Uncle Travelling Matt

Ukraine

Moldova and Transdniestra

Romania

Next part: Viseu de Sus to Bucharest

Excursion: The Mocăniţă and Vişeu de Sus

Most people visit Vişeu de Sus for one reason. It’s not the stunning mountain scenery, nor is it the opportunity to experience the fascinating Maramureşeni culture. It’s not even the fine, traditional Maramureşeni wooden church which stands on Str. 22 Decembrie. No, most people come to Vişeu de Sus to ride the Mocăniţă.

A few decades ago there were over 3,000km of narrow gauge railways in Romania, the vast majority being logging lines stretching up the narrow Carpathian valleys to the sites where pines are felled commercially. Today only 60km remain and not all of that is operational. The Mocăniţă is the last remaining narrow gauge logging line in the country and, on top of that, most of its trains are steam-hauled. The railway that only survived because the Vaser Valley which it serves is too narrow to drive a logging road down, is not the biggest tourist attraction in the Maramureş.[1]

At the station, waiting for the 9 o’clock train, I met the two Germans from Vişeu de Jos railway station. They were most pleased with themselves since they’d bought a package – for just 300 lei (around £65) they’d got a meal, a ticket for the train and two nights’ accommodation in a German standard gauge sleeping car which was the latest money-making venture of CFF Vişeu de Sus, the company which operates the Mocăniţă. Indeed, I reckoned it sounded like pretty good value and good fun too, particularly since the sleeping cars were First Class. Next time maybe…?

Ready for departure

Our carriages for the trip up the Vaser Valley were far less luxurious open-sided and open-ended affairs with slatted wooden seats, but I personally would have had it no different if I could. After all, when travelling by narrow gauge steam train, the whole point is to hang out of the side as far as you can so that you can feel the wind on your face and smell the smoke, (as well as get the soot in your eyes – ouch!). My only complaint was one of my own stupidity: I’d forgotten that temperatures can drop rapidly in dark, narrow valleys where the sun struggles to get a look in between the trees, and very soon it became apparent that I should have brought a coat – the Mocăniţă in June can get very chilly!

Chilly or not, it was an incredible ride. Our little train twisted up the narrow valley, negotiating tight curves, clinging to hillsides and crossing over the fast-flowing waters of the Vaser several times. Each turn revealed breathtakingly beautiful views as we penetrated a region beyond the reach of road transportation.

Steaming up the Vaser Valley

The line was also fascinating from an operational point of view. In my youth I spent several years working as a volunteer on a steam railway and so I have a basic understanding of railway operations and what is and isn’t safe. The Mocăniţă however, seemed to break all the rules.

To boil it down to the basics, there are two kinds of railways: important double-track ones with sophisticated signalling systems or less-important single-track ones with only a basic signalling system which has changed little from the time when railways were first thought of. On such lines the train receives a token to enter a particular section of track and – so that it doesn’t crash into any other trains that might be hanging around – there is only ever one token and so only one train can ever be on that section of line at one time. Simple and yet surprisingly effective, (until the brakes fail and you fall off the track instead). However, as we rumbled along this single-track and not-particularly-sophisticated line, only a hundred metres or so ahead of us was another train – a loco with a few trucks – steaming along quite happily in the same direction. My Health and Safety alarm bells began to ring madly! What if its brakes failed?! What if we went too fast and ran into its back end?! What if a coupling broke and one of the trucks broke free and thundered into us?! My mind went into overdrive with all the gory possibilities and yet, at the same time, secretly I was rather pleased that they did operate in such a carefree and potentially-lethal fashion. A bit of a rebel without a cause, I just love it when someone breaks the rules!

Excuse me guv’nor? What’s that up ahead?

At the halt of Novăţ we stopped and encountered another strange inhabitant of the iron road; a beaten-up minibus with its tyres removed and replaced with rail axles. This truly was Titfield Thunderbolt territory and I loved it.

Is it a bus? Is it a train?

But not everything was so far removed from the world of rail professionalism and profit-seeking. At Cozia where there is a passing loop, we passed a lengthy logging train heavily-laden with freshly-cut pine; a reminder that cute as it may be, the Mocăniţă is still a commercially-viable timber-transporting concern.

Logging train at Cozia

Our trip finished at Paltin even though the line itself continues on for another 20km or so before terminating just shy of the Ukrainian border. Before we alighted the guard announced that we would be staying at Paltin for a couple of hours and that there was barbequed food available for those who may want some, but for passengers of a more energetic nature, he would be leading a hike into the hills which we were welcome to join. Feeling cold due to my lack of a coat and fat due to far too much barbequed food in the past, I decided to join him.

The walk turned out to be just what I needed; the stiff exercise soon warmed me up after several hours of sitting on the train and whilst the slopes that we ascended were steep, after my Agapia to Sihla hike, this was a doddle. Some of the other participants however – about fifteen from a trainload of several hundred, proof if it were needed that God intended us to eat barbequed meat – were struggling and so I had plenty of time to observe them as they caught up. There were only two other foreigners taking a stroll, a Dutch couple, the rest being locals or at least domestic tourists. One couple that intrigued me was a young, typically Romanian man with his dark-skinned and classically Roma her features, (and may I add, rather pretty), partner who were obviously accepted to a degree at least by the wider family since his mother was huffing and puffing along with them. In a country where prejudice against the Roma is rife and, one assumes, mixed marriages are rare, it was nice to see such an exception to the general rule.

Hiking in the hills above the Vaser Valley. N.B. The Roma girl discussed is third from the left whilst Anton is in front of her

I learnt a lot as well on that walk. The first thing that I discovered was that our hiking train guard was in fact nothing to do with the railway at all, (he checked tickets as a favour), but instead a National Park Ranger whose job it was to promote environmental awareness in the Vaser Valley which he did admirably by informing us that there are bear and lynx in the woods, by finding a lizard and then a frog which he held in the palm of his hand and, in an area which had recently been logged, by explaining that by law the lumberjacks can only take trunks that are 8cm or more across and that all the leaves and branches are shorn off the felled tress in situ and then left to act as habitat for wildlife.

By dint of everyone else being in a couple or family, I fell into conversation with our guide, the only other singleton to be seen. Bizarrely, our conversation began on the subject of the possibility of Scottish independence in three years’ time but soon moved onto more predictable topics.

His name was Anton Brener and we sat together and chatted all the way back to Vişeu de Sus. Although Romanian, he was a Roman Catholic and an ethnic German. Vişeu de Sus he informed me, has always been an ethnically-mixed town with a sizable German minority. Back in 1989 it had around twenty-two thousand inhabitants of whom no less then seven and a half thousand were either German or Hungarian. Today though, the situation is quite different, for whilst the overall population has remained fairly stable, only one and a half thousand Germans and Hungarians remain and that figure includes those in mixed marriages. Most have moved back to their ancestral homelands in the west where they are offered citizenship; the shortfall in numbers that this creates, Anton explained, has been neutralised by the quick-breeding Roma.

