May 22, 2023 Sibiu RO

When we arrived Ton was very happy to see that they had a dryer to go along with a washer. Today our plan was to wash and dry our sheets, and then head out for an interesting museum in town. The plan kind of worked, but as you can see from the title photo, the dryer had to be augmented with some time on clothes lines so our trip to the museum has been postponed until tomorrow.

The fortified church of Kirchenberg as seen from François.

Since we arrived I have been looking at another fortified church which is on a hill overlooking the campground. Today after we finished with the laundry. I proposed a hike up to take a look at it. Ton thought about it for about a second and told me to take good pictures as she was going to relax.

Looking up at the church from the village.

It was a short hike to the base of the hill that the church was on, but the climb was a good workout. When I got to the church I was the only one there. The grounds are well preserved, but the church was always pretty basic, appropriate for a village the size of Cisnadiora.

The unadorned alter in the church.

There were no paintings on the wall and the interior furnishings were an alter and two crosses. The only thing of note was a wall of placards in the nave of the church with the names of men from the village killed during WWI. There were about 45 names there in total. Several things were interesting to me, all of the dead were from 1916. As we learned at Bram castle the Romanians joined the allies in 1916, what was not said was that the decision was a military catastrophe for Romania. The country was quickly overrun by the Germans, Austro-Hungarians, and Bulgarians. This is the reason that all of the casualties from the town were in 1916. Most of the soldiers were from the 188th regiment of the Romanian Army which I presume was the local regiment from this area. That regiment must have been very roughly beaten as the number of dead from a village the size of Cisnadiora is catastrophic. But to me the most interesting thing was that all but 2 or 3 of the names were obviously German. Not only the king of Romania was of German descent, but a good number of the soldiers in the Romanian Army were also. This area was majority German at that time and they fought and died for Romania against the Germans and Austrians.

The exterior of the church.

Today the population of the area is around 1% people of German descent. Most of the ancestors of the men who died in 1916 have emigrated to Germany to seek a more prosperous life.

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