Winds Of Sorrow: Travels In And Around Transylvania

Alan Ogden

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Review

This book overlaps with Romania Revisited and Fortresses of Faith, but is distinct.  After a useful ‘Potted History’ of Transylvania, Ogden shows how the country is divided.  There is the large Saxon community, centred on Sibiu, which began arriving in 1143 and lasted until after the Second World War.  It is now largely dispersed, thanks to Hitler, Stalin and Ceausescu, but Ogden has located some stalwart survivors in Viscri, whom he visits on several occasions.  He writes also about the Székelys on the eastern borders of the Carpathians; the remote villages of Maramures; the gypsies; and above all, the Hungarians and Romanians and the historical forces that have kept these peoples at loggerheads.

Ogden demonstrates with tremendous enthusiasm that, far from being an irrelevant backwater, Transylvania is crucial to a true understanding of Europe.  For five hundred years it was the vital buffer zone between the Christian west and the Ottoman east.  Considering the number of armies that have passed through – Mongols, Huns, Turks, Germans, Russians – quite apart from Vlad the Impaler – it seems miraculous that anything has survived at all.  But, apart from Ceausescu, the modern world has ignored Transylvania and the result is that it is remarkably untouched.  Besides his description of the various regions of Transylvania, Ogden gives an account of the ‘nationalist storm’ created by the Rákoczi and Thököly families in the eighteenth century, also an ‘Appendix to Miklós Bánffy’s Transylvania’ (a useful companion to They Were Counted and the other volumes of his great trilogy).  Winds Of Sorrow adds significantly to a body of work that amounts to a valuable contribution to European culture, testifying to the tenacity of its virtues as well as to its horrors. - review by Johnny de Falbe