Romanian health resorts need people (III) - How we used heritage to start building a community

Irina Leca

When we started thinking about how to build the crowdfunding campaign for the emergency conservation works on the Ivanovici Villa, we faced two challenges - we didn’t have an NGO and we knew that donors wouldn’t hurry to donate for a building that is publicly owned. And let’s not forget the pandemic and the significant private donations going towards hospitals. So how to convince people now to donate to secure an abandoned landmark?

The Ivanovici Villa before the intervention

With the rise in domestic tourism, we decided that the best option would be to offer people the chance to come to Govora and experience its heritage, while also giving them the chance to contribute to our cause. We teamed up with Castle Break, a tourism agency which focuses on heritage tours off the beaten track and also has a strong civic component, and devised a campaign that would target their community. We also partnered with other entrepreneurs and NGOs in the region that offered to help by providing their services and products or their know-how for our cause. Together, we designed a series of experiences and products that mixed what we could sell: postcards, books, guided tours, wine tastings, a gourmet brunch. We also kept the option for direct donations for people who didn’t want anything in return for their donation. 

We held the brunch on the Cornoiu estate in Curtisoara. The owners supported our initiative and opened their private home for us and our donors.

With only one month to raise the 4000 euros, we launched the campaign in the first days of July and worked hard to gain visibility and donors. Luckily, the fact that something was happening in Govora due to a young team of people stirred the attention of national media pretty quickly. Our friends also helped in spreading the news and the first weeks went well. But after the initial buzz, things started to slow down. People were saying they wouldn’t donate because we might not win the grant, because it’s a political maneuver (election time, remember), or that they will give the money only after we start working on the building. One week before the deadline we had raised only 50% of the sum. 

Luckily good news soon came in: we won the grant. Knowing that we’d lose it if we don’t have the 10% co-funding, people came to the rescue and we raised the other 50% in just two days and donations were still coming. At the end of the campaign, we raised 5000 euros from over 200 donors, both individuals and enterprises, organized 12 guided tours, 4 wine tastings, one brunch and sent almost 100 postcards and 50 books throughout the country. We had gained the trust of a lot of people, a small but significant part of which were locals. We were now accountable for getting the actual conservation works done. 

One of the first things we did - clean up the place together with volunteers

This is where the architects, engineers and craftsmen came in and they had to do their job fast. The professionals studied the structure of the building, looked for mould and fungi and designed a project to secure and protect what was valuable. All the paperwork was in the hands of the local authorities, as they were the beneficiaries of the grant, so our job was to connect everyone, help whenever necessary and also keep the public informed. Construction works began in October and everything was finished by December. We had our fair share of sleepless nights, mistakes, hiccups, tensions, disappointments, but in the end things worked out well and we got the chance to learn a lot. 

The Villa after the intervention

The Ivanovici Villa is now safe for a couple of years and we have won some time in which we can work with the local authorities on the actual restoration project. Soon, we will start public consultations regarding the adaptive reuse of the site, to see what kind of functions would benefit local stakeholders. We’re also setting up a local NGO with the mission to find a sustainable future for Govora’s heritage - be it officially listed or not. 

In 2020, pandemic and all, we managed to put Băile Govora on the map again and put its heritage in the spotlight. Hundreds of people helped, be they donors, heritage professionals, volunteers, artists, employees of public institutions or entrepreneurs. Together with them, we have started a heritage community dedicated to Govora, which we hope to see grow and have more and more impact in the following years. Fingers crossed :)

PS: If you enjoyed our story and would like to find out more, you can find us online on our website, instagram and facebook. And in Băile Govora, of course.

Romanian health resorts need people (II) - How we raised awareness about local heritage

Irina Leca

The Electric Plant in Baile Govora, cca. 1910. Now a warehouse.

So how does a small team of heritage enthusiasts start to convince sceptic stakeholders that abandoned buildings are not burdens, but untapped potential for local development?

Let me first start by pointing out two important facts that shaped everything we did. The first was COVID, which made us rethink our plans everytime the authorities made new announcements on how public events should take place.

The second were the local elections. We were supposed to have them in spring, but the pandemic pushed them further down in autumn, so there was a lot of political pre-campaigning going on from February to September all over Romania. That meant a lot of positive news for heritage - candidates were announcing their ambitious projects that would save endangered heritage, restore city centers and so on. Sometimes, these were not even new, but promoted during past elections and never implemented.

In Govora, saving local heritage was not part of this year’s campaign for any of the candidates. That didn’t mean that our initiative didn’t get interpreted as political, on the contrary. Due to the timing of our project and our partnership with local authorities, we knew we had to (1) put in extra effort to explain to locals that we were 100% apolitical and (2) convince people civic involvement is a good thing. So what did we do?

