower, it was built by the german collonists on top of the old Teutonic Basilica. It’s the first real piece of history you come across in the village as you drive or walk towards the fortress.

As we got there at around 19:00 I was wxpecting that the site will be closed and I’ll only manage to take some aerial shots. We were lucky and met a ver nice guard that opened up the gates only for us. I could say that for my birthday I had a whole citadel opened for me :)

The mayorship restored the fortress completely and if it weren’t for the water treatment station right behind it, you could take some very nice panoramics. A very nice, local initiative that aims to prpduce that spark of local, historical tourism which should exist.

While Transylvania is well known all over the world for its legends of vampirism (which is a total fiction BTW) there are other real legends to be told here. The grounds were places of historical battles that sometimes involved European forces which were either on its way to some Crusade or were just reinforcing the limits of the Western World.

Kind of like we are doing now, through NATO and the military partnerships we’ve done with USA. The “frontline” of the Old Continent was pushed a little bit more East since then but the rules somehow still apply.