Sheep in diaspora

Thanks to my occasional 'day job' of guiding British visitors around Romania, I'm lucky to get several trips here a year.  One tour has just ended and the next is about to start, so in the breathing space between them, I want to record a few of the new insights that are lighting my way to what I hope will by a richly rewarding transhumant experience that will help to remind us just how much we owe to sheep and shepherds.  One of these flashes has come from Alexandru Surdu's book, Scheii Brasovului.  The book is a fascinating history of the Schei district of Brasov, published in 1981 after years of frustration and stone-walling by his fellow academics, censors, publishers and the like.  Schei was inhabited long before the Saxons elbowed their way into Brasov.  It (probably) gets its name from the Slavs that swirled in and out following the Romans' withdrawal from Dacia in 271AD - but Schei was also a cauldron of other peoples with their own long-forgotten claims to belonging here, including Cumans, Pechenegs and the Dacians themselves. 

Tomorrow (12th May), if you can get here in time, you can enjoy the spectacle of a spring-time rite of passage that dates back to the Dacian pastoralists who lived, loved, herded sheep and fought here so long ago.  Called Junii, a word for youth, it is a gathering of clans of men who have sworn eternal brotherhood.  They dress up in all kinds of weird and wonderful variations on traditional Dacian costumes and parade - or gallop - on sturdy semi-grei (small cart-horses) from Schei through the old Saxon citadel and back to the grassy glades of Pietrele lui Solomon to get legless.  Pietrele lui Solomon, or Solomon's Rocks, are cones of schist which close this end of the city in mountainous mystery.  It promises to be very hot. 

On another spare day, I walked to Pietrele lui Solomon myself.  You can carry on panting up forestry roads far beyond them until you reach Poiana Brasov, or you can meander off into the leafy woods in scores of other directions, sucking in moss-clean air and quite forgetting that Transylvania's second largest conurbation lies at your feet.  Spring sprung quickly in Romania this year - it took two weeks from cold winter and dead, yellow grass, to temperatures of 30 degrees Celsius and greenery bursting out all over.  At the moment the apples, plums, apricots, pears and cherries are at their tender best, with blossom drifting about on the roads as if it grew on trees. 

In Piata Uniri, Schei's main square, stands a 15th century Orthodox Church with spires like you see on a Disney castle.  Disney must have copied them, though, because these are the real McCoy, and this church, dedicated to Sf. Niculae, is the most important centre of Romanian culture in Brasov if not the whole of Transylvania.  Why?  Because it was here in the 16th century that a group of theologians and teachers got together and opened the first Romanian school, founded the first Romanian printing press, and here where there is the largest collection of Romanian manuscripts in the entire country.  

The school and printing press were housed together in a charming two-storey 18th century building which is now a museum.  You can visit it for the price of a packet of chewing gum and, if you have any Romanian at all, treat yourself to a presentation by the priest, Parintele Olteanu.  I just happened to be there at the same time as a group of secondary school kids, and the banter was fast and furious.

Upstairs in the museum there is a display of some of the museum's precious Romanian literature, written in Cyrillic letters (Romanian did not use a Roman alphabet until the 19th century), and to catch the children's interest before it disintegrated into mobile phone conversations, Parintele Olteanu asked them who they thought was the most famous Romanian character in the world.  'Dracula' was the - predictable - reply.  But who was the real Dracula?  'Vlad Tepes' came the shout.  'Not at all', replied Parintele, and he went on to give a account of the blood-curdling activities of Countess Erzsebet Bathori, a 16th century Czech noblewoman who believed that bathing in virgins' blood would keep her young.  'She was the real Dracula', said Parintele, 'and Vlad Tepes had nothing to do with Bram Stoker's fictional Transylvanian count.  Stoker read about the Countess on a visit to Prague and realised that she was the perfect model for the vampire he was looking for'.  All he had to do was change her gender and move the location to the mysterious Land Beyond the Forest - Transylvania.  But where was Dracula's castle?  'Bran', said someone.  'No, absolutely not: it was near Bistrita [northern Transylvania]' - and that does tally with Bram Stoker's tale, since his Dracula lived near the Borgo Pass (Pasul Bargaului) which is near Bistrita.

