Scarcity of the housing stock of the inter-war Romanian village

Abstract

In Romania, the archaic village was and it is ontological evoked, if not for its exclusive existence form then certainly for its admiring and preferred form. A fundamental reality that was verified in time and space has been forgotten: “many peasants, a lot of scarcity”. Committing such a mistake, Romanians ended up glorifying and venerating the bareness that the providence requites. The Romanians did not have the possibility, and consequently neither the vocation of modernizing the social structures. In 1901, the United Kingdom had only 9% of labor force in agriculture, while in Romania it is still deplored the depopulation of the villages after the Second World War, in a primitive structure with 80% peasants. At the beginning of the XVIth century, Thomas Morus said about the United Kingdom that it is the country “where the sheep eats people”. It was the time when the depopulation of the English village has occurred, with the specific shocks of any modernization, but which has transformed the United Kingdom in the first world industrialized power. The reality is that the most important modernization of the housing stock of the Romanian village took place during the communist period. Today, more than 70% of the living fund in the Romanian villages was allocated during the period of 1948-1989. However, it is not the case of the villages inhabited by Swabians and Saxons, some of the villages inhabited by Hungarians and some of the villages inhabited by Romanians, which are located in Marginimea Sibiului, from Tara Fagarasului and North Bucovina.