Red people, a tad shorter than our kind, came out of a mountain riding red horses. There were about two hundred of them, and they started preaching all sorts of things in front of the people. Suddenly, they ran all over the people who were listening and returned to their cave, never to come out again. They vanished, all but one, who got caught by his hand by a man. Alas, the little devil turned that man's hand forever red and then ran off. During the following year, some kind of misfortune came upon almost all who witnessed that terrible event." Western Europe used to hear a lot of red creatures on red or fiery steeds, of demons and doomsday visions. But it is for the first time that the western imagination finds its way into the east, at Cârţa, in Transylvania. What could have determined this transfer and, more precisely, what caused the appearance of a Romanian Saxon settlement in a western chronicle?

The answer to both of these questions lies with the Cistercian order. Cârţa was a monastery founded by the Cistercians in 1202.

The church and the monastary

Cârţa was a monastery subordinated to the abbey of Igris. It was first acknowledged in a document from the times of King Andrei II which confirms a donation of a Cistercian monk, Gocelnius, to the monastery. Its ruins may be seen on the road between Brasov and Sibiu in the Olt valley. All that is left of the old cells of the monks is a high wall located south of the church that still preserves a two-party window and round-arch ones. The great Tatar invasion of 1241 caused unimaginable damage. Nearly the entire church needed to be rebuilt in 1250. The new building was executed in what is called early or Burgundy gothic - a style that still used a fair amount of typically Romanesque building techniques. At the same time that construction was taking place at the Cârţa building site, this early gothic style was also being used at the Saint Bartolomeu church in Braşov. Although less visible now, the Cistercian style had a strong influence on the churches of Prejmer, Hărman, Sânpetru and Feldioara. Elements of this style were also adopted in other buildings in the Hârtibaciu valley, where the church of Cârţa was regarded as a worthy model.