A Prince from the West, who, like any other Prince, likes to hunt in the woods of Levant, was passing by. He goes for a tour, with a lot of photo-reporters behind him, gets on the first page of the newspapers, appears on all the prime-time news bulletins and leaves. The villagers he left behind wonder about this media monkey business.
"He stays there, in front of the first German church. Probably, the Romanians donât feel quite comfortable about this, but when the first German colonists came here, they met Catholics". The woman shows me the baptismal font, telling me it was from before 1200 A.D. The Germans that came in the area of the Transylvanian plateau were Catholics. It was only after Honterus, the scholar from Brasov, showed Transylvania the first signs of church reform, that the people started to believe in the new religion, the Lutheran one. The Papacy wanted to keep its treasury, and there were others that were trying to undermine the Christianity. Lutherâs law met a fertile environment, because the ordinary people had already seen the distance between them and the Catholic clergy.
CATER COUSINS. The consequence of the detachment from the Papacy is the thing that my interviewee is trying to emphasize now: there isnât such a strong bond between the reformed Germans in Ardeal and the ones in Banat, who are still Catholics, even though they come from the same ethnical group, which is smaller and smaller, which leads to self-conservative gestures. Of course, it would be a lot simpler to blame the language differences. In Ardeal, we find the ones called "Sasi", which claim some characteristics from the Luxemburg Saxons. They speak "letzeburgisch", a totally different language than the language spoken by the Germans in the plains or the hard-to-define dialect, which is closer to "Hochdeutsch", the literary German, spoken by the ones in the mount
