by Amèlie Clément

The region of Transylvania is famous for its wood carving and wood architecture. This tradition has not really changed since the Middle Ages in several parts of the area where famous carvers and sculptors still work in the old fashion. Their name is often written on gates and furniture which they carve themselves: We found for instance the names of Béla Sütö (and his son), Ferenc Máthé in Vargyas and the Haszmanns. They usually carve gates, furniture, everyday life implements like tools and kitchen utensils and funeral headboards. They may also be carpenters at the same time and build small churches, belfries, village houses and barns. They not only cut and assemble planks, they also decorate them with fine carvings which obey to old and symbolic patterns. Unfortunately, this village wood carving tradition step by step disappears faced with modernism and new taste as regards village architecture and furniture.

Anyway, it is still possible to have a good idea of this wood carving tradition and traditional wood architecture by visiting several villages which have been maintained quite close to their former state as in the Maramures. It is also possible to visit several ethnographic museums which try to preserve the traditional heritage of Transylvania. The biggest Romanian open air museum, the Popular Technics Museum, is situated in Sibiu. Added to that, the Ethnographical Museum of Transylvania in Cluj, the Maramures Museum and the Ethnographic open air Museum in Sighetu Marmatiei, the Székely National Museum and its open air museum in Sepsiszentgyörgy, and the Village and Popular Art Museum of Bucharest. Actually there is a popular art museum in or near almost every important town of Transylvania

The open air museums collect old houses and churches from different villages of Transylvania and reconstruct typical villages. If those open air museums are not the village reality, they help visitors to make themselves an idea about what those villages looked like. They also gather Roumanian, Székely (Hungarian) and Saxon houses, which help to understand the characteristics of each minority.

Wooden gates

Wooden gates are the main originality of the traditional Transylvanian architecture. They keep up the principles of construction and decoration fixed in the late Middle Ages. The gates are monumental, made of strong wood. The carvers use all the qualities of wood, its monumentality, its color, its network, its hardness and its workability.

Those gates magnify the entrances to village houses, cemeteries and churches. Their function is to welcome visitors, to show devotion to the own people, confession of faith today and status to the owner. Many of those gates are still built nowadays because villagers still give great importance to this outside. One can be proud to have had built a beautiful and strong gate in front of his house. Of course, taste changes and the sculptors are sometimes asked to find new patterns, if it is not they who introduce small changes. But the general pattern of those gates does not really change and it is always a long and difficult job for the sculptor. An important celebration is given by the owner and its family to the neighbors the day this gate is erected.

As those isolated regions are more and more reached by progress, traditional village houses made of wood are step by step replaced by modern houses. But people became attached to their traditional gates and usually carried on with this tradition. Thus, the gate has often nothing in common, in style and material, with the house itself.

The visitor passing through the gate is welcomed by welcoming or blessing carved inscriptions. We can read "Because it strengthens the latch of your gates and bless your sons within" or "Blessing to the incoming, peace be with the going". The gate also shows carved symbols like the moon, the bright sun or the stars. Those motifs symbolize the triumph of light and brightness over darkness, the victory of life over death. Other motifs like stylized wine plant, leaves and claspers symbolize undestroyable life. The people living behind the gate are protected by those powerful natural elements stylized on the door.

The gates respect a basic pattern which vary according to regions, specificities of minorities and carvers' personal style. A gate is usually associated with a small canopy with a bench were people can stop and talk. A small roof protects them against sun or rain. Men used - and probably still do - sit there to chat and women did their embroideries. The gate itself is made of several parts. The main arched door of the gate, often closed by a window gate, allows cars and agricultural engines to get into the yard. The smaller door, which is used by people only, has also an arched upper, but it is usually completely closed by a thick panel divided in three parts. The upper one is carved with radiations representing a stylized sun. This decoration is very simple and geometrical. Above this small door there is a square or rectangular panel which is the most decorated part of the gate. The entire gate is covered by a one or two storeys roofed pigeonery. Its front board is carved in a stylized frange. The top of the roof ends with a toothless crest and two points at the ends of the ridge. The gate is prolonged by a simple openwork fence.

Of course it is possible to distinguish regional and cultural differences among those gates. Some are carved, some are painted. Some are very simple, just a small door covered with a pigeonery or a tiled roof, sometimes next to a low portal. Others are huge, with different entrances and very wide gates, and several storeys pigeoneries. In Calvinist regions, doors are often decorated with more or less stylized wine claspers, leaves and grapes which climb along the pillars and stretch in the upper parts of the gate. Stylized peacocks and stags are carved in the foliage.

In Udvarhelyszék or Nyiknmalomfalva the gates are painted and carved, which almost never happens in Székely regions. The pillars of the gates are carved and painted with the motifs of the tree of life and wine claspers. The colors are soft greens, pinks, yellows and blues. The plant-like motifs cover the entire surface of the gate. In Zetelak, the small doors are openwork and not closed like in Székely regions. In Hrromszék, it is possible to find gates with gate-mirrors opened with round holes. A Székely gate from Szemerja has openwork gate-mirrors with wooden lacy made of stylized tulips. Another Székely gate from Kézdimartonfalva dating back to the 18th century is carved with the coat of arms from the Hrromszék region. Some gates are carved with figurative and naturalist Christian motifs such as the Christ, Mary and the four Evangelists. The road from Korond to Székelyudvarhely leads to the cemetery of Farkaslak behind the church of Nepomuki Szent János. Seven old gates recalling the memory of the ancestors form an alley to the tomb of Balász Orbán.