When the kids had filed out, declaring that they had not been bored, Parintele Olteanu gave me five minutes of his busy time.  I mentioned my interest in transhumance, and received another flash: Parintele Olteanu is a brother of Parintele Pavel of J, the one who raised the money to restore the paintings in the 18th century Orthodox church, and the one who told me so much about one of Romania's most famous shepherding villages, and the villagers' independent, self-reliant spirit.

I rang Ghita before I began the last tour.  He was on the road with his sheep near Cluj, and sounded as though he were suffering from lack of sleep.  He and Andreea have a daughter.  I cannot wait to see them and their families again.

And today, the Polish-Romanian-Ukrainian transhumance must have set out from Rotbav on its 100 day journey across the Carpathians to Koniakow.  It would have been great to be there but I had to stay in Brasov to prepare for the next tour.  I heard that an Austrian film company is making a documentary about the trek for the BBC. 

Meanwhile my Georgian (Caucasus) friend, Devi, is leading her own transhumant tours with people rather than sheep, but we have a lively dialogue going about who will visit whose shepherding country first: she is as passionate about shepherding as me, and with her German-Javanese-Turkic background, keeps coming out with the most amazing facts - such as that one of her Turkic grandfathers was a shepherd in the Crimea, which makes me wonder if it is possible that his path crossed those of the Romanians heading east with their flocks of Turcana, and later Karakul, and if so, what they thought of and said to each other.

Eye-balling sheep

As a nr. 8 bus whisked me into the centre of Cluj on Thursday, it passed a little park where I noticed one or two shiny new tractors on display.  I was dazed from the flight and the heat, and wondered idly what was going on there.  Three hours later I was back, meekly following in the wake of my energetic farming friend, Alina, who informed me that this was the 19th edition of the Cluj Agricultural Show, which is the second largest farming extravaganza in Romania - Bucharest hosts the biggest one.

It was a sweltering afternoon - 30 degrees - and I felt sorry for the caged and penned animals in their thick coats who had only a light awning to keep them cool.  They had been washed and brushed to perfection, and strolling up and down the rows gave me a chance to do some homework: at last, thanks to Alina, I know that the Tigaie is not a cross between Turcana and Merino, but a breed of its own which has a shorter fleece and better meat than the elegant Turcana (my favourite), and that the Mangalita pig, which is a small, demure animal with a bristly, reddish coat resembling a wild boar's, is low in cholesterol which ought to make it a winner in the food-faddy West. 

Alina gave me some other interesting information about how certain sheep farmers of her acquaintance manage to obtain subsidies for hundreds of animals that they do not in fact possess, thanks to their relationship with certain mayors who hand out these subsidies - butter would not melt of course.  I also learnt that the priest who officiated at the mass exorcism I witnessed just over a year ago also keeps sheep: his name was on two pens containing some Turcana ewes.  Except that I believe his 'volunteers' do the hard work.  It does make me worry about the Orthodox Church's attitude to Christianity. 

Leaving the animals, we walked in the sunlight along rows of glistening red, blue and green machinery - not two shiny tractors, but scores of them together with combines, cow presses, spanking new Allen scythes, which are a boon to mountain farmers with lots of pasture to mow but a crying shame for those of us who love to watch men at work with the slow, sweeping rhythm that they develop when wielding a manual scythe, which cuts short and close without making a horrid noise.  Having tried a bit of manual scything myself, I know how hard it is on your back and hands but it does a better job around tree trunks! 

Finally we went into the food and crafts tent, which was about to close.  There, in a corner stand, almost alone, was Mrs Pascu, the pretty, buxom, happy-looking (though not in my picture) wife of a transhumant shepherd called Vasile who has just given up his regular sheep walk between Muntele Mare in the Apuseni and Satu Mare (at a rough guess, a distance of 150 miles).  She was clearing away a bowl of delicious telemea - salty sheep's cheese, a bit like feta - and sucking on a few stray pieces, we passed the time of day and shot out again, Alina first, with me in her slipstream, to look at some peperite (quails).  Alina wanted some for her own farm.  The fowls and rabbits were also beautifully coiffed, but housed in cages that were too small for them so that the quails were falling over each other, and on wire bases so they had to walk gingerly if they could move at all.  It was depressing, but not as bad as real factory farming, which is little comfort to the beasts.  All of which ought to turn me into a vegetarian.  I'll let you know...  

