by I got back yesterday from my latest trip. It was interesting in many ways but I struggled to relax, probably because a trip like that requires a certain level of organisation, and being organised is always something I have to work at.
On Tuesday I did 487 km getting up to Bârsana. A few more than I needed to; for that I can blame crappy signs (or lack of them) and myself for not using GPS. The campsite was two kilometres up a steep lane from the town of Bârsana. It was basic and when I arrived it was pretty empty. There were three host cats; the woman at the entrance was slightly surprised that I didn’t have a dog. I pitched the tent between apple and plum trees. My first night was starry like I hadn’t seen in years – I wish now I’d stayed up to watch the meteor shower – which also meant it was much colder than I’d bargained for. There was the pleasant clang of cowbells, and in the early morning the sound of cockerels. Over breakfast the next morning I chatted to a French couple, using a mix of English and French. After speaking French for a bit, or trying to, I then had to talk to the campsite owner in Romanian; what came out of my mouth was pure gibberish, as it often is when I have to switch between two foreign languages.
On Wednesday I visited the 600-year-old wooden Orthodox monastery in Bârsana – there was wooden everything for miles around, making the whole region visually distinctive. There was a lot to see outside the engine room of the place which was closed to visitors. I then drove to another, much smaller, monastery on the other side of the Iza river; not much to see there, so I sat for a bit by the river and read my book – Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. The author is a clever bugger. After that I spend a couple of hours in the town of Ocna Șugatag, whose name conjures up images of a childhood game. (An ocnă is apparently a salt mine; I’d visit one of them a bit later.)
I was more prepared for the cold on the second night. The following morning was the most strangely fascinating part of the whole trip as I visited Cimitirul Vesel – the Merry Cemetery – in Săpânța. A well-known tourist attraction, this consists of an ornate church surrounded by hundreds of brightly painted wooden gravestones.
Each “stone” has a naive picture of the deceased, usually illustrating what they did for a living, and below that a poem giving the story of the person’s life, sometimes in informal dialect rather than strict grammatically correct Romanian, and always in the first person. These poems could be amusing (merry if you like) but often they told tales of great sadness. Accidents, long illnesses, lost loved ones, the running theme that these people did everything they could. They died young, or they lived to a good age but saw their friends and family die young. One or the other, mostly. Worst of all might have been a three-year-old girl, together with an illustration of the tractor that ran her over. It was interesting to see people’s jobs – there was the occasional picture of a teacher at a blackboard but for the most part they worked on the land, as they still do now. No management consultants, no business development managers, no actuaries. And no pure housewives either; the women did (and do) hard physical work, just like the men. (It’s a very common sight in a village to see women carrying rakes and scythes.) It isn’t clear how this unusual tradition of painted stones came about. They’re made in a workshop nearby and each one takes considerable time.
Above is one of the happier stones. Irina was a part-housewife who weaved woollen cergi (rugs, I suppose) as you can see in the picture. She taught her children, enjoyed her time with her grandchildren, and wishes nothing for the best for them all. She hopes they grow old like she did. She lived to 93.
I spent the rest of the day at Sighet, or Sighetul Marmației to give it its full name. It was my third time there. I visited a small museum and read more of my book in the park.
Above are just some of the tennis trophies in the museum. There was a local champion in the over-70s.
Above is a selection of locally produced board games. They all got published; presumably they were crowd-funded. One of them uses a whopping 72 dice.
A few pictures from Sighet. Dogs in doorways seemed to be a theme.
After a third night in the tent, in which it rained, it was time to make tracks.