Apparently, I got the temperature wrong when I claimed on Facebook that it was 38 ˚C in Bucharest when we arrived yesterday; it was in fact 42 ˚C so it was with some relief when we soon climbed out of the southern plains into the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, though the relief was only temporary. While the next day, half-way to the old Saxon town of Brasov started sunny, it was soon clear that the heat wave was all set to break.
We had just about, managed to get through the Peles Palace once owned by the old royal family rather gothic and lugubrious with strong Germanic overtones, when the clouds began to roll in as we approached the fourteenth century chocolate box Bran castle once occupied by the Romanian hero: Vlad the Impaler (did what it says on the tin and famed for fighting off the Turks). However, it is, of course, now more widely known as Dracula’s Castle, and what more appropriate way to make our approach than in the mother of all thunderstorms.
While being completely familiar with the monsoon rains of Asia, I have to acknowledge that this one took the biscuit: no storm drains but torrential rains, instantly created rivers, crashing thunder and fork lightning. When someone grabbed my arm in the gloom as we entered the fortress, I almost felt it was Drak himself putting in a guest appearance. It was, in fact, only the ticket collector, bad teeth and a pasty face and dressed in black. Who needs Son et Lumière when you get the real thing for free?
With the weather still unsettled, we leave Transylvania for a couple of days and head up towards the Ukrainian border into Moldova province and the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the famous painted monasteries of Bucovina.
Now just in case the only thing you know about Moldova is that they came 11th in the Eurovision contest (with Moldova Beethoven?), let me put you straight.
We are in the part of Moldova which was retained as a province by Romania when the Russians carved a chunk off after the war and made it into a separate country confusingly also called Moldova. They (province and country) are named after the Moldova River but seem to be also referred to as Moldavia which adds to the confusion. While almost everything gives you the impression of being in a Swiss landscape, alpine meadows full of wild flowers, cows (no bells though), fir forests, neat cottage gardens, neat haystacks and country roads (here populated with heavily laden horse-drawn carts rather than motorised transport), the style of local houses is distinctly Russian looking: lots of turrets, fretworked eaves and a curious silver roof-covering that glistens in the sunlight. Very Doctor Zhivago, it is only slightly marred by the occasional fenced motorcar graveyards, where ancient vehicles from an earlier era are piled up neatly in rows. And where today in Europe do you still see every flock of sheep or goats corralled by a shepherd into tidy herds?
Judging by the number of hives everywhere, honey is clearly popular but the hives themselves are interesting for two reasons: firstly, because they all painted in very bright colours, and secondly, because they seem to be itinerant, loaded onto trailers so they can moved about, presumably not before the bees have all returned at night after a hard day’s foraging.
We came across a man in the mountains you could truly describe as of classic mountain peasant appearance, selling eggs he and his wife had hand-painted to the infrequent passing driver. He was dressed in shabby clothes offered to him by an earlier passing motorist, was as thin as a rake, and said he lived without electricity in makeshift accommodation (the country had up to five metres of snow this winter). He had no other source of income and would range up to thirty kilometres between two big monasteries eking out his trade, with occasional menial work on offer from the monks. Well, he believed his story. The country as whole may be making strides in many areas but the legacy of the terrible communist years persists despite significant EU money now being spent on infrastructure.
However, this is all incidental to the main purpose of heading up to the border with Ukraine: no, not to go and watch the English football team carry out penalty shoot-outs in the world cup tonight, but to visit some of the many world-famous painted monasteries, which curiously seemed to be mainly run by nuns. Same old story really: a male aversion to housework. They were mostly built in the 15th and 16th centuries to educate the local peasants the story of Christ, but as the area was continually under threat from the Turks and the Tartars, many are surrounded by fortifications making each monastery look like a castle from afar. They have received their UNESCO qualification not just for the elaborate painted panels covering every available space inside the church, but above all, for the painting on the outside walls which to a great extent have withstood the vagaries of the harsh winters and blazing summers in this country.
