Roșia Montană on the World Heritage List.
Procedures, stages, status

What to find in Roșia Montană

Roșia Montană is an example of endurance, thoroughness, and even stubbornness. It is one of few places on the planet where the existence of extremely coveted resources and their exploitation did not become a pretense for the destruction of the environment. These were, of course a pretext for the environment’s transformation and marking, but not for its damage. We’re dealing with one of those special cases in which the human presence is limited to an almost unreal discretion, although it has been a continuous presence that has been manifesting itself explicitly for over two millennia. And this is a performance that is hard to achieve and even to discover in other places. People’s impact on nature has been real but also benign. The interventions have been constant, but not sudden, decisive, but not brutal. In reverse, nature responded accordingly. It “adopted” “the proposals” of the people and assimilated them into a landscape that shows no traces of trauma.

A sort of balance was achieved, that allowed the community to evolve to the point in which evolution (understood here as horizontal development) no longer had a reason. Roșia Montană is the settlement that refused to become a town, preferring to remain a mining townlet. This is not about missing its destiny, but about accomplishing it. Roșia Montană did not “remain behind” but chose not to go onward in a direction that would have affected its identity. An identity defined by a cosmopolitan community, multiethnic and multi-confessional, in which the spirituality of the different ethnic and religious groups subsumed itself in the identity of the townsperson, or in that of the miner. The allegiance to the guild, together with the conservation or perpetuation of specific and ancient exploitation techniques helped the mining activity spanning over twenty centuries to create a unique landscape, where new adds itself to the old, and the old justifies and legitimizes the new. We shall not talk here about the kilometers of roman galleries, nor about the technical innovations. Neither shall we stop on the archaeological discoveries or the industrial, domestic or religious architecture of the area. They have already been broadly stated in theCriteria for inscription in the World Heritage List, where we invite you to browse through them. Here we have tried underlining an essential fact: Roșia Montană is special because of what you can see when you visit it. But it is even more special because of what cannot be explicitly seen, but exists everywhere: that subtle “understanding” between people and nature, in which people proposed and nature accepted. And all of this in the context of one of the most invasive human activities: mining.