The story of the Germans in Central Europe is a fascinating one and one that these days is little told, jarring as it does with the narrow nationalistic viewpoints through which most national histories are presented in the region.

I’ve mentioned this history briefly already when I was discussing my visit to Transylvania and the very Germanic cities of Braşov and Şighişoara back in 2003. They came east from their Teutonic heartlands from the Middle Ages onwards, colonising undeveloped regions all across the central and eastern regions of Europe, particularly those where the King of Hungary and then later the Emperor of Austria ruled. Roman Catholic – and then later some Protestant – in faith, these Germans were an urban people, establishing most of the urban centres in the region from Brno (Brünn) to Braşov (Krondstadt), Bratislava (Pressburg) to Lvov (Lemburg). According to Anton they arrived in the Vişeu de Sus region around two hundred years ago and basically created the town and its industries, (including the logging), out of nothing. It is a family story which one can find echoed all the way from Gdansk (Danzig) to Târgu Neamţ, (which, as I explained before, means ‘German Market): German colonists arrive in a rural area, then they establish a town and industries or mines. They – along with the Jews who were also predominantly urban and had a major presence in most towns and cities – then dominated the local economy and culture, fermenting the seeds of the Industrial revolution in almost Mediaeval landscapes. At the onset of the 20^th century there were significant German or Hungarian minorities – and in some areas like the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia, majorities – in the areas that nowadays comprise Poland, the Czech republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania, Western Ukraine and the Serbian region of Vojvodina. By the onset of the 21^st century however, like the Jews, most of them had vanished.

Everyone knows what happened to the Jews, but the absent Germans is a story far less told. Its prime cause however, was exactly the same: Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.

In schools today Hitler is portrayed as a greedy, grasping half-mad nationalist dictator who had an insatiable desire to swallow up countries that belonged to other people, firstly independent Austria, then the Czech Sudetenland, then the rest of Czechoslovakia, then Poland and so on. That picture is largely accurate, but at the same time, not entirely so. You see, at the time, the Germans saw it differently and were justified to a certain extent in doing so. In the way that they viewed things, there East was theirs to take, after all, Germans lived there and had lived there for centuries and they dominated every city that you stepped into. Indeed, if you wanted irrefutable proof that the Germans were racially superior to the Slavs and other lesser races then you needed look no further than the lands between the Oder and the Dniester rivers: totally uncivilised and backwards before the German colonists arrived, the only reason why they lagged between Munich, Frankfurt and Cologne was that they were being held back by those same lesser races who thwarted the Germans in all their endeavours. That was how most Germans saw things and that was a mindset designed for such a man as Adolf Hitler. When the Nazi tanks rolled into Vienna, then Prague and then Warsaw, they were not invading foreign lands, they were merely extending the boon of German sovereignty to al those places which should have been given it in 1871 when the German Empire was first forged.

As we know only too well, such views were not exactly shared by the non-German locals who were treated like the sub-humans that the Nazis truly believed them to be, and so when the Red Army starting reversing the Nazi advances and destroying the Third Reich that Hitler had so spectacularly created, the future for those ethnic Germans who had lived for centuries east of the Oder was not bright, Natural targets for reprisals by both their neighbours and the Soviet invaders alike, they fled in droves and after the war forced population transfers, particularly in Poland, meant that around twelve million were uprooted from the communities where they had dwelt for centuries and simply disappeared into Germany itself. Like their hated enemies the Jews, they remained a memory only, weathered inscriptions on tombstones, faded ledgers in the Record Office.[2]

Except in Romania where although many left, many also remained.[3] Romania had been an ally of the Germans for much of World War II, only shifting sides when it became clear that Hitler had lost and so the locals had not suffered at the hands of the Nazis like the Poles and Czechoslovakians had. Nonetheless, with the advent of communism, suffering was always to be on the agenda. Anton told me that in Vişeu de Sus many of the local Germans had moved with the Nazi retreat but his grandfather had opted to stay in the town of his birth as he owned a successful business – the only café in town with a billiards table. However, after coming to power, the new communist regime nationalised it and so his grandfather lost everything.

Under Ceauşescu, a money-making scheme invented by the regime was to charge a tax of around $20,000 had to be paid by any ethnic German (or their sponsor) who wished to emigrate, (they were offered citizenship by the West German government), so emigration was limited but after the revolution of 1990 the tax was abolished and thousands left so that today only a few remain, Anton Bremer being one of them.[4]

He told me that in the Vişeu de Sus locality the Germans and the Jews had lived in the town whilst the Romanians, Ukrainians, (the border is only 30km away), and a few Roma had inhabited the villages. Nowadays though, Anton told me that the Roma far outnumber the Ukrainians because they breed faster. “The Gypsies are a problem,” he said. “They have too many children, they marry too young and they steal because they are not educated. The EU tries to help but they just stay the same.” How accurate these observations were, I cannot say although they were striking in their similarity to comments I heard whilst living in Bulgaria. Indeed, the one that I recall most of all was provided by a lawyer whom I taught who told me that the EU had provided a grant of several thousand Euros for each Roma family to improve their homes. “They had a party that lasted for three days and nights and every shack sprouted a satellite dish but at the end of it all, the homes were just the same,” he said, before commenting definitively, “You cannot change the Gypsies, never!”

I asked Anton about the Jewish community which had been quite large and influential but very conservative and its members didn’t mix much, let alone intermarry, with their neighbours. The Holocaust destroyed it in a single night, all the Jews of Vişeu de Sus being loaded onto trains and shipped off to Auschwitz never to return, but then he told me that there is now a small museum on the railway station commemorating that lost race and that the guy behind both the museum and the renaissance of the Mocăniţă is in fact a Jew.

“His name is Michael Schneeberger and he is a German, a descendent I think of the Jews who once lived in Vişeu de Sus. He came here because of that but he is also a railway enthusiast. He visited in 1992 soon after the Revolution and when he saw the Mocăniţă he raved about it and publicised it and so others came and the tourism started. He still visits regularly; most of the photos in the brochure are by him. He also has plans for the future: more sleeping cars for tourists and reconstructing traditional houses like he did with the Jewish museum to form a small skansen at the railway station. It is good for Vişeu de Sus, tourism is the only growth industry around here.”

When we got back to Vişeu de Sus I visited that Jewish museum on the platform. It was named ‘Elefant’ after one Alexander Elefant, the last Jew in the town who owned a timber mill. The building itself was the last Jewish lodging in Vişeu de Sus before being moved to its current situation and it told, as all of Central Europe’s Jewish museums do, of an old and prosperous community criminally exterminated in its prime, mown down in a single night.

