The wooden churches of Maramures
The minibus that left Baia Mare at 7 am put me down at the crossroads roughly half an hour later. At this time no one along the solitary village road that goes slightly down, flanked by pretty bungalows, not too ancient-looking, but rather well tended and modern, in fact. It is quite far from the image I had prefigured when I read about Maramures being one of the last swathes of land were traditional peasant culture is still alive, not having been swept away yet by the wave of modernity that has changed Europe and the world so deeply in the last decades. These pretty houses don’t do much to evoke pristine peasant life, weren’t it that they stand in a beautiful open countryside of green fields scattered with haystacks and spring flowers. However, it seems that traditional lifestyles are still rooted in this area behind the contemporary façade of the dwellings.
I have come here in search of two examples of wooden churches that are a highlight in this region of Romania, but the first building I see down the road baffles me. It is a rather impressive white church with two side bell towers topped by very steep roofs. It’s all white, including the roofs and it stands out in the gloomy morning air under a cloudy sky. Only after a while do I convince myself this isn’t the church I was looking for, renovated, so I walk further on.
The hostel in Sighet is a bit hard to find and it’s desert. No other guests in the rooms, I am the sole occupant of the portion of the house destined to guests. The floors are wooden, the beautiful dark-haired landlady simply charming.
Sighet looks very different today, a Monday. At this early hour the streets are bustling with students going to school and people from the surrounding villages coming for their shopping, maybe attracted by the two competing foreign supermarkets that little by little will surreptitiously replace the old retailing patterns still made up of high street shops and markets.
I needed to go to Cluj and asked a girl who seemed to be waiting at the bus stop. She said a bus would be coming soon, but a private car pulled up earlier and we all jumped in. During the ride we talked on, in Italian, as she wanted to practise what she’d learnt as a child when she used to spend the summer on the Adriatic coast. When the conversation became less matter-of-fact, however, she switched to fluent English, not without an accent, in spite of her 12 years in the US living on a private island off the coast of Florida.
Sibiu presents itself under a beautiful clear blue sky today, a change from yesterday’s rainy weather. The striking feature of this city was until recently the presence of a considerable Saxon German minority that settled in Transylvania as early as the 11th century and left a strong legacy that became intermingled with other Romanian cultural components. In the 19th century, though, the population that had lived here since the Middle Ages was confronted by the hardships of war, deportation and the dire straits of the communist regime, and when finally in the 1990’s the iron curtain was dismantled, the Saxons were the first to flee the country to join their ethnic fellow countrymen in Germany and Luxemburg.