Sphinx

One of the interesting aspects of being in a country like Romania where my grasp of the language is limited to essentials like hello, excuse me, please, thank you, and may I have a beer/coffee please? – the bare minimum for survival and politeness’ sake – is finding myself much more reliant than usual on visual signs and clues, not just carefully-chosen symbols intended to communicate messages visually but the form in which different unintelligible texts are presented – the structure of a menu, the font choices of official instructions or regulations. It’s a reminder of the wide variety of forms of literacy that exists; in this case, being able to recognise writing, and even hazard a guess at the kind of message intended, without knowing what it means.

There was a similar problem in the Bergkirche – the Church on the Hill – in the lovely medieval town of Sighişoara, where there was an English information sheet but it spent most of the time discussing controversies about the early phases of the building, and very little time explaining the wonderful medieval frescos that had been whitewashed over after the Reformation and then recovered only centuries later. Some iconography is instantly recognisable: armoured man on horse killing dragon, easy. But what about armoured man with horse and with dragon on a leash? Maybe it would have been more obvious if the pictures had been in better condition, but it really needed the explanation from the attendant that this is an episode in the longer version of the story. As to why Saxons – the German-speaking population in Transylvania – were so keen on St George, that remains a mystery.

The meaning of this image, at the centre of several rows of unmistakable saints, was likewise easily guessed – I’ve never seen anything like it before, but discussions on the Twitter produced a couple more examples. What I wonder is how this actually worked on medieval viewers, given the prevailing view (or at least this was my understanding, erm, thirty-odd years ago…) that these pictures were all about teaching basic Christian ideas to the masses. Did the image of a three-faced figure actually help convey the doctrine of the trinity, or just give them nightmares..?

It’s then quite comforting to come across a completely familiar image, even if it seems like an unexpected setting for it. Several cities we visited had the same Capitoline she-wolf with Romulus and Remus, often with an inscription to “Rome our mother” or something similar; a strong assertion of Roman ancestry, in places that could claim to have been founded between the conquest of Dacia (lots of portraits of Trajan, too) and its abandonment 170-odd years later. We look westwards, it says; we are part of classical culture and tradition, not like these Slavs or Magyars; visitors from the European heartland should feel right at home.

What’s been interesting about this visit is that Romania has felt thoroughly European and familiar – less alien than I expected, being so far east – but not in the least because of the Roman heritage…

Update: Katie Low has noted that, according to the Wikipedia, the Italian stare gave five copies of the Capitoline wolf to Romanian cities in 1920, including Târgu Mures (the other one I saw) – but not Sighişoara, which must have copied it. (See here). Mussolini was also a fan, donating copies to various US cities…