After I’d looked around the exhibits I rejoined a member of another of Vişeu de Sus’ disappearing communities, my new friend the Forest ranger, who had now finished his duties for the day and had invited me out for a coffee. I walked with him back into town to his office near to my hotel where I met his colleagues and admired an enormous 3D relief map of the valleys of the Munții Maramureșului Natural Park which was several metres square. Then we headed for the best coffee house in town, (according to my host), where Anton told me a bit about his work and home lives.

Apparently Anton had only been working on the Mocăniţă job for a few months and before that he had been engaged in monitoring species numbers and checking on logging operations which often involved getting into heated arguments with those who chose to either break or bend the rules over what can and cannot be chopped down. Anton found the EU a headache; their many rules and regulations were good and well-intentioned, but completely unenforceable in a country like Romania where the power is with the money, not in politics, and illegal logging is the only real money-spinner in town. That meant that he was at the sharp end of things which could be difficult without power and influence behind him, but nonetheless, he was not wholly despondent for he did feel that green ideas and thinking were slowly sinking into the minds of the Maramureşeni.

Another, more personal, issue with his work was that it frequently intruded into his home life as his fiancée was also his boss, (she was a biologist too), and so they tended to talk shop after hours. I remarked that my brother, who also works with his fiancée, has much the same problem which can be difficult, (and result in some rather dull dinner conversations for yours truly). I asked him if he intended to marry and he said that they did since they had lived together on and off for over six months and because it was possible to do so since they are both Roman Catholics and whilst sharing a religion is not a necessity in 21^st century Maramureş, it does make things “culturally easier”.

Engaged or not, we both disturbed from our discussions by the waitress who collected our empty coffee cups and who was most arresting indeed. Once she’d left we both agreed that whilst it was most agreeable to look at such lovely visions whilst drinking equally lovely coffee in a café, when working together it can be hard. That’s why Anton prefers to be alone in the remote valleys of the Maramureş with only the trees and wildlife for company whilst I am happy in a high-security gaol with beefed-up gangsters and withdrawn addicts. The two situations are very different but in both there is one important common denominator: little to disturb you from your work.

With Anton at his office

I bade adieu to Anton, promising to keep in touch, and then set out to see a little of Vişeu de Sus. Despite spending the night there I had so far seen very little of the town. True, I’d popped out to the supermarket the previous evening and then ate an excellent meal of pork and sausage with mămăligă[5] whilst watching German defeated the Netherlands 2-1, but I knew naught of the town beyond its railway station and finest coffee house so in the several hours that I had to kill before I was due at Vişeu de Jos railway station to catch my train back to Salva, I decided to have a quick look around.

I started in the obvious place, the magnificent traditional Maramureşeni wooden church on the main street. When I checked it out up close I was a little disappointed to discover that it only dated from 1990, but it was open so I had a look inside.

Through the door the smell of pine was strong and the modern wooden walls made me think of some kind of enormous sauna with pictures of saints on its walls. What surprised me though was the layout. This was indistinguishable from any other Roman Catholic church.

Vişeu de Sus has a Roman catholic church, across the road from the wooden one, the place where Anton and his fiancée worship. They would not think to go to a service in the church that I was now stood in even though it is also Catholic. Well, sort of. You see it’s Catholic in the sense that it accepts the authority of the Pope in Rome but that’s about it. Vişeu de Sus’ wooden church you see belongs to the Uniate or Greek Catholic Church.

Anton referred to the Greek Catholic Church as “mere politics” and although they share the same Pope, Vişeu de Sus’ (largely German and Hungarian) Roman Catholics see the (predominantly Ukrainian) Greek Catholics as a totally separate Church. My friend Martyn, a traditionalist Latin Mass Catholic with a passion for quality liturgy stated that he’d always wanted to attend one of their Masses since they use the elaborate Orthodox rite but were accessible to Roman Catholics because of their adherence to the Pope. Thus it was that I was expecting an interior pretty similar to that of an Orthodox church with lots of icons and a lack of seats, perhaps only a picture of Benedict XVIth as a clue to its unusual affiliation, but no, this was no different from any other Roman Catholic establishment. I left a tad disappointed.

Vişeu de Sus’ Greek Catholic Church

After checking out the town’s only attractions, I passed the time by browsing through her few shops. At a toy shop I came across a rip-off version of Lego in the window called Cogo, a model of a steam train selling for 35 lei (£6.50), a quarter of the price of its Danish counterpart. Considering that I was in the capital of Romanian steam and considering that my son and heir is an avid fan of both Lego and steam trains, (or at least, I tell him that he is…), then it seemed rude not to buy the set and, when the assistant told me that they had a different one as well, then that too. “Ho! Ho! Ho!” declared this Santa Claus as he left with the first of Christmas 2012’s stocking fillers.

Cogo trains: for those who can’t afford Lego

[1] Although referred to ubiquitously as the Mocăniţă, the term was actually first coined to refer to all of Romania’s remote narrow gauge logging lines. It is derived from ‘mocan’, the Romanian term for ‘shepherd’ or ‘one who lives in the mountains’, and suffixed as feminine and diminutive in keeping with the tradition of naming conveyances and indicating small size. It's also been suggested that it means ‘coffee machine’, as one of the little locomotives is reminiscent of one of these in action. The fact that little trains have being given such a term of endearment by the Romanian people suggests that, just like in Britain, they are well-loved.

[2] It should be noted that in addition to those Germans living in the east, the post-war population transfers also affected thousands of Germans in the Netherlands.

[3] By 1950 it is thought that 253,000 had left but 421,000 remained.

[4] http://countrystudies.us/romania/41.htm

[5] Mămăligă (polenta) is a finely-ground maize flour boiled with water into a porridge. It serves a similar role to mashed potatoes in British cuisine. Traditional peasant food. I approved.

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Friday, 16 May 2014

The Missing Link: Part 3.6: Suceava to Viseu de Sus

Greetings!

This week’s offering is all about an amazing train journey through the mountains which is actually rather apt since my activity focus for the past few weeks has been building a mountain range on my son’s model railway. The layout is called Caertomos, (Welsh for “The fort of Thomas”; he’s called Thomas and its got a castle), and it was inspired by my journeyings along the Heart of Wales Line which can be read about here in The Sacred Heart of Wales.

Today’s piece though, is not Welsh but Romanian, through the Carpathians not the Cambrians, to one of the most famous little steam trains in Europe, the Mocanita…

Uncle Travelling Matt

Links to all parts of the travelogue

Ukraine

Moldova and Transdniestra

Romania

Next part: The Mocanita and Viseu de Sus

Journey: Suceava to Vişeu de Sus

My train out of Suceava’s grand railway station left at twenty minutes past one. For the first twenty miles or so it followed the same route that I had taken to Gura Humorului two days before and I busied myself writing letters and reading. Sometime after Gura Humorului, as we begun to climb into the Carpathians, the young lady sat opposite me asked if I was writing a book. Her name was Oana Nicoleta and she was a Masters student in the university at Cluj Napoca travelling back to her studies after some time with her family in Bucovina. I fell into conversation with her, telling her where I’d been and of my impressions of her country so far. She asked me what I thought of Romania which led me to saying what a difficult question that was to answer since I had not visited a Romania but instead several Romanias – Transylvania, Moldavia and Bucharest – all of which seemed to bear little resemblance to one another. She agreed that Transylvania in particular was markedly different to the rest of the country due to the German and Hungarian influence.