Note: I'll give the pictures captions later, must get some sleep now because it's 3.55am here.  I must be barmy. 

The cloakmaker

Constantin Vîngârzan must be one of the few sheepskin cloakmakers left in Romania, but such is the prevalence of sheep farmers in the village of J, where he lives, 900 metres up in the Southern Carpathians, that there are two of them there.  When I called round at Constantin's house, he showed me into one of those super-tidy courtyards where suburban modernity and old-fashioned wonkiness whirl round each other in a dance so fast that it can only be happening at molecular level.  Plastic windows, mirror glass and chrome balcony railings versus uneven cobbles and good, solid wood doors, and not a speck of mud or even dust - my head was spinning with the disorientation - no sign of the rich dirt that surrounded us, here in the wild, magnificent mountains, and this in mid-autumn when the concrete road outside was lined with dung, earth and leaf litter like a proper rural village.  I still found it hard to get used to the differences between how J looked from the street and from inside the domestic citadels that functioned as family homes and farmsteads.  They must have been copied from the hugger-mugger style of building which the Transylvanian Saxons developed: cheek by jowl for protection, and sealed like containers from prying eyes. 

Dl Vîngârzan's workshop lay at the back of the property, and was in the same neat state as the yard.  You had to go through a kind of conservatory to reach it, and once out back, the craftsman's studio turned out to be converted animal barns.  Looking up, I realised there were rows of new wool cloaks hanging in a huge loft above my head.  It felt as though I were tunnelling like a mole under a forest of creamy-white fur and the muffled atmosphere made that sensation more real.  Not for the first time, I realised how luxurious humble sheep's wool can be and the smell of oily fleeces and leather was intoxicating.  

First catch your fleece 

Before he can start, Dl Vîngârzan has to get hold of the sheepskins.  He keeps some capes in stock, but he generally makes them to order, and usually his clients bring him their own skins, from their own freshly-slaughtered sheep.  A single full-size cloak takes three or four skins, but before he can get down to tailoring them, he has to cure them - which he does in a tank containing a mixture of fairly toxic smelling chemicals), then he must clean, dry and sand them before cutting and sewing the leather which he does more or less by hand, although he uses a small electrically-powered sanding machine.  He let me watch him at work at his sewing table, where he sped through the process of cutting the skins into the right shape to fit round the shoulders in the light of a single electric bulb, and then sewed them together with lightning accuracy.  He skill was masterly but it was poignant to realise that as close shepherding dies out in Romania, this beautiful craft will probably disappear as well.  The Vîngârzans' children are not interested in taking the business over, and you cannot blame them because the market must be shrinking, if you will excuse the pun, and in these times, such a painstaking way of making money is not regarded as cool.  You can still find cloakmakers hawking their skins at the animal fairs that take place at villages in this area throughout the year.   

Until now I have made the mistake of calling these ankle-length, sleeveless sheepskin cloaks which shepherds wear with the fleece outside, cojoace.  Mr. Vîngârzan calls himself a cojocar, which comes from the same root.  None of the shepherds I met has ever corrected me, but a page from the brilliant anthropological website, Eliznik, shows that the correct terminology for the shaggy capes is either sarică or bituşcă, while a cojoc (pl. cojoace) is a sheepskin coat with sleeves.  

I have seen photographs of sarice (plural of sarică) with very long sleeves and the fleece worn inside, but as far as I know these are mainly worn on ceremonial occasions and decorated with embroidery.  The long sleeves look exaggerated, like the sleeves of a kimono, and very elegant on the men who carry the coats draped around their shoulders, with the sleeves hanging loose, as they do at New Year rituals, but the sleeves had a practical purpose - to protect shepherds' arms during blizzards.  And having worn a sarică and even slept in one, I can say that they are very much like a house.  Hmmm, imagine a whole building made of sheepskins... 

 

Spring transhumance - it's that time again

The first of April is the official start for the spring transhumance in Romania, because it is usually the day after winter grazing arrangements come to an end.  It means that shepherds have to get their sheep safely across country before the young crops appear on the unfenced strips that patchwork the hillsides and dales.  I am hoping to contact my friends to see how they are getting on in the next week or so.   

