The Restorer

Count TIBOR KALNOKY, Transylvania, 2002:

The story of our family goes back quite far up to 1252 in the Transylvania; we have been always nobles in Transylvania. Since then we have take part in the history and in the shaping of this land. Actually, what my ancestors says have been doing for a long time was to keep Transylvania as a part of Europe and, I think my responsibility to its them and also to it my children is to continue in this path, not to let everything be forgotten and be destroyed. For me the feeling of Transylvania is like discovering the cradle of Europe. What you have here in this region is not only a genuine wild life, genuine villages as they have been 100 years ago, lots of different cultures, different ethnic, different people living together absolutely peacefully and rather completing each other and incredible riches of colours, of traditions.

You can see that Transylvania is a very deeply rooted tolerance of humanity and a very deeply rooted sense of hospitality.

When we came in ’87 the reason was really to see the old stones, to see the setting where are my roots. And I expected to see ruins of course, to see perhaps an old house. And that was all. As I did not grow up here I knew all this only through stories and old pictures, and very few old pictures because my parents and my grandparents did not have the possibility to take away with them anything. They have to leave the country with in 24 hours.

For me it was very emotional experience to see that, well there are not only old stones here, but there are actually living people. And for me it was a very, very big motivation to try to do whatever I could in order to come back and try to participate in the development of this region. And this is what I’m doing right now. We try to finance our renovation efforts through very unusual sort of tourism in the village. We have very beautifully restored the guest houses inside of the village and people who came to visit us, are become part of the village and have activities like tourist to the neighbour villages to just learn and know our old culture and our environment in the way that we are living.

We try to steak of course as much as possible to the original, the structures of the rooms were maintained; we use the old furniture with new comfort.

The interiors depend very much on the detail. The detail is something that is messing in most hotel rooms, in most public places. The detail is something that needs an effort and a detail is making the differences from my point of view. The detail is personalising the whole thing, it is making something more human, especially in this world today, were everything is unify somehow. The whole thing is made out of details, and the details reflect the whole thing.

The first impression of the castle here in Micloshoara… first was a sensation of wonder as I think it is very beautifully and then immediately a very sad sensation because I saw how it was literally falling to pieces and to see how it was been used in this 50 years that have gone, and to see that actually nobody was take care of it.

50 years of communism of course have influenced to lot of mentality of the people. And this is way the younger ones were a little bit more sceptical what we are doing here and why we did came back. The problem really is that the mentality could not understand why we would come back from the West there everybody wants to go.

During communism the castle was used in several purposes: they used as deposit for agriculture machines, for potatoes and other seeds, they used as offices for the local co-operative and also for the communism partied main office. So first what we have to do is getting an architect to see the state of quality of the buildings, so to make the plans of what the building is like right now.

On the based of that we are doing the research right now that means archaeological deeps and wall researches etc. And on this results that are already ready we are going to make the renovation plan to decide which elements we are going to maintain, we are going to renovate and restore. We wanted to know first of all what is still in the building, what is perhaps hidden in the walls of earlier phases from renaissance?s times or baroque times. In the other castle we have lots of renaissance: doorframes, renaissance?s windows which will be put back.

The buildings architectural it?s self it’s certainly after the environment. It is part of the environment. But if we take wild life as an environment, I will say this is the most important a tie for mankind. The next important tie that is actually having the greatest influence on the soul of people is the building there are living in. Mankind, the human brain needs stimulation in its environment because this is how we are enriches our self, and enriches our souls by being exposed to the influences of the buildings.

We have to take care that the things in the building keep their age and that you can see the age and feel the age by looking at them. And we have to take very much care that the people they keep their traditions and the form of life, which is of course a paradox because people long for progress, long for cars, long for TV, and don?t want to work so much any more, and old traditions are all directly tide to the old form of life, which was not a car, but a cow, and not a TV, but an evenings setting together dancing or seeing or telling stories.

Restoring will mean also changing again, because if you have a nice old house which has his own spirit, by restoring it you can actually kill this spirit. It is a very, very difficult question. And certainly progress means also directly the destruction of lots of things. And through this actually restoring it is a paradox in it self, because by restoring you destroy what has been and you give it a new face. It is a very problematic point of view. So, actually the question also is that we want to restore, because we are also going to the future and we want to use, and we want to preserve the value of an object to go into the future. I think that what restoration has to be is to preserve the values of certain things. I’m not an anonymous foundation or association who wants to save a building, I have directed emotional ties to the history of these buildings. And this is satisfying me very deeply in what I’m doing and this is actually giving me the strength to cope with of the difficulties I meet during the way. And that what I opted for this possibility that offered itself to me which is of course a rare opportunity and desirement an adventure personal, and I went for it.

In Romania very little restored has been done…

Although in Romania through this slower progress perhaps we still remain much closer to our origins, to our traditions to nature. So, perhaps from this point of view we even have less to restore because we still have lots of richness that did not yet get destroyed by actually, by progress.

We are still so rich that even if we can preserve only 10 percent of the assets that we have right now in the country that we will still have enough to be proud of out.

If you think about that fairytales that you read to your children like Grimm fairytales, nobody in the West can really visualise this anymore because they just don’t think that ever existed.

When you came here you get back in this world and you can see in a very plastically way that all this was through and actually really existed and still does here.

The people who come here get very deep experiences for their soul and for their health.

The West is going to discover Transylvania as a real hidden treasure of Europe, and I hope very much that experts and international authorities are going to take interest in what’s happening here.