“But different again,” I said, “is the Republic of Moldova which I’d expected to be quite similar to Romanian Moldavia yet the two seem world’s apart. However, I’ve seen many signs declaring that ‘BASARABIA e ROMÂNIA!’ so it seems that there is some desire at least for the two countries to unite.”

“Twenty years ago there was much talk about it but these days, no, it’s not going to happen, especially since we joined the EU. The ‘Basarabia e România!’ movement has little popular support.”

Our conversation then turned to other matters. Oana was a big film lover so I asked her if she had seen ‘California Dreamin’’ but surprisingly, she hadn’t. Her favourites were the classic tragic love stories – ‘A Hundred Years of Solitude’, ‘Pride and Prejudice’, ‘Onegin’, ‘Jane Eyre’, ‘Wuthering Heights’ and, of course, ‘Romeo and Juliet’. She was talking to the right guy and I waxed lyrical over all these and more, particularly the Zefferelli version of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy and the stunning performance of Olivia Hussey as Juliet.

Finally, I asked her about her name which I thought sounded rather unusual, (although it probably isn’t, being a Romanian form of ‘Joanne’), and she laughed. “Actually my mother wanted to call me ‘Mihaila’ but my grandmother didn’t agree. Traditionally in Romania, a daughter should be named after, or at least share the same first letter as, their grandmother. She was Olivia but my mother didn’t like that so I ended up as Oana.

Whilst we were talking the scenery outside changed from beautiful to spectacular. Our train was crossing the Carpathians now and we hurtled down pristine alpine valleys with pine-clad slopes and craggy peaks beyond. The colours were startling, deep blues and greens, more like the hues of one of those new-fangled technicolour films of the sixties than reality. We could have been in Switzerland, except that there I wouldn’t have had the pleasure of being able to lean out of the window and breath in the fresh mountain air.

Crossing the Carpathians

At Salva I bade goodbye to Oana and changed trains, alighting from the swish electric express and boarding an aged, diesel-hauled local stopper service. The atmosphere inside was as different as the outside: I now shared a compartment not with an acute Masters student but instead a fat jolly peasant woman who was bringing her unsold goods back home from market.

The valley along which we rumbled at 19^th century speeds started off gentle but then became more dramatic. However, unlike the trip that I had just taken across the Carpathians, there was a very different ambience here. There, although beautiful and sparsely-populated, one was always aware that we were on a major communication route, a lifeline across the mountains from one developed region to another. Here though, one was conscious of really entering the sticks, the back of beyond. But that was only natural; after all, I was now in the Maramureş:

‘The Maramureş is a land cut off by mountains to the south and, since 1945, by the border with what was then the Soviet Union to the north. Until 1920 eighty per cent of its surface was covered in forest. Still today there is something distinctly sylvan about the Maramureşeni, especially when one sees them huddled together in their wooden churches, praying to God to help them eke out a living, with their mostly wooden tools, from their small patches of ground encircled by the echoing forest.

In valleys surrounded by forests and mountains, with no towns of any size nearby, remote and poorly connected to the outside world, the Maramureş remained one of the most unaltered regions of Europe. So well preserved had been their traditional way of life that, in more recent times, a selection of ethnologists and philologists from different parts of the world had travelled over the passes to study the lives, customs and language of these unique and isolated people… [and as a result]... the peasants of the Maramureş appeared to believe the entire world outside to be made up of philologists.’[1]

That quote comes from William Blacker’s ‘The Enchanted Way’, the wonderful book that inspired me to head up to the Maramureş, and since this was my first views of the region, it is perhaps apt to read of Blacker’s:

‘Surviving on dry biscuits I headed east again, along bumpy roads. After two hours, on entering a forest of tall beeches, their branches topped with snow like ermine on an empress's robes, the road began to climb. I drove upwards for half an hour and then over a mountain pass into an area marked on my rough map as 'Maramureş'. Slowly I descended through misty woods, not knowing what I would find, along a road which became rougher and rougher.

As the gradient levelled out, following a frozen stream whose waterfalls had turned into motionless cascades of ice, a few wooden houses began to appear. I proceeded cautiously along the snow- and ice-covered road, astonished at what I saw. East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, even the parts of Romania I had just travelled through: none of them were anything like this. Only here had I found the sort of Eastern Europe which I had imagined from reading ‘Old Peter's Russian Tales’ when I was young; the Eastern Europe of wooden peasant cottages on the edge of forests inhabited by wolves and bears, of snow and sledges and sheepskin coats, and of country people in embroidered smocks and headscarves. I thought I had been born too late to see anything like the peasant life about which Tolstoy and Hardy had written, but I was wrong. Here there was a remnant of an old, almost medieval world, cut off by the mountains and forest I had just crossed, and I had stumbled upon it quite by accident.’[2]

Even with such firm endorsements from William Blacker, I have to say that the Maramureş came as a pleasant surprise to me. It is a region of narrow valleys with settlements nestling on their floors, hemmed in by wooded slopes. Those settlements were clustered around their churches but unlike in the rest of Romania, many of these were Roman Catholic, their tall spires thrusting confidently heavenwards, in stark contrast to the squat domes of the Orthodox temples. It was an almost Mitteleuropean scene, Slovakian or Polish, but only almost. Central Europe is a wealthy region, even if that wealth has been partially obscured by five decades of communism. The Maramureş was not and never had been a place of great wealth. As Blacker intimated, it was still mediaeval; peasants toiled in fields of haystacks, donkeys plodded along the roads pulling carts and set next to them our lumbering, aged train was transformed into an ultra-modern monster providing the lifeblood that links these forgotten veins of Europe to the continents more modern arteries.

The Maramureş

We stopped at a station called Fiad. I looked out of the window and saw no settlement for it to serve. The only traces of humanity were some concrete slabs which served as a platform and a tiny station office from which the national flag flew. Unlike at all the other stations, this stop lasted longer than a momentary halt: the entire trainload of people alighted and started lighting up cigarettes or chatting. I descended from my carriage too and joined them, lighting up a Moldovan cigarette of my own which I had bought for such a time, then wandering up and down the platform passing my time people-watching and admiring the mighty, throbbing diesel locomotive which was carrying us into Europe’s darkest region. As we waited – and I was wondering why we were waiting - a story formed itself in my mind. As I watched the locals – aged peasants, a tired-looking guard, fashion-conscious youngsters, Romanians, Gypsies and other unidentifiable races – I began to think about how all our lives are inter-connected even though, superficially, a train stopping mysteriously in the middle of nowhere, seems to cast a group of totally separate islands together temporarily in a tiny sea. By the time the train travelling in the opposite direction, (the reason for the wait), arrived, my short story ‘Interval’ was largely worked out in my mind.

