Copșa Mare 231 - 'Klosius House'

A family & its ancestral home in Copșa Mare are reunited after four decades.

Sabine Davoll with Emily and Max on a visit to Copșa Mare in 2019

Today, we celebrate an historic reunion between a family and its ancestral home in the village. In 1983, Gustav and Eleonore Klosius emigrated to Germany. Almost forty years later, their granddaughter, Sabine, and her husband, Luke, have bought back the family house, Copșa Mare 231, opposite the old townhall on Strada Principală. It is undoubtedly one of the loveliest buildings in the village.

Gustav (37) and Eleonore Klosius (28), with Eleonore holding Sabine Davoll's mother, Mariane, in her arms, and Sabine's aunt, Maria, holding her father's hand. The picture was taken in 1958.

Eleonore (48) and her husband Gustav (57) on the steps of their house in 1978.

Records showing that Gustav (b.1921) and Eleonore Klosius (b.1930), living at Copșa Mare 231, emigrated to Neuburg an der Donau in 1983.

The Klosius family owned the Greweln vineyards to the south of the village, and until the communists took power, ran a butcher shop from their house. Copșa Mare has had mains natural gas since the 1940s, and Gustav's other job was to check each day the gas pressure in the small gas compressor station on Greweln, just behind the Lutheran cemetery, and to report his findings by telephone to nearby Mediaș, headquarters of the Romanian natural gas industry since 1925.

Copșa Mare 231 was seized by the state in 1984, and for the next two decades used to house council tenants. In June 2007, an Italian property developer managed to acquire the house, renovated the street facade, renamed it 'Orange house', and then promptly sold it. The house has stood empty ever since.

Orange no more! Sabine standing in front of Klosius House in 2019.

"I can see the pure joy on my grandmother's face if she had known we had bought back her house, which she was forced to leave all those years ago" said Sabine. "'We can return to our true home at last!', she would have exclaimed, her wonderful bright eyes filling with tears."

The Davoll family in front of their house in the village, with Mrs Negru their neighbour. August 2022

Sabine and Luke, together with their two children, Emily and Max, intend to restore the house as their family home in Transylvania, returning life and laughter to a building so much loved by Sabine's grandparents.

We wish the Davoll family a warm welcome HOME!