On New Year’s Day 1990 we were all euphoric. Within months the Communist Bloc had become Europa Felix, countries suddenly made happy by freedom. And I was revelling in my own freedom to explore regions hitherto inaccessible.
A long time ago Fate had ordained that my first Europa Felix journey should be through Transylvania. The year must have been 1940; I can dimly recall my parents discussing the Vienna Diktat, when Hitler forced Rumania to surrender the northern half of Transylvania to Hungary. I was aged eight and had been temporarily weaned off Just William, Biggles and the Coot Club by Walter Starkie’s Raggle-Taggle – grown-ups’ books did not usually have such tempting titles. At least half of it was way beyond me, yet by the last page I had decided that one day I, too, would wander with the Gypsies through Transylvania: the very name seemed a one-word poem. But the region’s contemporary fate didn’t interest me; for the next several years the Transylvania eventually to be explored and the Transylvania on my father’s flag-pocked map remained two quite separate places.
Then Churchill did his infamous swap with Stalin – ‘You can have Rumania and thereabouts if we can keep Greece within our sphere of influence’. By 1950, when I set off on my first European cycling tour, Rumania had been a Communist state for three years. Transylvania, like Tibet and Central Asia, had sadly been written off as a Never-Never Land.
Towards the end of the 1970s Nicolae Ceausescu became – it is now generally agreed – mentally ill in a peculiarly unpleasant way. And his wife Elena became more and more ruthless, avaricious and domineering. Throughout the 1980s increasingly grim reports trickled out from the Ceausescus’ ‘State of Terror’. A harsh censorship had mentally isolated the population. Too much food was being exported to repay Western loans and many were starving. To stymie any samizdat movement, every typewriter had to be registered with the police. Five children were demanded of each couple, abortion was outlawed and Elena founded the ‘Baby Police’ to screen women monthly. When the President revived an old plan to raze more than 7,000 villages, churches and all, and to force the peasant (mainly elderly) into cramped blocs, the Western media gave widespread coverage to this brutal campaign. In April 1989 the EEC belatedly suspended trading relations with Rumania because of its deteriorating human rights record. But for far too long the West had fawned on the Ceausescus, choosing only to see Rumania as a lucrative trading-partner and cherished anti-Soviet ally within the Warsaw Pact.
Early on the morning of 22 December 1989 the World Service broadcast a report from one of the threatened villages. Gently the interviewer asked how this perverse exercise in social engineering would affect the peasants. ‘In a bloc we can have no pig, no hens, no cows’ – the voice of that elderly woman trembled with despair, yet also held a note of incredulity. How to imagine life without pigs, hens, cows? An elderly man sobbed while beseeching the interviewer to try to save the village’s 400-year-old church; its frescos, he said, were famous throughout Europe and what about all the foreigners who used to come to study them? Could these important people not now rescue the church from the bulldozer? The interviewer’s own voice trembled as he described this ancient Transylvanian village (unnamed: the Securitate were still in power) with its still vigorous tradition of folk art – wood carving and weaving, song and dance. Waves of grief and angry frustration surged through me; at breakfast-time my daughter found her tough mother almost in tears.
‘Cheer up!’ she said. ‘Those villagers will be OK. Haven’t you heard the latest news? In Bucharest the army is turning against the Ceausescus!’
On Christmas Day I resolved to go to Transylvania as soon as possible; I felt impatient to share in Rumania’s happiness. Of course I must also expect to find much hardship, tension, dissension, suspicion: once the challenge of learning how to use freedom had been confronted, the prevailing euphoria could not long survive. As a political zombie, it would ill become me even to try to understand the consequent machinations – which would anyway be an urban phenomenon. I was only eager to travel among the ordinary countryfolk of ‘the other half’ of my own continent during the dawn of their New Age.
Just as ‘everyone’ leaves London in August, ‘everyone’ was converging on Timisoara and Bucharest during January 1990. Apparently I too was being attracted by Rumania’s new aura of tragic glamour, and friends refused to believe that I was going simply to enjoy a Transylvanian trek – not to gather material for a book. In their eyes, travelling and writing were – for me – part of the same process. They said, ‘A holiday? It’s not possible!’ And events proved them right.
On the bus to Munich I tardily recognised that I was taking quite a risk. The pursuit of fifty-year-old dreams is a dangerous sport. Was it reasonable to expect more than a faint resemblance between Walter Starkie’s Transylvania and post-Ceausescu Transylvania? Yet already I knew, in that cellar of the mind where we store our illogical certainties, that my journey was not a mistake.