Funeral carving

In the Transylvanian cemeteries, you can find carved wooden posts driven in the ground between stone graves. They are called headboards. They belong to a very old tradition as supposed to be relics of pagan burial practices from the age before the Hungarian conquest. In those times, the pike of the warrior killed in the fight was sticked into the tomb. The shaft was thus the ancestor of those wooden posts we see nowadays.

Those headboards represent men, women, young people and children and their sizes, shapes and endings are supposed to symbolize the sex and age of the dead through different carvings. The headboards sometimes are driven up onto the grave two at a time, which indicates that a couple had been burried here. In that case, the heads of the headboards are differently carved, the smaller one represents the woman.

The headboards are interesting especially because of their artistic carvings. Some sculptors are specialized in carving those rectangular wood pillars in order to give them a symbolic meaning, generally in a geometrical manner. The base of a headboard is rarely carved, except with inscriptions. The upper part is decorated with carved geometrical forms, simply shaped but powerful, catching light and shadow. The head of the pillar is decorated with much more care because it identifies the dead. Altogether those geometrical carvings remind the style of stone carving in the Romanesque Age. It has the same stylization though wood is easier to carve than stone, and it probably uses the same symbolic ornamental elements: star, sun, flower and mace. Those different carvings rest on each other up to the head which could end, for instance, in a stylized open tulip which resemble a crown. In some regions like in Erdövidék, where lives Székely population, there are some very old headboards carved in a special way. In their Calvinist cemetery, each face of the pillars reproduces the same pattern, whereas it could change in other regions.

It is also possible to find in Székely cemeteries a number of large rimmed and shingle wooden crosses higher than a man. The cross is made of wood, usually covered with carved inscriptions. The connection of the two arms of the cross is marked by a stylized flower made of iron. The extremities of the arms of the cross are connected with a finely carved arch, itself roofed with a wooden shingle. Nowadays, this wooden shingle is replaced by a toothed tin-plate that covers the wooden arch. The rim of this tin or iron arch is often decorated with little crosses or diamonds regularly cut out of the metal. The endings of the tin plate are bent up or down in order to give it artistic finishings.
Around the stream Kisküküllö in the cemeteries there are the simpliest headboards. The main face of the square pillar is covered by inscriptions. The top of it, oriented eastward, is carved with stylized sun, rosette, bouquet or weeping willow.

Houses and churches

People in Transylvania also used wood to build beautiful houses and incomparable churches. But new materials tend to replace wood.

The Székely houses are made of wood from ground from the bottom up. If the walls are made of stones, bricks or cob, they are surrounded by a wooden portruding porch whose supporting pillars are usually simply carved. Roofs are made of wood tiles called shingles. In Saxon villages, the houses' pediments are decorated with inscriptions and old sayings lauding the owner. The houses' pediments are sometimes very fine wood laces in Székely villages.

But churches are much more impressive than houses. The most beautiful ones can been seen in the Maramure? (for instance in Plopis, Surdesti and Dragomiresti). They are usually small but harmounious, gracious and remarkably well-proportioned. There are different kinds of churches. As Transylvania used to be unprecised boarders, those churches were also used as fortresses, which explains the solidity of their lower part, often made of stones, and the fact that roofs may be toped by a steeple looking like a fortified tower with a covered way where people could watch the landscape in case of danger. The churches of Magyarvalkó and Körösfö where Hungarian population lives had been built on a gothic pattern : one long shingle roofed nave preceded by a stone tower roofed by a fortified steeple surrounded by four pinnacles ending with metallic points or crosses, used as small watchtowers.

Those fortified churches are sometimes entirely made of wood except the stone slab on which they had been built. The Romanian churches are the most beautiful ones because of their gracious, slender steeples sometimes reaching 60 meters high. The wood churches usually follow the same gothic pattern as stone ones. The carpenter Vasile Nicula Ursu, called Horea, built the most precious one in Csiszér. The church gives the impression that it is just one beautiful shingled roof. Actually, the roof almost starts from the ground and raises high into the sky. The bottom part, built on a stone slab, is very low. The main room closed by wooden walls is surrounded by a portical which holds an impressive and harmonious roof up. Though the tower is fortified, the steeple is very slim and high. But the most Calvinist commune churches of small villages are usually simpler and without charm.
Churches are often preceded by wooden belfries, also dating back to the periods when those churches were used as fortresses. They are mainly used as barns nowadays. A skirt shaped shingle roof is held up by an interlacing of pillars. On the top of the roof there is a watchtower ended by a large steeple. The arises of the roof are often slightly rounded. One can see those belfries in Magyarsáros, Cserged, Mezöcsávás, Kessetkisfalud or Rigmány.

And there are churches which cannot be categorized like this pretty one in Székelyudvarhely, called the Jesus Chapel. Its structure is unique in Transylvania. It had been built according to the shape of Tartar tents. Actually it was the place of ancient fortress where Buda, brother of Attila, settled. The Székely bowmen defeated the Tartars shouting the name of Jesus as the legend says. The church has been built on the very spot of the victory. The four white walls are rounded and covered by a skirt shaped shingle roof.

Case Study Trip to Transylvania

As those information come from books, it is now necessary to check on the very spots if those gates, headboards, houses, churches and belfries do correspond to what books explain about them. A trip to Transylvania will be the occasion to measure the permanency or progressive disappearance of carving traditions among the different minorities. It will also be the occasion to understand fully the characteristics of each group of Transylvanian population and each region. Last but not least, it will be interesting to know what Romania did or what the country views as a cultural program in order to preserve and to set off this beautiful but fragile popular heritage.

References

• Mihad' E. Serban: La Roumanie, Karthala editions, 1994, 230 pages.
• Imre Szacsvay: In Transylvania, Officina Nova, Budapest and Püski Ltd, Budapest-New York, three illustrated volumes.

last update: 11 JUL 2002 by Ralph