Fiad: the inspiration for ‘Interval’

Moving on deeper into the Maramureş and the scenery only got better, both natural and human. At Săcel, a town kept alive by logging judging from the goods yard loaded high with timber next to its railway station, I saw my first traditional Maramureşeni wooden church. These structures, unique to the region, have tall, pencil-thin spires, large sloping roofs and wooden walls. They are beautiful and, as Blacker suggested, worthy of inclusion in any of Old Peter's Russian Tales, (or to be more culturally and geographically accurate, any Brothers’ Grimm Fairy Tale).

Săcel with its wooden church

I alighted at Vişeu de Jos (Lower Vişeu) since the branch line up to my final destination, Vişeu de Sus (Upper Vişeu) ceased operating a few years ago, but outside the station I encountered a problem. I’d expected, since this was one of the more major stops on the line, there to to be at least one taxi waiting outside for customers, but the place was deserted and there wasn’t even a café to ask in. What to do? I was not alone for a couple of German rail enthusiasts had also alighted there – their purpose the same as mine – but they were of little use since their English was pretty much as good as their Romanian which, in short, meant that we were screwed.

But into such situations, a knight in shining armour can sometimes ride and ours came in the shape of the director of the local children’s home who had come to the station to pick up one of his charges. He offered us a trip into town and declined any payment, depositing me right outside the door of the Hotel Brad, my home for the night.

[1] The Enchanted Way, p.32-3

[2] The Enchanted Way, p.9

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Friday, 9 May 2014

The Missing Link: Part 3.5: Targu Neamt, Agapia and Sihla

Greetings!

I’ve been off work this week and hosting a friend. He’s familiar to regular visitors of this site as the Lowlander from 'Across Asia With A Lowlander’ and also my V-log on Schouwen-Duiveland in the Netherlands. We’ve had a great time camping in the Welsh mountains and reminiscing over trips past whilst also contemplating some future expeditions. Mali perhaps…? One day.

Until then please enjoy another trip I took up into tree-covered mountains, this time in deepest, darkest Romania and my unforgettable visit to Sihla Monastery.

Keep travelling!

Uncle Travelling Matt

Links to all parts of the travelogue

Ukraine

Moldova and Transdniestra

Romania

Next post: Suceava to Viseu de Sus

Excursion: Târgu Neamţ, Agapia and Sihla

On the last day of the Moldavian leg of the Missing Link, I took the bus south from Suceava to the small town of Târgu Neamţ. The town’s name seemed to sum up to me much of what I’d learnt about the region so far. ‘Târg’ is the Slavic term for ‘market’ and the word crops up in place names all across the Balkans, such as the northern Bulgarian town of Târgovishte. ‘Neamţ’ has a comes from the Slavic term for the Germans: ‘Nemski’, quite literally ‘the mute ones’, presumably because they stayed silent in the face of alien Slavic babbling. So ‘The German Market Town’ tells us by its name that this area has, like Bessarabia to the east, always been mixed although in these parts there are influences from both the Balkans and Central Europe.

Despite its exciting and exotic name, Târgu Neamţ was one of the dullest towns that I have ever set foot in. Built, it seems, entirely since the 1960s, it is a dusty-grey collection of low-rise concrete blocks. After alighting from the bus I dined in an adjacent eatery which was equally dank and bland and staff by a man whom I christened Mr. Miserable due to his startlingly negative demeanour which soured even further when he presented me with a Coke Zero and I reminded him that I had in fact order the real, sugary, thing.

But my purpose that day was not to stay in Târgu Neamţ; instead the town was merely a springboard for yet more monasteries and so after my meal I hired a taxi to ferry me the 15km or so to the Agapia Monastery.

There’s a beautiful piece on Agapia in ‘Untrodden Paths in Roumania’ by one Mary Adelaide Walker who toured the region in the 1880s. She described approaching the monastery in the following words:

“The little village through which we pass is rather poor looking, but two or three pretty houses, standing back in orchards and gardens, belong, as we afterwards learn, to some of the richer nuns; there is also the school-house, and, passing that, we are soon in a broad lane, bordered by monastic dwellings; in a charming cottage ‘ornée’ style, with wide balconies, and gardens glowing with blossoms. Some of these picturesque retreats are almost hidden by the mass of creepers twining about the white pilasters; others, higher up the slope, peep out of a nest of forest foliage. In the midst of this wild luxuriance, the cupolas of the monastery, covered with glittering scales of burnished metal, and crowned with their numerous and complicated golden crosses, gleam and sparkle against a dark, pine-clad mountain-side; on the summit, an opening in the heavy fringe of trees is marked by a large wooden cross.”[1]

I have to say that, the metalling of the road aside, things have changed little. The monastery that Walker describes in the 1880s was a hive of activity and so it is today, with black-robed nuns milling around busily, although the pilgrims of today – a party of schoolchildren and a fat guy from Stoke-on-Trent – are a world away from the sightseeing and spiritual-seeking members of the Romanian nobility who advanced on Agapia a century and a half ago.

Agapia Monastery

The setting of Agapia is beautiful and so too is the church containing paintings by one Nicolae Grigorescu who was, apparently, the best in Romanian history. They certainly looked ok to me although the church itself was far too baroque for my barbarian tastes. Unfortunately, having seen that church then I realised that I had nothing else to see and my taxi hadn’t waited around.

My guidebook informed me that there is a second monastery some 2.2km away up a hill called Agapia din Deal (‘Agapia on the Hill’ as opposed to the larger Agapia din Vale or ‘Agapia in the Valley’ which was the complex that I was stood in. This other Agapia was described as “quiet” and “humble” and that it “charms with its peaceful ambience and wooden buildings.” However, the book also talked about “the small and highly worthwhile” Sihla Monastery which has a wooden church and a nearby cave of Pious St. Teodora, a hermit who apparently dwelt there as a troglodyte for no less than sixty years. Being a believer that devotion to saints is an excellent way to get closer to the Divine, I plumped for the latter even though the road sign at the turn-off informed me that it was a full 8km away. It did make me stop and think awhile as to whether I really wanted to contemplate such a trek but I decided to go for since, after all, had I not been reflecting only the previous day that, no matter how beautiful or historical they may be, religious sites can only be fully appreciated – or attained – by some hard spiritual and physical exertion.

And besides, I was getting fat.

Perhaps pleased by my choosing the narrow upper road as opposed to the wider downward route, God smiled down on this humble pilgrim and sent an angel down to assist him on his way. Well, not exactly an angel, more a peasant in a red Lada, but almost the moment that I’d started walking, he picked me up and gave me a lift for the first 4km or so before the road split and our ways separated. I bade him goodbye and thanks and then continued on alone, up the mountain, to the Shrine of Pious St. Teodora.

