The Saxon Villages of Transylvania: A Mediaeval Model for the Future Eco-Village?

I wrote this piece four years ago on the Transition Towns New Zealand website and at the time I was unable to  repost  it to Blogger. Then kimwilkie.com pulled the content from their website which rather negated the point of the post! I recently found archived versions of the core documents. Enjoy!

Submitted by Kevthefarmer on 23 January 2011 - 8:43am | updated 02 Jul 2015 | Blog entry

• eco village

I was prompted by an article in the most recent Ecologist magazine to find out more about these remnant mediaeval villages as a potential model for future farming as I see it.  All the links from the article had the inevitable "coffee-table magazine' look about them- pretty flowers, wild animals you know the sort of thing- triumph of style over substance.
Eventually I came across this report commissioned by H.R.H. the Prince of Wales and published way back in 2001
Part one:
http://web.archive.org/web/20110717123238/http://www.kimwilkie.com/image...
Part two:
http://web.archive.org/web/20110717123238/http://www.kimwilkie.com/image...
It still has lovely pictures but more importantly it has diagrams, aerial views and descriptive text. The producers of the report have included the inevitable nod to "sensitive tourism" and  "appropriate integration of agricultural technology",  but then this was ten years ago before peak oil awareness and agricultural commodities were at very low prices. The need for "cash earners" was predicated upon the notion that cash is needed to provide the "mod-cons" that must be provided to discourage all the young people from deserting their communities.  I believe that ten years later with agricultural prices rising, peak oil a historical fact a billion hungry people in the world and apparently a change of heart in the E.U. that has until recently sought to destroy the remnants of "peasant farming", this mode of living could suddenly become very attractive to those who formerly might have wished (and been encouraged by politicians) to abandon it for a "better life" in the cities.
I am particularly impressed by the combination of family autonomy in the gardens and arable lands and community co-operation in the use of the common pastures and woodlands. As you will see from the village layout the houses, yards and barns are all very similiar in size indicating a self-imposed egalitarianism in these communities (remember these people were free peasants- not vassals of some feudal lord). I am sure that hundreds of years fighting off Mongol and Saracen hordes built a great sense of community solidarity.

I have been a long time looking for a model of what I see as a realistic and practical solution to post peak secure and sustainable living. Here I find inspiration- but sadly I have little confidence in our ability to act in a suitably urgent fashion. Perhaps I need to take a crash-course in Romanian language!