61st day - Sept 7th: Schönau / Sona - Church without a congregation

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After breakfast, writing a blog post and planning routes for the next few days, I saddled up my bike and set off in the drizzling rain. By now, I have gotten used to the rain. Pastor Alfred Dahinten (Mühlbach) arranged for me to stay at the parsonage in one of his branch communities, Schönau (German), Sona (Romanian), which is about 45km away. On the way is the district town Karlsburg (German)/ Alba Iulia (Romanian). On the website of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Romania, I found information that there is a Diaconal Association of the Protestant Church Community and it caught my interest. At 1 p.m., Pastor Gerhard Wagner received me and reported that shortly after the political changes in Romania, he founded a Diaconal Association and took over a former state-run home for people with disabilities that had catastrophic conditions and improved the living conditions for the residents. Furthermore, there are two diaconal nursing homes in the city. In total, the Diaconal Association of Alba Iulia employs about 70 people. While the nursing homes receive state financial support for their staff, the association does not receive any state funding for the home for people with disabilities. Parish communities from Austria and Southern Germany support this work with money and also material donations.

After this interesting conversation, I cycled further on the E81 and 14B to the former Saxon village of Schönau (German)/ Sona (Romanian) near the small town of Blaj. Just before Blaj, there were numerous serpentine roads leading down into the city. The landscape here is very beautiful in the Transylvanian heartland. When I arrived in Schönau, the inspector showed me the sleeping place in the parsonage, but there is no longer a pastor because almost all Transylvanian Saxons left the village for Germany in the 1990s. Only the church and the parsonage remain. The church has numerous banners with Bible verses in German, and the parsonage has countless photos from better, old times when Germans made up 90% of the population in the village. Today, there are no regular church services anymore. In the village with about 1000 inhabitants, only 4 people are evangelical. However, in Germany, there is an association of former Schönau Transylvanian Saxons who regularly hold homecoming meetings in their former Romanian homeland and also conduct a church service there.