Les villages des serfs saxons. Un patrimoine moins connu
Serfs’ Saxon Villages. A Less Known Heritage

Summary/Abstract: Most villages analysed in this paper are located in the region between the rivers Târnava Mare and Târnava Mică and only some of them lie in the former noblemen’s enclaves on royal lands, to the west of Târnava Mare. Those settlements were subject to the 1992-1996 research within the Romanian-German project to inventory the villages in the Saxon colonisation area in Transylvania. Proposing those settlements as the subject of this paper was primarily motivated by the wish to make known and, therefore, liable to be protected aspects of the Transylvanian Saxons’ culture that correspond to a less extent to the clichés constituted in the collective imaginary on the German colonisation settlements in Transylvania. Moreover, the features of these settlements recommend them as responding to the aspects of the vernacular architecture as they were defined over time. They are, to the same extent as the free villages, the “fundamental expression of a community’s culture”. They also are a “witness of a society’s history” and represent the “traditional and natural means by which those communities created their habitat”; “though utilitarian, they are, however, of interest and have aesthetic value”, being also a “constant adaptation in response to social and environmental constraints”, and having “coherence of style, form and aspect” (quotes from the “Charter on the Built Vernacular Heritage”, of the ICOMOS consultative committee, Stockholm, September 10-11, 1998). Keeping their features that make them important to history is threatened not only by the elements of the dissolution of the rural civilization, which are generalized in the entire country, but also by the specific challenges faced by the German colonisation settlements in Transylvania. The lack of knowledge, even by decision-making specialists, of the importance of those settlements as visible signs and still well-kept “sources” of that “little” history of the rural space, which is so little documented, leads to the loss of the aspect and historic substance of those settlements. Although they benefited from spontaneous reviving phenomena, in the absence of the specialists’ assistance, irreplaceable elements giving individuality and historic value to those villages may be destroyed.

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