While the spirit was uplifted, the demands of the flesh could not go unheeded as lunchtime approached as did a nearby tavern. The local residents seemed to be rather keen on their local speciality: monkfish, but there had been a run on it. Perhaps nunfish could have substituted?
If you want to know where your EU contribution goes to, I can enlighten you forthwith: it goes on upgrading Romanian roads; dozens and dozens of the country’s roads are under construction simultaneously, courtesy of the blue flag with 12 stars. Thus, a journey which even on the old roads might have taken x hours now takes 2x until the work is completed, so the whole population seems now to be engaged in either driving horses and carts or road building and all in the same workspace.
Despite all this, we are now deep in the part of Romania colonised by the Saxon Germans 800 years ago, and the ability to speak German is proving useful. In fact, three out of twelve in the group have a Cambridge degree in German. Typical; you wait for years, and three come along together.
Anyway, while the Normans were settling in England, the Rhinelanders were setting off to help the Romanians fortify their country’s heritage against the Ottoman invaders in the thirteenth century and quite a few stayed until the present day so that in some of the Saxon towns, there are still a handful of descendants of those settlers left in the smaller villages to attend the Protestant services in the fortified churches their forefathers built.
Everything is written in German within these churches and some Romanians do speak both languages, for example in the magnificent walled town of Sighisoara (Schussburg in German) where Prince Charles likes to hang out while staying in his nearby retreat, and you can see why: Sighisoara is a walled village built on a sloping hill approached through ancient towers built by German guilds (the taylors guild, for example), with a small square surrounded by multi-coloured 16th- and 17th-century buildings, many with attractive wrought-iron trade signs. The dominant bell-tower looks out over a jumble of houses with roofs of pretty dark red rounded tiles, reminiscent of Freiburg and Rothenburg ob der Tauber in Germany, or Collonges-le-Rouge in France, nestled in rolling hills of corn, hops or grapes similar to the Alsace landscape.
Let me end on a note of particular interest to those in the counselling business. In the pretty village of Biertan, the old church has a small prison which doubled as a Medieval ‘Relate’ centre. If a couple made it known that they wished to get divorced, they would immediately be put into the prison for a month, together, give a single bed, one plate, one spoon, one fork (no knife of course, just in case), one table and one chair, and forced to think the decision over. Guess what: over 200 years, 300 couples went through the system and only one couple went ahead and divorced. A slam dunk, then.
Now let’s be honest: most people think of Romania, if they think of it all, as the country of Roma Gypsies, ill-treated orphans and tyrannical leaders. The country badly needs a spin-doctor and a PR budget because it has made remarkable progress since the disaster years of the megalomaniac Ceausescu, who thought nothing of demolishing nearly 10,000 houses to create his new ‘Paris’ and its own (longer of course) Champs Elysees, forcibly relocating 40,000 citizens to the outer suburbs.
But Bucharest, the capital, is getting back on its feet with many of the trappings of any modern European capital: German cars, busy shoppers, fancy hotels and restaurants, even though the spectre of Ceausescu looms over the city from the second largest building in the world, the Parliament Building, all twelve floors and 3,000 rooms. (The largest building? the Pentagon, of course, though the security in the Pentagon could not be tighter than it is here.) I’ll never get to see into that one, so have to be content to have walked through the gigantic staterooms of Ceausescu’s folly now used by the country’s parliament and its bureaucrats and for conventions for up to 1,200 participants in a single salon. The atmosphere is gloomy despite the opulence of pink marble and crystal chandeliers and shoddy cheap desks but few pictures or furnishings.
So, in summary, Romania is a country beginning to make its way again in the modern world, though their politicians do not seem to have learnt the lessons from the corruption of the communist years. The best of what the country has to offer lies north of the plains of southern Romania over the Carpathian Mountains, where life is closer to nature and traditional village life so difficult to find in modern day Europe. The term ‘peasant’ is not pejorative but accurately describes those who lead simple if hard lives in this beautiful and devout country where the influence of the Orthodox Christian faith is omnipresent and, at times, it is difficult to imagine you are in the twentieth century.