It was a stiff climb, a solid gradient all the way, but the scenery was exquisitely beautiful alpine forest through which the road wended. Only one or two cars passed me as I walked whilst passed a small logging truck but beyond that I was alone and, surrounded by the tall trees, a deep sense of peace began to descend on me. As I laboured up the slopes of the Carpathians, I began to recite prayers and invocations to the saints of my native England whilst all the while keeping my focus on the goal: the monastery which I hoped to attain rather than merely visit.

The road to Sihla

To be fair, it was a good thing that I did eventually attain Sihla rather than merely visit it since, viewed objectively, whilst my guidebook was right about the setting, architecturally it was rather bland and modern and certainly no match for its companion 8km away down the hill. But after my long trek up some very steep slopes and careful focussing of the mind on the spiritual, to me it seemed like I had entered Heaven itself, (particularly as I’d forgotten to bring a bottle of drinking water with me), and after passing through its gates I baptised myself anew in the holy water that runs from a tap in the compound before drinking down deep gulps and then making my way up to the tiny wooden church.

Sihla Monastery

Like the church in the skansen in Suceava two days previously, I liked this intimate spiritual space and knelt there in prayer for some time. Then, when I had finished, I got talking to the monk in the exonarthex who promptly summoned a younger brother with good English who could answer all my questions.

The church was dedicated to St. John the Baptist, (an obvious inspiration for such isolated hermit monks I suppose), and St. Teodora who had lived in a cave nearby and whose icon I was shown by the brothers. The English-speaker add that, with God’s help, the monastery had managed to stay open and active throughout the communist era, a remarkable achievement although since the place looked largely rebuilt in recent years, I am guessing that it was in a much-reduced form.[2]

I bade adieu to the friendly and helpful monks and set off for the real goal of my journey, the nearby hermit cave of St. Teodora. It is situated about half a mile away from the monastery itself, on a tree-covered hillside. Before reaching the cave itself, one is confronted by a large rock with a set of rickety wooden steps running up the side. Climbing these one reaches a stone trough full of ice-cold water on top of the rock. Tradition tells us that this is the bath in which the saint used to wash everyday.

After descending the steps I continued up the uneven stone path to the cave itself. The setting reminded me strongly of the site of St. Kevin’s hermitage at Glendalough in Ireland although that solitary holy man did not sleep in a cave.

The Cave of St. Teodora was a deep cleft in the rock. It was dark and it took some time for my eyes to adjust. When they did I found myself in a simple, holy shrine with some icons, a trough for candles and a place to kneel. I lit my candle and then placed it in the trough before the icon. Then I knelt and prayed.

I stayed there for a long time. I can’t say how long exactly, I never carry the time with me and in such places time is often not linear. But when I emerged I felt refreshed. The Lord was in that place.

The Cave of St. Teodora of Sihla

I then commenced the long walk back down to Agapia, all 8km of it. Of course, going down is much easier than going up, although constantly braking and holding yourself at an unnatural angle is much more wearing than you might think. I did half hope that someone might pick me up as had happened on the way up, but only two cars passed during the entire journey and neither of them showed any sign of stopping.

But it mattered not for it was a beautiful walk, me alone with the forest. I stopped and prayed at the frequent wayside shrines, drank from the mountain streams and relaxed, letting my mind wander over the hills and far away.

A wayside shrine near Sihla

About half a kilometre before the monastery, the cottages began; beautiful Hansel and Gretel affairs of latticed wood. When we got into the settlement properly there was a wooden church. I went inside and found that there was a Liturgy in progress with a single nun in attendance. I doubled the congregation and as the words drifted over me, I recalled Rebecca West’s comment on the Orthodox Mass in her classic Balkan travelogue ‘Black Lamb, Grey Falcon’:

‘Here was the unique accomplishment of the Eastern Church. It was the child of Byzantium, a civilization which had preferred the visual arts to literature, and had been divided from the intellectualized West by a widening gulf for fifteen hundred years. It was therefore not tempted to use the doctrines of the primitive Church as the foundation of a philosophical and ethical system unbridled in its claim to read the thoughts of God; and it devoted all its forces to the achievement of the mass, the communal form of art which might enable man from time to time to apprehend why it is believed that there may be a God. In view of the perfection of this achievement, the ecclesiastics of the Eastern Church should be forgiven if they show incompetence in practical matters and the lack of general information which we take for granted in painters and musicians. They are keeping their own order, we cannot blame them if they do not keep ours.’[3]

She was entirely correct.

Approaching Agapia from Sihla

Back at Agapia itself I dined at a restaurant near to the monastery and then ordered a taxi to take me back to Târgu Neamţ. When I got to the town I discovered that I had two hours to kill in that most soulless of settlements before my bus was due to depart so I decided to head up to the only attraction in town, the castle which according to my guidebook was probably worth a visit since, “A top-to-bottom restoration was nearly finished during our visit and it was reportedly looking fantastic.”[4]

It was a longer walk than I anticipated, easily over a mile and with a very stiff climb at the end of it. My legs, still aching from the 12km of mountain rambling earlier in the day, complained bitterly as I scaled the slope but it was well worth it; the restorations had transformed what must have been a pretty nondescript ruin, (judging by the photos of the pre-restored castle in the exhibition), into one of the best – and most visitor-friendly – mediaeval fortresses in Europe. From the grisly dungeons, (with papier-mâché prisoners chained to the walls), to the guardrooms, to the princess in one of the upstairs windows to the excellent exhibits on the history of the castle to the absolutely incredible views out over Târgu Neamţ and the Carpathians beyond, I loved it to bits and had only two regrets: firstly that my time was short so I had to rush round it all far too fast, and secondly that my son and heir was not with me since he would have loved it. Still, he got something out of my visit since at the bottom of the hill they were selling some rather good quality toy wooden swords in scabbards, one of which he now plays with whenever we visit a castle in Britain.

Târgu Neamţ Castle

I finished Jo Nesbø’s ‘The Leopard’ on the bus back and then, in the evening, went to the internet café where I met up with Seb for one last time and printed off my boarding card – my first thought of the slowly approaching end to the trip – before finally retiring to my room to savour a dull 1-1 draw between co-hosts Poland and Russia.

[1] Through Another Europe, p.47

[2] As an aside, several months later I was talking to Fr. Samuel Carter, our local Orthodox priest, who has visited many of Romania’s monasteries and admits that genereally one blurs into the other, but for him, like me, Sihla stood out and indeed he was welcomed by and translated through the same young monk who also helped me. In Fr. Sanuel’s church in Stoke-on-Trent there is an icon of St. Teodora of Sihla.

[3] Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, p.505-6

[4] Lonely Planet Romania, p.268

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Thursday, 1 May 2014

The Missing Link: Part 3.4: The Painted Monasteries of Bucovina

Greetings!

