Climbing Romania's Three Highest Peaks
John Saunders
has his head in the clouds
October 2005
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The massive Bucegi ridgeline,
from Mt. Omu. |
‘The country is holding
its breath today,’ read the Times. ‘Tension and nerves will be
felt by millions of commuters and thousands of police who know that the bombers
have chosen Thursday as a day of atrocity.’
The world has been rewritten by the writers of cheap thrillers. And not necessarily
present day thrillers. We feel as if we are in the neurotic pre-1914 landscape
of William Le Queux or early Edgar Wallace.
While my university contemporaries were waiting pensively in the tube I was
in another kind of pre-1914 landscape, driving through villages in Maramures.
I was looking at benches in front of wooden houses on which sat men in hats
and women with scarves, aged from thirty upwards. They were looking attentively
at each car or pedestrian that passed and they seemed to have run out of things
to say to each other. Tranquil is I suppose the word. The bomb explosions
in London seemed unreal to Londoners but less real in Maramures.
It has taken me fifteen years to get to Maramures. In 1990 when everyone in the Transylvanian countryside wore traditional costume to Mass and cars were scarcely seen, I asked the Romanian who had befriended me ‘is this the poorest part of Romania?’ It was my first day here.
‘No, it’s the richest. Can’t you tell?” A disconcerting reply. ‘If you want to see somewhere poor and old fashioned you should go to Maramures. In Maramures they’re still living in the Stone Age.’
However, Maramures has changed, like the rest of Romania.
Gloucestershire has been bought up by stockbrokers wanting weekend cottages and Maramures I had read was full of villas built by customs officers and police colonels. And there are plenty of new houses around. A lot fewer people wear homemade clothes or costuma populara every day than did when I missed my first chance to visit. Tourism is bigger business now than it was then and there is a steady stream of foreign visitors but the area still feels pretty undiscovered – or, rather, protected by its inaccessibility. You can’t get there easily from anywhere by car, train or plane.
Agrotourism, putting up with peasants, is the joy of travelling in Romania. This is tourism on a human scale, bespoke. You are a lodger but treated as a friend. Catch it before its innocence has been lost and the Sunday newspapers back home write about it. Your hosts who are subsistence farmers provide milk for your coffee fresh from the cow at the end of the garden. How much will be lost when EU health regulations bring all this to an end.
The priest’s wife in the village of Botiza, Victoria Berdecaru, has revived the carpet making industry in the village, organised a very neat crafts museum and deals in accommodation for visitors. I stayed with Vasile, a handsome 40-year-old carpenter and handyman who built the museum and who told me “I do everything except dig graves. I won’t dig graves.”
I came on a chance impulse to see the 38th edition of the Hora La Prislop festival. I don’t spend much time watching Etno TV but live horas (traditional dances) are different. Well, slightly different. Hora La Prislop is held on a mountainside and participants from villages throughout the Maramures compete for prizes. It attracts a big, well-mannered audience who sit on the grass watching the stage neither eating, drinking nor talking. I also noticed with slight disappointment three or four foreigners, one bestrewn with two large and expensive cameras. The festival is great fun on a sunny Sunday afternoon if you repress the adage about trying everything once except incest or Morris dancing.
The date of the first festival, 1968, is telling. Nicolae Ceausescu was just beginning to wrap himself in the flag and emphasise the traditions of the Romanian peasantry, twenty years before he began to knock down villages to make way for agro-industrial complexes. We were back in the 1970s and you expected to see local party dignitaries in crimplene suits make speeches praising agricultural output.
This was the eve of Assumption Day. In Romania as in much of Southern Europe the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary is one of the most important days of the year. It is treated in the countryside as an unofficial holiday. The roads were full of processions, adults in full costume, and angelic girls in white as for a first Holy Communion.
People from all over the area and the two biggest processions converged on
the Monastery of Moisei where Mass in the open lasted from early evening till
midday. Until 1989 these processions were sternly discouraged by the police
but today every ex-communist politician wants to be photographed on the Assumption
at some famous monastery. Moisei was crowded with visitors and stalls selling
refreshments. Long before the first procession was near the narrow road to
the monastery was blocked and impassable by car.
Wooden churches are what Maramures is renowned for, with spires, steep rooves and wall paintings. I attended Mass the next morning in a Greek Catholic church in Iaud or rather in the graveyard amid hollyhocks and painted crucifixes with most of the congregation. The women stood together in the front, the men together at the rear. Most of the women wore scarves and traditional blouses and skirts but there were a few in blue jeans and loose hair. Each year the numbers of the latter increase.
The priest at the close read out the names and size of the contributions made by parishioners to the cost of building the new church. (‘100 euros on the part of Dmn-a Ionela Ghica, 100 euros on the part of Dl Vlad Dumitriu …’) Everywhere you go in Maramures new churches have been or are being built alongside the houses of incomers. A few miles away an impressive Orthodox monastery complex has been built on the site of one suppressed in the eighteenth century.
Iaud is a village where half the population is Greek Catholic. The Greek Catholic rite resembles that of the Orthodox but the Greek Catholics, also known as ‘Uniates’, recognise the authority of Rome. Iaud boasts several fine wooden churches and a reputation for large families. It seems that the inhabitants observe the Church’s teaching better than in richer parts of Europe. According to Vasile: ‘if you have three children here people think you’re impotent.’
At the other end of Maramures Sapanta’s Merry Cemetery has become a big tourist attraction. A local carpenter began the custom in the 1930s of painting brightly coloured pictures on each tombstone accompanied by gently ironic verses about the deceased. His pupil keeps up the tradition. Comic epitaphs are not unique to Maramures – I have seen plenty in English churchyards – but there were too many sightseers and I moved on briskly.
Sighet, a pleasant Austro-Hungarian town a mile from the Ukrainian border, detained me longer. It houses the infamous prison where so many brave men were incarcerated and in many cases died. Today the prison is a well-designed museum that explains the communist terror. When I visited, the museum had plenty of visitors. Children ran around noisily. I got a slight sense in the exercise yard of the horrors of the recent past. I stood in the little cell in which Iuliu Maniu had died and I went out.
Last year Prime Minister Adrian Nastase made a well-publicised visit to the museum but I was pleased that President Ion Iliescu, an ardent member of the Communist Party’s youth wing during the years when the prison was busiest, had not been to see it. Vasile told me that the secret of a happy life is preserving tradition. ‘You have to change but you should keep the traditions.’ I thought of life in London where traditions have been dissolved by affluence, technology, pop culture and multiculturalism. In Maramures past and present are seamless, the existence of God is assumed rather like the sun rising each morning, neighbours know everything about each other and no man is an island.
But the numbers of cars we saw everywhere with Italian driving licenses testify to the exodus of Mureseni to work abroad. In the locality where I was staying everyone went to Northern Italy, where the discipline of Italian life was irksome but the money was very good. In other parts of Maramures I am told everyone goes to Spain. Maramures is beautiful but desperately poor and an economic impossibility.
As Vasile said to me ‘When you say agriculture you say poverty.’ Europe no longer has room for subsistence farmers and even if people like Vasile would never swap their lives for anyone else’s, his three daughters will go to college and not return to live their mother’s way of life. Vasile has no regrets. ‘They must fulfill their destiny. I hope they will return here when they are old.’
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John Saunders at the summit
of Mt. Negoiu. |
John Saunders is Deputy Managing Director and CFO of Kvaerner IMGB, and can be contacted at johnsaunders2002@hotmail.com
