New Life in Transylvania

Stepping Back into Romania’s Saxon Past at Malancrav’s Refurbished Apafi Manor

The pretty pink manor house in an impossibly beautiful landscape seems a dream of long ago and far away. Which is exactly what it is. This is Transylvania, literally “beyond the woods,” the far edge of Europe, the magical place where the Pied Piper is said to have lured the Saxon children.

The tale was legend. The arrival of the Saxons was real. Encouraged by the Hungarian feudal nobility who owned these lands, they came in the 12th century to bolster defenses against invaders from the East, and they built villages just like those they had left behind.

Those were rough times, but by the late 17th century peace had settled. The Apafi family could at last enjoy its lands, and two generations, Prince Michael I and II, expanded a country estate in the Saxon village of Malancrav. It was not as grand as others in the mighty Austro-Hungarian Empire, but it had enormous charm.

The years were kind. Successive owners made alterations during the 18th century, the 1830s and the 1920s, but the manor was always loved and cared for.

Then the Communists came along. The noble drawing room became a rough village hall, the porch became a concrete kitchen, and eventually the house was abandoned.

That is what Jessica Douglas-Home saw when she came upon it in 1993. Throughout the 1980s she had brought suitcases of books from London to dissidents behind the iron curtain, an effort gratefully known as “catacomb university,” and had heard of the Saxon villages in Romania where, after 850 years, the villagers still spoke a German dialect and lived a medieval life.

Securitate watched, so she could not travel farther, but after the iron curtain fell and Ceausescu was gone, it was finally possible to enter. Most houses were empty. Families had given up hope and emigrated back to their distant heritage in Germany. But in Malancrav, “I walked past crumbling houses on the way to see the beautiful 14th-century church,” Douglas-Home says. “It was a summer evening. I continued up the hill, and there was the manor house, pale in the fading light. It had been plundered for building materials, but the bravely flamboyant entrance porch spoke of happier times. I was overwhelmed with love for this romantic house. What was it? Could it be saved?”

There was a chance. When delivering those books, she had founded The Mihai Eminescu Trust, named after the 19th-century Romanian national poet. The trust could now focus on saving the ancient villages and their fortified churches, and, with generous funding from the Packard Humanities Institute in California, it could restore this unique manor house.

The trust’s architect, Jan Hülsemann, was in charge. He bashed concrete to free the columns, dug to find foundations for an earlier, 15th-century house and extended the structure to that original footprint.

It was a scene from a medieval manuscript. Malancrav’s master builders supervised local craftsmen as they climbed ladders, carried handmade tiles in wooden hods, mixed lime mortar, sieved sand, brought wool from local sheep to use as insulation. Skills that had been passed on for generations were used again. British restoration experts came to advise, and they all learned from one another.

Interiors needed a different kind of expertise, and English designer David Mlinaric offered his help. “There has always been more than decorating in my work,” he says. “Recovery of a house that has been asleep is what really interests me. The house was far from Vienna, the center of power and taste in the Hapsburg empire, so details have a regional identity. For example, the allocation of color on the exterior was a puzzle. White stopped and started in unexpected places against the pink.”

Clues were found in Latin documents that detailed the 17th-century interiors. Photographs of Cris Castle, just a few valleys away, showed 19th-century rooms with overscale furniture, gilded or stained, and they found similar pieces through word of mouth, by knocking on doors and by buying to save things that would have been thrown away.

Everything is as local as possible—even village memories are part of the house, as families searched for photographs, many of which helped Catherine Fitzgerald design the garden. Local craftspeople copied antiques, village women wove and embroidered draperies and sheets, and locksmiths mended and adapted period locks.

These ancient skills are the core of what the trust calls the Whole Village Project. The intention is not only to save houses but to make the villages self-sufficient by reviving crafts, opening shops to sell them and encouraging gentle tourism. Not busloads—nothing that would intrude or that would endanger the natural beauty—but enough to provide the income that guarantees a future.

Apafi Manor is available for vacation rentals. Guests can also stay in village houses that the trust has restored. A local cook can be hired, who will buy directly from village farms. The food is very good.

Now there is hope in these Saxon villages. The Prince of Wales has noticed. He is a patron of the trust, has funded projects and owns a house in Malancrav. He already sees changes that “help the area to prosper without losing its rare character.”

David Mlinaric, too, has seen a new optimism take hold. “When so many things are going wrong in the world, it is good to have been able to help put something right, even in a tiny way,” he says. “Thanks to Jessica, these villages have a new breath of life.”

That breath is still fragile, but it is getting stronger, as many who emigrated have begun to return and the Saxon villages have regained what the rest of Europe lost long ago.