Today’s idea: From from a mythical place of blood-red terror, Transylvania is a study in centuries-old green living largely unsullied by modernization, an article says.
Environment | So, you vant a sustainable lifestyle, eh? Writing in Notre Dame Magazine, Jay Walljasper suggests the 13th century folkways of Transylvania, which are maintained to this day:
“It’s a laboratory for sustainable solutions,” says Krupali Krusche, the Notre Dame architecture professor who in March 2009 led a team of undergraduate architecture students and one medieval studies graduate student to Transylvanian villages considered among Europe’s best remaining examples of pastoral society. We tend to think of unspoiled nature strictly as wilderness, but these 10 villages spread across valleys in central Romania provided Krusche’s students a rare chance to study architecture in ecologically pristine landscapes that have been inhabited for centuries.
“It’s the one place in Europe where the life that existed in the 13th century can still be found,” says Krusche. … “It is the roots of today’s ideal of an organic lifestyle” — sustainable farming, local food, natural building methods, a close-knit community.
The students’ work was aimed at documenting and preserving the villagers’ lifestyle — not to be confused with keeping them undead.
[Notre Dame Magazine]