We measured our resources and capacity
With just 3 people in the core team and not a lot of funds available, it was clear to us that we couldn’t go big, and that we also needed some strategic partners. We partnered with the local authorities (of course) and the National Institute of Heritage (who supports grass roots heritage initiatives with knowhow). We counted on getting new partners after securing funding and spreading news about what we were going to do.

We defined our audience
We didn’t want to waste any energy in engaging with the wrong people, so we started with a stakeholder map. Our main stakeholders were owners of historic buildings, the local and regional authorities, architects and heritage professionals. Tourists were also a big part, as health tourism is the main income generator and people with lung issues come here every year. Knowing that some locals were also very passionate about local heritage, we kept them in mind when designing our project. With almost no budget for PR and communication, we started a facebook page to keep some of our stakeholders active and informed.

We figured out what works best
By April, we knew what we had to do and managed to secure funding to do it (cca. 20.000 euros from public grants for cultural initiatives). We planned a round table discussion to link professionals and local stakeholders and start a discussion around what can be done with local heritage, from planning to funding. Then we were supposed to have a week-long public event dedicated to local heritage, with workshops, thematic movies, guided tours and video mapping on the main landmarks. And, last but not least, we wanted to have an on site intervention in a public space - a small historic gazebo that used to be a beloved meeting place, but had fallen into disrepair.

Group photo from the round table event

The pandemic made us rethink our plans several times, but in the end we managed to do all we had set out to do and even more. We had the round table in May, the week long heritage festival in August and we worked on restoring the gazebo from August to November. 

Because of the severe drop in tourists and travel restrictions, we had more time to engage and connect with the local community. We got to interview people who had lifelong connections with the town and who were willing to welcome us into their homes and share their stories with us. 

Radu Geiculescu, engineer and local historian

Maria Boskoff, former dentist, 98 years old

As for the activities we organized, the most successful ones among locals and the few tourists were the guided tours, the movie screenings and the video mappings. We live streamed the video mapping sessions on our facebook page to reach a wider audience and saw more people show up or tune in each time. 

Discussions on how to restore houses or take care of old trees were not that popular with the locals, but we had key attendants among local authorities. Fortunately, restoring the gazebo really helped us raise awareness. After we finished restoring it with traditional techniques, with craftsmen and with the help of sponsors and volunteers, messages and questions from locals on how they should intervene on their houses began to appear. We are now working on a best practice guide that we hope to publish and distribute this year. 

Somewhere in June, while we were working on this project, the National Institute of Heritage premiered a grant meant to help owners of historic monuments access funding for emergency conservation works. We saw this as a chance to do something for one of the endangered buildings. Funny thing, although Govora has a lot of built heritage, only four buildings are individually listed in the List of Historical Monuments and thus eligible for public funding. Out of these four, the only one in disrepair was the Ivanovici Villa, which had been declared a public hazard in 2005 and abandoned in 2012. The building belonged to the town, thus to the local community, and the Mayor managed to have it recognized as heritage in 2009, thus saving it from demolition. Since then, there had been no efforts towards restoring the building and its structure became increasingly vulnerable. 

Ivanovici Villa, built cca. 1900

This was a great time to act, so we decided to approach the local authorities and see where it goes. The grant could win them 40.000 euros to cover studies and construction costs, and we had 1 month to write and submit the project together. They were open and enthusiastic, but there was a small problem - they needed to provide a 10% co-funding and had no budget for it. Overly enthusiastic, we decided to raise the money ourselves and donate a minimum of 4.000 euros if the project was awarded the funding.

What followed was an intense month-long crowdfunding campaign, in which the Ivanovici Villa and Govora gained national coverage and we got the attention of the entire community and beyond. We won the grant, raised the money, took a deep breath and started preparing for the actual construction works. More on how it all went down in the following post.

Ch.3: Reverting decay – but how?

Fig.1: Mid to 19th century house from Bihor, Romania in pre-collapse. Please excuse the author's terrible taken-from-the-car type of photography skills.

The image of traditional houses in various stages of collapse is, to me, always sad, but rarely truly ugly. Perhaps there is something about the recyclability of most of it, perhaps the faint traces such constructions leave – at least in comparison with modern concrete constructions, the jagged, rusty ruins of which plague the eye about as often as plastic litter.

Fig.2: Similar house, which the author remembers seeing with a roof over it about a decade ago. With the wall toward the street partly collapsed, a traditional bed was visible; in the background, a mostly-free standing doorframe and a precariously still existing wardrobe.

