Driving over the Gutâi Pass into northern Romania’s Mara valley the signs were good: a summit mysterious with cloud, an old woman selling honey by the road, and as we dropped out of the forest and back into sunlight, long panoramas of rolling countryside dotted with hay stooks leading off into the purple ridges of the Carpathians. People say that if you want old Europe, a place steeped in the rhythms of nature and skills lost elsewhere, then Romania’s Maramures region is for you. Guidebooks talk of medieval isolation and ways of life unchanged since the third century AD. And then there was William Blacker’s sublime 2009 book The Enchanted Way which cast a deeply romantic glow over the entire place. No wonder we were fired up with great expectations.
So when we began to see the villages, there was some consternation. Yes, there were a lot of traditional wooden houses with great square ornamental gateways and barns where homemade haymaking tools were leaning. But there were other buildings too: block-built houses with ugly balconies and UPVC windows. These did not fit. Nor did the old man in a Chelsea football shirt. Expectations are vital in the travel trade and ours were not being met, not yet at least.
We reached the village of Breb and checked in at Pensiunea Marioara (doubles from £33 B&B). Did we want a room in the old wooden house in the garden, or one in the new, more substantial, concrete house? We chose the concrete house because we could look at the wooden house from our balcony. There was traditional Maramures music playing, but on CD. It was incessantly jaunty. Our hostess, Marioara, soothed us with excellent homemade delicacies. Next day we set out walking. The wooden churches of the area were a big reason to come here, but the first we came to was of concrete. A conversation with an old basket maker was abruptly terminated by three Italian tourists who stepped between us, taking pictures.
We wandered on, a little disconcerted, towards the village of Hoteni. The plum trees were laden with fruit and the freshly cut meadows were speckled with stooks. At the church I watched a man remove his straw hat – the oddly conical be-ribboned traditional Maramures one – and cross himself as he passed. Nearby, the road was being rebuilt and there were traffic lights and growling lorries: we cut away across country, following any path we could find. An eagle soared. We ate our lunch in the shade of a walnut tree. My wife Sophie and daughter Maddy headed back to Breb while I made a detour, up a hill to where two men, both named Vasile, were loading hay on a horse-drawn cart. One of them spoke French. I had a go at forking hay, but the older Vasile soon took the tool back. “There’s rain coming, we’ll have to be quicker.” A few minutes later I found myself sitting on top of the wagon, lurching down secret back roads to his house where I was taught how to stook and rewarded with a tot of homemade spirits.
Where was the wooden church, I asked? Vasile showed me a path and along it I met another man, also called Vasile. My journey was interrupted with a trip to his house where I drank from his well. At the church I watched woodpeckers attacking the steeple, then wandered on, coming across an old man in a traditional smock, negotiating the price of a football-sized cheese with a man on horseback. I walked with him to his house and found his grandson helping to re-shingle the roof. “Where are you going?” he asked. It turned out he was on holiday from a job in London. “Is your name Vasile?” I asked. It was, and it was his grandfather’s name too.
“Maramures has changed a lot,” he said, “People have gone abroad and made money and now are building new houses.” But this Vasile, only 28 years old, had a view on that. “It all happened very fast, but now we are realising that we have to value the old and traditional too. I’m rebuilding my grandfather’s house, but I won’t change a thing – it will be all traditional, exactly like a century ago.”
He showed me inside, the two rooms hung with embroidered hangings and the roof studded with cooking pots. Back outside the 89-year-old was helping his 86-year-old wife dig out a ditch. When I asked for a photograph, she screeched in alarm and disappeared, only to reappear with a fresh headscarf, “You can’t photograph me in that old thing.”
“They stay young by working,” said the younger Vasile. “They don’t retire or watch television.”
When I got back to Breb, Sophie and Maddy reported similar experiences: helping an old lady mash pears and plums ready for brandy-making and watching others spin wool with distaffs. Maramures, we concluded, still has enchantments and a few parts of life may be unchanged since medieval times, but not all.
The next day we drove right up the valley heading east, and took the Mocăniţa, a steam railway starting from Viseu de Sus. The line was built in 1932 and run primarily for logging operations in the remote mountain forests on the Ukraine border. Tourists, however, now provide a big subsidiary income. The train lurched and shuddered up the gorge of the river Vaser in a charmingly random fashion, 22km up to a logging station, Paltin, where we had lunch and walked for an hour in one of Europe’s most remote forests. Back at the locomotive I chatted to our driver, Dumitru Brendea. “There is nowhere better than Maramures,” he said. And the culture, I wondered, did he love it? Yes. And the music? His face clouded over. “No. Not me. I love The Rolling Stones.”
• Wild Frontiers provided Kevin’s walking tour (a section of the Enchanted Way). Full 10-day tour is £1,745 inc food, accommodation, land transport, not flights, 020 7736 3968, wildfrontierstravel.com. Roving Romania assisted with the visit to the Mocăniţa railway (roving-romania.co.uk)
Follow Kevin’s journey on instagram.com/kevinrushby; contribute your tips on things for him to see and do on the way on twitter.com/kevin_rushby; and read the previous weeks’ dispatches at gu.com/p/4bjv9/stw