1st of May is the day when the joint Polish-Ukrainian-Romanian transhumance begins.  The trek from Brasov county in southern Transylvania to the borderland between Poland and Slovakia is set to take 100 days.  Its aim is to raise awareness of the benefits of extensive farming, pasturing animals in mountain areas to encourage biodiversity, and of slow food. 

At the end of this month - with luck - I'll be off again to find out about the connections between Marginimea Sibiului - an area where people are staunchly proud of their Romanian origins - and villages of 'Ungureni' (Transylvanian shepherds) on the southern side of the Carpathian Mountains.  The fact that these ties existed was almost the first thing I learnt about the Marginime, nearly 20 years ago.  Noted experts such as Corneliu Bucur and Dumitru Budrala told me that the Oltenian and Muntenian shepherding communities were founded in the late 18th century by Margineni on the run from the Habsburgs who destroyed their Orthodox churches and wanted to conscript them as border guards.  Before you start protesting about the beneficial effects of the Habsburg Empire, I know that things are hardly ever black and white, and that there was a more positive trade-off, as for example when villages in the Marginime received land and privileges in return for their military support. 

Meanwhile, I have been looking at the history of Margineni shepherds in southern Russia and the Caucasus between c. 1880 and 1950, with the aim of going there to see if there are any traces of them left, and also looking for people who know about shepherding in Georgia and Azerbaijan.  The search has already revealed some fascinating characters, about whom I hope to tell you as soon as I get the time!  It's all go... 

Portrait of a shepherd

Nicu R is scouring pots by the fire.  He has his head down, concentrating on scraping off the remains of polenta which have solidified on the metal.  When he looks up I see that his eyebrows meet in the middle, making a curve like an arrow's flight across his forehead.  His sardonic expression suggests that he is older than his 21 years; his small stature and sweetness of countenance make him seem much younger.  When he holds his soggy footwraps to the heat, they steam as though in pain. 

Nicu may be short but he is immensely strong.  He proved his strength a couple of years ago, when he brained a landowner who had knocked down his boss, Ghiţa’s father, over a disputed trespass.  I had heard a version of the story from Dragoş Lumpan: the shepherds were taking the flock to their winter grazing, it was nearly dark, and the sheep may or may not have strayed onto a field of lucerne.  When the angry landowner floored Simion, Nicu attacked him with his bâta, a tough hazel staff.  As Nicu went for him, the man had raised his forearm in self-defence.  Nicu broke that as well.   

He was put away on a charge of attempted murder.  He could have got 15 years, but, happily, the man Nicu attacked survived.  Ghiţa hired a lawyer to defend the young shepherd.  After 18 months in gaol, Nicu returned to the fold.   

Nicu comes from Mediaş, a town in central Transylvania, and has worked as a hired shepherd for eight years.  Here he is, at 9.30pm on 30th January, drying his ciorapi after a supper of pastrama (mutton) grilled on the embers, and bread.  Above his head, the stars are diamonds in black ink.  Scents of sheep's dung and wood smoke mingle with frost: I could make a pretentious reference to olfactory challenges here but will not.  I can think of few more live-giving smells.  The sheep, gathered a few yards away in an unfenced orchard, gossip and bicker among themselves.  A molly ewe shimmies down to the fire, nosing for scraps.  Her silky tresses glint in the firelight. *

Ghiţa and the other three men, Tica, Dinu and Sorin, had left for the night, leaving Nicu to look after the sheep.  Ghiţa was going to his wife who was staying with her mother, 15 miles to the east.  Andreea was expecting their first child and Ghiţa was more than usually preoccupied.  Like Ghiţa, the others were two hundred miles from home.  They had come north from the Southern Carpathian Mountains to help him build a lambing shelter.  I did not know where they were lodging. 

I was there out of curiosity: having started a book about transhumance, I wanted to know more about what shepherding in Romania was really like.  It was hard to tell what effect prison had had on Nicu, but his self-possession was impressive.  He was articulate too.  This surprised me: although I knew it was patently untrue, I must still have thought that being often illiterate, hired shepherds were idiots as well.  I did not know if Nicu could write, but his brain seemed as sharp as an icicle.     

