ROMANIA: For Margit Buran, the sign in her window says it all. "This house is NOT for sale! We don't want cyanide!!!", writes Daniel McLaughlin in Rosia Montana
"I've told them I won't move but they still come to measure my flat," she says. "I always refuse let them in. I was born here and want to die here." Her window looks out across the rooftops of Rosia Montana, towards the scar of a struggling gold mine and rolling Transylvanian hills that burn with the colours of autumn.
Beneath her is the village's main square, where young men smoke cigarettes around their pick-up trucks.
"We all work for the mining firm and hope their plan goes ahead," says Mr Razvan Oprisa, a driver for the Rosia Montana Gold Corporation (RMGC). "There's nothing else to do here and we'll have to move away if it doesn't work out."
There is no room for compromise in the battle for Rosia Montana, and the stakes are only getting higher.
Toronto-based RMGC wants to flatten most of the village and nearby hills to get at the largest gold deposit in Europe. Romania's politicians are treading carefully ahead of next month's elections: Hungary and the European Union fear the environmental impact of the massive open-cast mine and the cyanide it will use to leech out the gold.
Major financial and political muscle has stretched the fabric of Rosia Montana's community to breaking point. The Romans, Austro-Hungarians, Nazis and Soviets bored ever deeper into these hills - for gold that was first tapped more than 2000 years ago by the native Dacians.
But the current, Communist-era mine has lapsed into debt and disrepair and is slated for closure in 2007, the year Romania should join the EU if it fulfils criteria that include the slashing of subsidies for ailing state-run operations like this one.
For many of Rosia Montana's younger residents, the new mine means hope: RMGC says it will need about 1,200 people to build the pit and 400 to 600 to operate it, while thousands more will provide services to the mining community.
Locals have taken up to $100,000 (€78,000) from RMGC for houses that will be demolished to make way for the mine. These are undreamed-of sums in this poor area of northwest Romania, and big enough to buy property and start again elsewhere in the country.
The corporation, almost one-fifth owned by the Romanian government, has already spent $100 million relocating families and ascertaining that some 330 tonnes of gold and 1,600 tonnes of silver await beneath Rosia Montana. But largesse, it seems, is not enough.
The plan has stalled while RMGC repackages its project to convince Bucharest, Hungary and Brussels that the mine and its waste cyanide would not be an environmental time bomb, and convince archaeologists that historical treasures will not be blown up or buried.
The other problem, as far as the gold corporation is concerned, is Alburnus Maior.
The action group, named after the Roman settlement on this site, unites some 350 families that will be affected by the mine, and that are refusing to sell up and move out.
"We founded Alburnus Maior to defend our properties and fight investors who are coming to Rosia without considering our interests, and wanting to pollute the region," said Mr Eugen Cornea, a topographer who worked for 30 years in the local mines.
"They just want make as much money as possible as quickly as possible," he fumes, face ruddy and boots filthy after a storm turned the village streets to muddy streams. "Well, we are pulling the brake on this gravy train." Mr Cornea (54) and his allies dismiss RMGC's promise to preserve the faded Austro-Hungarian facades at the heart of Rosia Montana, and the best-preserved section of a mine complex that funded the imperial ambitions of the Roman Emperor Trajan.
He says the village will be hemmed-in by the enormous pit, shaken by explosions, traversed by massive trucks and shrouded in choking dust. To speak of such a ghetto as a viable place to live - let alone a tourist attraction - is absurd, he insists.
Alburnus Maior warns that, worst of all, the cyanide tailings pool - which will fill a local valley - could leak or burst, with far worse consequences than the cyanide escape from Romania's Baia Mare gold mine in 2000 that devastated a swathe of the Tisza river in Hungary. Memories of that disaster have prompted the parliament in Budapest to demand that the EU block Romania's accession if the new mine goes ahead.
Mr John Aston, a civil and environmental engineer from Glencolumbkill, insists that the mine built by his RMGC employers will be a model of sustainable development.
He says it will emit minuscule levels of cyanide and will fund the clean-up of filthy local rivers; that the pit will be re-covered with vegetation; and that some $2 billion will be invested in Romania, with the regional budget garnering $30 million in taxes.
"You couldn't find a better place to put a gold mine, because the landscape here is already damaged," says Mr Aston, looking across the maw of the current pit to a hillside that will be obliterated to get at its gold.
"We want to reduce existing pollution and implement modern mine and pollution-management procedures. At the end of the mine's 17-year life, you could make a golf course, a biodiversity area, a cultural heritage gallery - all funded by the mine operation."
Mr Cornea and Alburnus Maior deride these "empty promises", and maintain that the mine's backers cannot fulfil all the EU's safety requirements and still turn a profit.
"Rosia is currently the least loss-making mine in the country, and it could be profitable with good management. The government should give it to us, and we'll make an ecologically safe and sustainable mine, using classical methods. They have practically no chance of making it happen," Mr Cornea says. "We won't move, and for as long as just one person remains here they cannot work. This is the key."
But RMGC officials say their plan is flexible and can start where conditions allow, before expanding to other areas of Rosia Montana. The company is also preparing a "substantially better offer" for houses to tempt members of Alburnus Maior, most of whom, it claims, are people with a grudge against RMGC or who are holding out to boost the price of their property.
And the firm is confident that, once the new Romanian government is in place, it will see the economic imperative of a plan that it says has the backing of local politicians and will adhere to all Romanian and EU safety regulations.
But men such as Mr Sorin Jurca (41) - who severed ties with his uncle after he sold his own home - appear immoveable.
"I am attached to Rosia like nowhere else on earth: the landscape, the history, the people who have refused to go. We can look each other straight in the eye," he says, outside his shop in the main square.
"We have a right to make our own decision, and we can definitely win this battle. Sometimes you need to fight a war to win some peace."