Perhaps there is an inviting, peaceful, non-threatening aura to a handful of crumbling mudbrick and woodbeam walls, and the archaeologist within can already see the stratigraphy of it all, the beautiful dark yellow of disintegrated clay bricks, the traces of ash mixed with a compacted clay surface – oh, most definitely a kitchen at some point – or who knows what else.

The main point in this project of here, though, is to avoid any such romantic images of decrepitude and collapse; that is, to stop the decay which has overcome the house, and revert it.

Knowing the existing issues and their level of priority, the solutions come along – they only need to be in harmony with the existing materials and appropriate technique-wise.

Since the roof has already been fixed, the next objectives would be the bed and foundation beams. Here, the stones have to be placed back in stable position and mortared together; the broken beam would be replaced, and the dislodged one would be pushed back into its proper position, and anchored. 

In order to protect the freshly re-mortared stone platform from water damage, gutters for rain-water are to be installed: the slight settling in place of the roof during and following the work on the stone bed and beams will not be enough to damage the gutters. Of course, their role is both to prevent rainwater from flowing onto the wall in case of high winds, but also to have all such water flow into the road-side ditch of the street, rather than accumulating by the base of the walls.

When these larger elements are dealt with, the detail work can finally begin!

One first thing to come back will be the chimney – for both stoves of the house (and who knows, if the attic is to become habitable...).

Further on, there is one portion that we’ve barely mentioned at all – the floors.

Like many such houses, it has floors that are only compacted clay. Quite obviously, compacted clay is no match for rodents, and while they may stay away from a permanently inhabited home, leaving such a house empty even for a couple of weeks may seem simply too inviting.

In order to adapt this issue – together with that of cleanliness – both to more contemporary sensibilities and to a wish for the same harmony of materials and techniques within the house, books such as that of Hulsemann or the Romanian Order of Architects’ guides for local rural architectural specifics recommend two main options: plain wooden floorings or un-mortared brick.

Given that both materials are available, let us suppose that the kitchen and pantry will be given a plain brick flooring, whilst the living room will have wood flooring.

In both cases, the first step would be lowering the level of the floor by some 0.15m and creating a compact, level surface. 

For the bricks, a compact layer of fine, dry clay or sand would be laid over, over which the bricks would simply be arranged in any pattern, without space in between them.

Fig.3: Different patterns for brick floors and one example (from Hulsemann 2014).

The wooden floors require small, parallel base-beams distanced at 0.5-0.8m, over which soft wood planks, such as fir, are placed in various manners.

Fig.4: Basic structure for traditional wooden floors (from Hulsemann 2014).

Reworking the plastering on the walls, whether in or out, is an easy and messy procedure.

After removing all clay plastering that is no longer adhering to the wooden walls (as well as, preferably, the older degraded layers of whitewash, which often hinder the adherence of the new layers), a new base plaster is made. This is a combination of clay, water and straw. After application, this plaster cracks in the drying process; a second, finer plaster is then applied over, which replaces straw with horse dung – the small, dense vegetal fibres of which do not let the surface crack. Finally, the whitewash is applied, in blue on the outside, and white on ornaments and the inside. 

Fig.5: Approximation of the colours and ornamentation currently existing and the likely colours and ornamentation in the early 20th century (and the likely end result of the restoration).

And that would be much of it all!

Of course, there are many details or smaller jobs that I’ve glossed over: removing the doors and windows for cleaning, repairing and repainting, changing cracked glass panes, plastering the entire back wall of the house and replacing lost portions of the attic tympanum, installing the stoves, having the electrical system checked and, why not, building a nature friendly latrine and cleaning the well.

Just as well, larger projects for later summers (may we finish these in 2021!) could be mentioned, such as turning the attic into actual living space.

However, with this blog I believe I’ve given a rough but balanced overview of the first things that one must to do save such a fragment of rural built heritage. 

If anyone wants access to my pdf library of books on restoring rural houses or wants to know how work is going and if the cottage is happy yet, give me a shout☺

Bogdan Sorinca

Bibliography

Jan Hulsemann. Casa țărănească săsească din Transilvania. Ghid pentru restaurarea caselor vechi. Translated by Eugen Vaida& Mihai Lazar. Simetria: Sibiu. 2014.

Ch.2: So where ARE we?

That is, before thinking how to de-ruin a rather bio-degradable house, one should ask what problems actually exist?

In the last post we saw the house around which this project is centred; we have a basic grasp of its locality, cultural and historical context, materials in its composition and some vague idea of an architectural mixture of styles.

Beyond looking at such a sorry little house and muttering “thou shall not fall”, though, what should one do to ensure survival and, why not, joyful continued existence beneath the firmament?