And after a break of a month, we are back to the missing link and my explorations of north-eastern Romania. This week’s post will probably not be too popular with most people as it seems to be all about religion and politics, the two subjects that we’re told to stray away from. But in Romania both are a lot more colourful than elsewhere; the election posters at the end are a particular favourite of mine.

By the by, on the travel front, I’ve booked my big trip for next year. I’m extremely excited because it is THE BIG ONE, the one that I have been planning for years and never been able to afford. I can’t really afford it now to be honest, but apart from irresponsible being my middle name, I’ve found a way to save for it bit by bit so it shouldn’t annoy my bank manager too much. Anyway, my trip of a lifetime will be a tour around North Korea! As someone who loves obscure and hard to get into nations then this really is a bit of a holy grail. To get into the mood I’ve been watching loads of North Korean films on YouTube and I can heartily recommend them for those of you who like something a bit… erm… different, so long as you don’t mind lashings of propaganda. Anyway, here’s my favourite so far, no surprises really as it is reckoned to be the magnum opus of North Korean cinema.

The Flower Girl (1972)

I have also been reading a travelogue of both the Koreas entitled ‘To Dream of Pigs’ by Clive Leatherdale. I read it years before when I was in Japan and this is a reread. I shall post a review when I’m finished, most likely after ‘The Missing Link’ is up. But that is for later, for now let’s forget Kim Jong Un’s and head towards Ceausescu's realm instead…

Uncle Travelling Matt

Links to all parts of the travelogue

Ukraine

Moldova and Transdniestra

Romania

Next part: Targu Neamt, Agapia and Sihla

Excursion: The Painted Monasteries of Bucovina

Tourists tend to visit Romania to do one of two things: to see Dracula’s castle and birthplace in Transylvania and to visit the Painted Monasteries of Bucovina. Back in 2003 on my Trans-Europe expedition with the Sibling I’d checked out the former and so now it was the turn of the latter.

Dating from the 16^th century, these monasteries are world famous not for their interior decorations as is the case with many churches, but instead for the wonderful coloured frescos which adorn their exteriors. According to Higgins[1] they were decorated so because at that time the peasants were not allowed to enter consecrated buildings and so each church was painted on the outside so as to act as “an illustrated Bible” for the illiterate peasants. To be fair, I have not heard the assertion that the peasants weren’t allowed to enter a consecrated building anywhere else and so it may not be true, but whatever the case, all sources agree that the purpose of the frescoes was for the religious education of the unlettered locals.

The base for exploring the monasteries is Gura Humorului, a small town just over an hour away from Suceava. I caught the 08:47 from the grand station and then watched as the scenery slowly transformed from a windswept open plain to Alpine views that could easily have been Switzerland.

When I alighted at Gura Humorului it was dead. I’m talking only passenger to get off, café shut, one-horse town dead. I know it wasn’t quite tourist season yet but I’d expected a little more that this. To appease my hunger I bought a 7 Days croissant and a coffee[2] from the shop in the station where the only taxi driver was sat chatting to his mate, the proprietor. I promptly hired him for a very reasonable rate and after our coffees were drained we set off, firstly to Voroneţ.

Voroneţ Monastery lies some 4km out of town over the Moldova River, the waterway that lends its name to the Romanian province of Moldavia and, (rather ironically since it flows nowhere near the place), to the country of Moldova. Enclosed by a high wall, the monastery was smaller than I’d expected, little more than a church within a compound, but the frescoes – and at Voroneţ the prevailing colours are blue and green – were spectacular. That said, I found that the place did little for me spiritually; with all the people milling around it felt more like a tourist attraction than a holy site, even though there are nuns resident there these days. Here was the first place on my entire trip where I’d come across significant numbers of non-domestic visitors, there being two coaches on the car park which had disgorged their contents into the monastery. It was a reminder of a world that I’d mercifully forgotten about.

Voroneţ Monastery

Our next stop was Humor Monastery, also about 4km away from Gura Humorului but in the opposite direction. After we’d retraced our steps I realised why the town had seemed so dead upon arrival: the centre was further on, past the railway station and in its heart it was quite lively indeed, possessing a similar ambience to an Alpine ski centre.

The compound which surrounded Humor Monastery was larger than that at Voroneţ, (perhaps because the latter is earlier), and boasts an impressive tower which you can climb up and view the whole scene as a bird would. Again the frescoes were incredible – at Humor reds prevail – but again I enjoyed it more as a tourist than as a pilgrim. Higgins goes into raptures over how at Humor there is “the instinctive feeling for matching building with landscape”[3] and he is right, but even so, inexplicably, Romania’s crown jewels were not really sparkling for me. Although they were clearly both architecturally and artistically inferior, I much preferred the three monasteries that I’d walked to a couple of days previously in Iaşi, particularly Cetățuia. But then that is the difference between being a pilgrim and a tourist: the two seek different goals and are touched by different things. The pilgrim often alights upon some small detail which focuses his mind on the Divine – the lane at Walsingham, the statue of Our Lady at Marrakech’s Roman Catholic cathedral[4] - whereas the tourist wants to be wowed by scenery, history, art or activity. Of course, most trips to religious sites contain an element of both; I visited Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre predominantly as a pilgrim but the tourist was present too[5] whilst at Međogurie it was the other way around,[6] but at both Humor and Voroneţ, whilst the tourist left largely satisfied, the crowds and the fact that I was driven to both sites with no hardship involved, (in stark contrast to the long walk and steep climb in the blazing sunshine to reach Cetățuia Monastery), meant that the pilgrim found naught.

Humor Monastery

With much of the day still remaining and chances being that I would never again have the opportunity to return to Bucovina, I decided to hire my laid-back yet jovial driver to take me to one of the more distant of the Painted Monasteries. There were two prime contenders: Moldoviţa and Suceviţa, and even though the former was closer, I plumped for the latter, largely because my guidebook informed me that the road to it: “offers breath-taking views across the surrounding fields and is reason enough to make the trip. It climbs 1,100m and passes small alpine villages. Yet the prize at the end of it is golden too – Suceviţa Monastery is the largest and perhaps all-round finest of the Bucovina monasteries.”[7]

The guidebook was half right. The monastery was the finest of the lot by a country mile, but the trip to it was not quite “breath-taking”. Nonetheless, I enjoyed it immensely, for what it lacked in spectacular views, (the road with the great scenery is the one which approaches Suceviţa from the opposite direction apparently), it more than made up for in quirky interestingness and on top of that, we now had company.

When I asked my driver if he would take me onwards to Suceviţa, he made an unusual request: could his wife come along? I had no problem with such a suggestion, so he took out an aged mobile, called her up and ten minutes later after he’d filled up the car with petrol, we were parked outside their house on the outskirts of Gura Humorului.

