Ch.1: Overview of a soon-to-be ex-ruin

i.e. The dusting off of a rather large artefact of recent history...or of a rather small house. 

That is, of a rural house in western Romania, in a small village tucked between the foothills in Mureș valley. A fairly compact rural site, its bulk a regularised grid on the northern side of the floodplain, with some streets snaking their way along the hills and between them, the dirt tracks continuing and disappearing in the forests that cover most of the hills.

The village, known in all the languages of the area as Odvoș (at least phonetically; otherwise, DE: Odwosch, HU: Odvos), is a typical western-Transylvanian one, with a multiethnic past, a mono-ethnic present and a reduced, aged demographic. It has an arguable number of streets – 7, perhaps 10 – three churches (a Romanian Orthodox one, a Baptist one and a deserted and half collapsed Roman Catholic one), its many homesteads and an abandoned aristocratic house.  

For the area, it presents most of the typical signs of decay of rural communities. As such, most of the youth have left the community for school; those of working age have long left for work, or commute. Most of the remaining population is aged and many homes lie abandoned – shall we say in conservation? – and disrepair. While a significant proportion of the homesteads seem to have been rich farms – with beautifully ornamented houses and large brick-built barns – many of them now seem or indeed are empty, slowly returning their substance into the ground. When hopelessly weathered, the roof tiles are taken for re-use, with wood slowly rotting away and mudbrick melting after years of rain, the image being dignified as much as it is sad.

Fig.1: The façade – facing the East – and street view of the house at nr.235, Odvos Taken by author.

This, for better or for worse, is the image that greets the traveller passing through the E68/DN7 road which traverses the length of the valley. And, in all earnesty, the house in this “tale” fares no better; its redeeming qualities can be seen by the more optimistic folk at best. That is, by those aware of the (literal) flexibility of such a building, so long as one uses clay and straw rather than cement and nylon, sandstone rather than brick and oak beams rather than I-beams.

Fig.2: The Southern side of the house, with its distinct longitudinal porch and most rural colonnade. Taken by author.

Its basic structure is typical of more archaic houses of peasants from the area: 2 main rooms (plus a pantry), with a side porch running along the length of the house. Interestingly, many such houses in the village have a porch in the middle of the porch, with the wooden pillars often covered in brickwork. It is not unimaginable that inspiration for this less than usual architectural artifice was found in the local abandoned mansion – a ubiquitous notion in the Mures valley. 

While size-wise and organisationally the house fits well in the register of Romanian peasant houses of the region, and excluding the dash of vernacular adaptation of an already provincialised baroque, the visual aspect – volumes, roof angles, windows and doorways, remind one of the houses of the Banat Germans, who used to inhabit a great many of the neighbouring villages and have, as such, left a very distinct mark in the cultural landscape.

Fig.3: a more typical Banat Schwaben house, with its aspect preserving quite ideally the late 1800’s architectural standard of the German villages in the Banat. Taken by author.

The house, then, manages to be several distinct things: firstly, a rather organised pile of roof tiles, wattle and daub, oak beams, mud brick and sandstone. 

Secondly, it can act as a symbol for the beautiful cultural mixture that is the Banat and Partium region. 

Thirdly, the house may become, for the duration of its restoration, a site for experimenting and recreating building practices which have been lost in the region – a summer school, perhaps.

Fourthly and hopefully, it will once again be a beloved home – aspects which will be the theme of the next posts.

By Bogdan Sorinca