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HARMAN AND
PREJMER |
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Visiting the Saxon villages around Brasov on the eve of the World
War II, the writer Elizabeth Kyle found churches prepared for siege as
in the times of Sultan Süleyman and Vlad the Impaler. The village of
HARMAN (Honigberg), 12km northeast of Brasov and served by trains (3
daily) and regular buses, still looks much as she described it, situated
"in a wide and lovely valley, its houses arranged in tidy squares off
the main street which sweeps up towards the grim fortress that closes
the vista". Inside the fortified outer walls, wooden staircases lead to
the rows of meal-rooms ( Gaden ) where each family stored a loaf from
every baking and other essential supplies for use in times of siege.
Here, Kyle encountered a Saxon Fräulein wearing a Borten - the high,
brimless head-dress which denotes maidenhood - who "flung open the door,
and immediately a mingled stench of ancient cheeses, mouldering ham and
damp flour rushed out to meet us. From the roof rows of hams were
suspended on hooks. Those nearest us looked comparatively fresh, but the
highest ones were green with age". Having been informed that "some of
those hams have been hanging there two hundred years", Kyle enquired why.
"Because, Gott sei Dank , they were not required," came the answer. "There
was no siege."
At that time the number of Saxons in Harman was 1500; now there are
fewer than 150, perhaps a third of whom attend the Sunday service at
9am. The church (Tues-Sun 9am-noon & 1-5pm) dates from 1293 (with clear
Cistercian influence), with later defensive walls and fifteenth-century
frescoes in a chapel above an ice-cellar. The tower was extended in the
fifteenth century. Look out for the mid-fourteenth-century pietŕ (with
North Italian influence) on the north side of the choir.
PREJMER (Tartlau), 7km to the east, and off the main road, was similarly
well prepared for siege: the church (Tues-Fri 9am-5pm, Sat 9am-3pm, Sun
11am-5pm) was built in 1225 and surrounded in the fifteenth century by a
five-towered wall, 12m high, lined two centuries later with four tiers
of meal rooms. The entrance tower is itself protected by another
fortified enclosure, the Mayor's Courtyard, added in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, to which an arcaded corridor, the Bakers'
Courtyard, was appended as a Baroque flourish in the less perilous times
of the late seventeenth century. Prejmer's church is the easiest of the
Saxon churches to visit: it has a concierge's lodge in the entrance
passage, and there is even a small museum , and some signs in English.
The land around Harman was the first in the Brasov region to be
collectivized (in 1950), and today Prejmer is the centre of a prosperous
agricultural region, with a trout farm and textile factory
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