Mrs. Taxi was dressed and eager to depart, as if embarking on a WI trip to the seaside. She – and her husband – were grateful to me for allowing her along on an unexpected drive out and to say thanks she presented me with a beautiful hand-painted egg. Then, as we drove along, I learnt through a mixture of hand gestures and extremely broken English, that they had a son who was living in Dublin – for either fifteen years or fifteen months, I was unsure which one – which is a nice place but very expensive, and that they’d much preferred Ceaușescu’s government to the current one since under the Conducǎtor people had had money, jobs and everything, whereas now things were very hard indeed although admittedly slightly better than they had been a decade ago. This was a world away from the gloomy travelogues of the Ceaușescu Era that I’d read in Robert Kaplan’s ‘Balkan Ghosts’ which had made Romania in the 1980s sound like hell on earth.

However, there were still signs that perhaps everything had not been all so rosy and perfect back then as they made out; my driver pointed out a village just off the road that was completely abandoned. He explained that it had happened during the Ceaușescu Era as part of the Conducǎtor’s systemisation drive. This was one of the dictator’s biggest projects and, arguably, the greatest tragedy that he inflicted upon Romania.

It all came from a visit that he paid in 1971 to North Korea. Impressed by the mass ideological mobilisation inspired by Kim Il Sung’s Juche ideology[8] that he saw there, he began his own project along similar lines upon his return. The idea was to bring the advantages of the modern age to the Romanian countryside by resettling people in villages into cities, either existing ones or newly-established settlements. Smaller villages, (such as the one that we saw from the Suceviţa road), with populations under one thousand, were deemed to be “irrational” and so their inhabitants were forcibly removed to a city. The programme was, understandably, not particularly popular with the peasants, but it continued being implement until around 1980 when it petered out. It was particularly enforced in Moldavia. Although largely abandoned as the country entered the 1980s, its ideology was revived for the remodelling of Bucharest in the middle of the decade and it is seen by most historians as being a key factor behind the violent overthrow of the Conducǎtor in 1990.

I said before that Suceviţa was good and I was not lying. In my opinion it was by far the best of the three painted Monasteries that I visited, although considering that it was also the latest, it perhaps should have been. After all, they’d had more time to perfect the concept.

Suceviţa was very different to both Humor and Voroneţ. They’d both been small in scale and nestled in close wooded valleys, but Suceviţa was large and expansive and situated on an alpine plain with space to be seen. Like the others though, its most spectacular feature was again its frescoes, or to be exact, the fresco which dominates the northern wall of the church and is considered to be the finest in all Bucovina.

It is of the Ladder of Virtues and depicts the thirty steps to Paradise. It shows vividly – and gruesomely – the poor beleaguered souls attempting to ascend the steps to the Heavenly Abode but being assailed by devils on the way, their sins causing them to fall into the inferno below. Only a few get very far up but even some of these – monks of course – fall just before the entrance to Paradise and their suffering is all the greater for they have farther to fall. It was a powerful and resounding masterpiece although I have to admit that it jarred with my own personal theology: I cannot imagine the merciful God of the Gospels being so plain nasty and spiteful.

The Ladder of Virtues fresco, Suceviţa

I liked Suceviţa. I liked its space and its aura. I also liked the tiny chapel on the hilltop above the main monastery and dearly wished I had the time to climb right up to it and stop awhile, but of course, I did not. On the next visit perhaps.

Suceviţa Monastery

On our way back I gazed out of the window and admired the fine Bucovinan cottages that we passed with their fine latticework and broad gables. The countryside, whilst not spectacular, was pretty and a glorious place to be.

I was dropped off in the centre of Gura Humorului and after bidding adieu to my driver and his wife, I retired to a nearby restaurant to enjoy my first meal of the day and whilst waiting for my food, (service here too was Laotian standard), I spent time examining the posters on the nearby billboards.

In Romania there were elections on. Not a full general election, just local ones, but the posters were out in force. However, unlike in Britain where we generally just get a name and the symbol of the party that they represent, these election posters were well worth looking at. All showed photos of the candidates and most of those candidates looked, well… interesting shall we say? Some were full on gangsters; others just dressed in strange, pseudo-traditional costume; others still rather scary whilst some were just plain strange. The one opposite my restaurant terrace however, was the best of them all, a moustachioed guy who looked like your mate’s dad who stands you drinks in the pub. And he had his thumbs up too! Yes indeed, he was the man for the job!

Romania: The country where democracy is eccentric!

Suceava (II)

That evening I had an appointment with Sebastian, the rather morose kid from the internet café. Before we met up I took a stroll around the city and popped into the Roman Catholic church solitary priest was practising on the organ. It was Spartan and classical in style, a total contrast to the gorgeous dark intimacy of the region’s orthodox churches and spoke of lands far to the north and west where the Germans, Hungarians and Poles predominate. It had some poor quality murals including one of a priest being tossed into a river off a bridge by some nasty-looking soldiers.[9] I popped a coin into a slot which lit an electric candle and then left.

I met Sebastian and we went for a drink in Biblioteka, a bar more fashionable than those I’m used to and which had books on the shelves as décor, (hence the name). There he told me that he has no money, no friends except those he’s met on the Web and that he rarely leaves Suceava. I realised that I’d hit the jackpot here with regards to stimulating drinking conversation, so I asked him about the ladies since his blatant ogling at a rather pretty pair on the table opposite suggested that he might not be gay. “Yes, girls are great,” he agreed, staring at the rather long and most definitely uncovered legs of a passing waitress, “but I don’t have a girlfriend. I have no money and you need money to have a girlfriend.” It was sad that he’d realised such a fundamental truth at such a young age – when I was seventeen I still believed that some women cared little for the pennies in your pocket – but fortunately it was not all doom and gloom; his father was working in Italy as a welder and he hoped to join him there. I wondered how a gaming addict who rarely left Suceava would cope in Italy. It all depends on the speed of the broadband connection I suppose.[10]

We walked up to a shwarma place where Seb thought the football, (England were playing France), might be on, passing an enormous new cathedral still under construction. When we got there though, the football was not on, but it was showing next-door so after devouring the kebab, we decamped there to watch an incredibly dour 1-1 draw.

After that Seb had no money but fancied a smoke so I took him to a shop and bought us a cigar apiece and whilst in there encountered a pair of Japanese tourists who were trying to explain to the bemused monolingual shopkeeper that they wanted to buy some of the local liquor. I translated their request into English and then Seb into Romanian and they got their bottle of tuica whilst I Seb was impressed at his new friend’s linguistic abilities and I felt pleased as punch at having spoken in Nihon-go for what was probably the first time in over half a decade.

Seb left then, ashamed to receive anymore handouts, but I was no finished so I retired to the bar where I’d watched the Ireland game the night before to watch the hosts Ukraine unexpectedly defeat Sweden. One of those watching was a Swede and after the game had finished we got talking, a pleasant conversation even if he was, understandably, somewhat glum.

With Seb in Suceava