Well, the key word here would be restoration. Restoration in a more museum-appropriate context, rather than the good old “1 sack cement, sand, 2 shovels” work-around-the-house shopping list. We know the basic materials and that they are generally easy to find – clay, straw, wooden beams and boards, recycled roof tiles, lime and mortar, so the next question is...where do we need to use them?

Here we ought to evaluate existing degradations; water infiltrations and the absence of any form of foundations underground are the main culprits in this case. 

Fig.1: examples of frequently met deteriorations in traditional Transylvanian Saxon houses; from Hulsemann, p. 13.

So, let us begin with a top-down evaluation:

Roof

An interesting mixture of modern and archaic features. Rather difficult to estimate its age, but most likely interwar. Roughly worked beams form a 90° angle-based cross-gabled roof, where the secondary roof protrudes according to the porch’s porch (do bear with me). Whether the structure was produced for the “LEU” tiles currently covering it – produced during the Communist period based on an 1890’s model – is difficult to say; however, the dense and uniform layer of smoke residues and tars which is found on the wooden elements but not on the tiles indicates strongly towards the existence of a previous external shell. At some point in this earlier phase, there was likely no chimney running through the roof: rather, the smoke stack would have opened at the attic floor’s level. Evacuating the smoke into the attic, beside the disadvantage of risking a fire, had several advantages:

- It coated the wooden structure in a bug/fungal and slightly fire resistant layer;

- It eliminated the necessity of a separate smoking area for curing meats;

- It partly heated the attic, increasing the thermal efficiency of the stove in the living and cooking areas.

Problems so far:

The demolishing of the old chimney by the previous owner has left for several months a 50x60sq. cm opening in the roof through which sufficient rain has fallen for some of the clay masonry below to decompose; since its patching, no further damage has been observed.

At the two ends – both gabled – some missing/broken tiles have also been replaced. Also at the gables are missing wooden planks (4?), so as to line the ends of the roof.

Fig.2: exposed wooden walls where the clay has washed off.

Walls

Surprisingly, perhaps, these are doing rather well. The basic wall structure is composed of small (cca.12-15cm Ø) logs with minimal overlap at the joints (cca.5cm outward). The masonry is a simple mixture of clay (yellow soil), straw, small amounts of sand and possibly horse dung – no additional supporting structure has been identified (as is typical at least inside houses – diagonally placed, thin wooden rods covering the entire wall, for better adherence and more level surfaces). Beneath the current combination of latte/light-blue/pink, all previous layers are different shades of light blue, with a sometimes ochre, sometimes dark grey belt just above the stone bed/foundation.

Fig.3: different layers of older paint, most of them alternating between shades of light blue.

Fig.4: a small portion of the old ochre and black/dark grey paints of the foundation.

Due to the nature of these materials, the lack of major issues with the roof and the less-than-severe damages to the foundation, the walls are in good shape and had well-enough elasticity to tolerate any shifting. The brunt of this movement was taken by the masonry, which has extensive damage.

Porch

Here lies the grand issue! With some rocks from the over-ground foundation slipping away, the weight of the roof remained only on the longitudinal beam, via the porch pillars (mock columns: adobe-clad wood). Due to this, the beam broke, with the bases of the second and third pillars shifting outwards some 20cm. Obviously, this is not only the main issue of the house, but also the element requiring immediate solving – as further shifts will only be out of question when this is solved, thus delaying any masonry work or rebuilding the chimney. Besides, with the 2 pillars having insufficient support, the roof is also under stress.

Fig.4: The snapped foundation beam beneath the porch wall.

Foundation

When there is no basement, such houses most usually have their foundation above the ground – if there is anything below, it is in the case of houses built in steep areas, where more anchoring is required. Otherwise, depth is not significant; instead, a bed of rocks is built over the ground. And, of great importance, they ought to sit well together, as cementing is minimal. By avoiding to use mortars in the construction of these beds, upward movement of water via capillarity is no longer a threat. If anything, Hulsemann recommends using plain clay instead of any sort of cement.

As such, it is unsurprising that in the case of houses that were uninhabited for longer periods of time, the lack of upkeep led to some of these stones being pushed out of the bed.

Here we have two such event; one rather extensive area between the second and third pillars of the porch, and one more localised one, at the northern corner of the façade, where the end of the northern longitudinal foundation beam shifted slightly, but not enough to lead to it cracking or to shift the wall to any visible extent.

Fig.5: the shifted north-estern corner of the house.

Bibliography

Jan Hulsemann. Casa țărănească săsească din Transilvania. Ghid pentru restaurarea caselor vechi. Translated by Eugen Vaida& Mihai Lazar. Simetria: Sibiu. 2014.

Bogdan Sorinca