Ignoring Ghiţa’s advice to doss down with the pups in the barn, I accepted Nicu’s invitation to make my bed on a slope in the orchard behind the yard.  He brought an extra cojoc for me to lie on, then helped to  lower me like a ladder to the ground, where I lay like a shag pile mummy, listening to the sheep’s jaws clicking as they snipped sparse shoots of grass.

“Cojocul e casa ciobanului.”  ‘The shepherd’s house’ is what they call these armless, ankle-length sheepskin greatcoats which make the eastern European shepherds who wear them look prehistoric.  The cloaks have the fleece on the outside, and once installed, you feel as safe as a castle. 

Nicu lay about three feet away in his own cojoc and asked me about sex.  For some reason I did not mind all that much.  It was like being interrogated by a younger brother, or a nephew, and whatever the reason for his enquiries, I took them as genuine curiosity, not seeing any prurience or other suspect motive behind them.  

Time passed, and I remained rigid in my cloak.  Cold crept from my feet up to my shins, not quite reaching my knees.  I kept my head tucked well inside the tickling hairs, lulled by the ewes’ stertorous breathing when they finally slumped down to rest.  

At 2 am, a call of nature made me get up fast.  Nicu had disappeared.  A silver light glinted on intricate patterns of pale grey-green lichen which grew on the bark of the plum trees.  Although it was nearly freezing, there was an exhilarating tang in the air.  It consisted of sheep, wet earth, snow, and countless other night-time smells from woods and mountains.  

At 8 the following morning, Ghiţa shattered my fragile peace.  He was furious.  “Where the hell have you got to?  Why aren’t the sheep out on the hill?  What the damn do you think you’re doing letting the donkeys into the hay?”  For a moment I thought he was firing all that at me, but as his boots stomped past my head, I realised it was Nicu he was after, so I kept cavy. 

Five minutes later, I picked my way down to the farmyard, carefully keeping the cloak out of the mud.  It was too late for that; the beautifully tailored skins which Ghiţa had dropped onto my shoulders the previous evening were already besmirched with snow and soil.  Probably I had twigs in my hair. 

Ghiţa was so cross that I was afraid to look him in the face.  I felt a sudden empathy with the bitch who cowered on the edge of the human circle with her tail between her legs.  We were both ravenous.  Sensing the tension, Tica, Dinu and Sorin were pretty quiet, too.  Not knowing what to say, I lifted the cojoc onto a gate to dry, and returned for the other, smaller one.  Having acted as my mattress, it was in a far worse state.  There was no sign of Nicu. 

Dinu fashioned a spatula out of a scrap of pine that had come from a pallet.  Instead of leaving its sides smooth and ordinary, he cut symmetrical steps into its shoulders making a piece of rubbish into something special.    

“Doamna, mâncaţi!”  It was an order, but welcome: I was afraid Ghiţa would ban me from eating.  We had bulz.  This is a wodge of mămăliga squashed around melted sheep’s cheese so that it resembles a miniature rugby ball.  We cooked our own in the ashes of the fire which Tica had started again, amongst the sheep and donkey dung.  Trying to distract myself, I looked for abstract patterns in the shit.  I scoffed my charred bulz while it was still burning, cradling it in my hands like a grenade.  It was delicious but stodgy and there was nothing to wash it down with except chemical green juice from a two-litre bottle.  Sorin passed it to me; the sugar rush was surprisingly good - in the circumstances I was grateful for anything. 

An hour or so later, Ghiţa handed me a plastic carrier bag.  “Will you take this to copilul?  He hasn’t had any breakfast.  He’s over there, on the other side of the hill; go past that big tree up there and keep heading to the right.”  Copil means child: since the youngster had defended Ghiţa's father, there was a close bond between them, though given the force of Ghiţa's rages you might be surprised to hear that.  I scurried off, glad to be doing something useful. 

The hills were cheetah skins: spots of sodden black earth spattered with beige grass, and melting snow. 

Nicu was standing in a wide hollow.  For an instant, in his conical căciula, he was an emperor surveying his kingdom.  An amoeba of sheep were his people: they nibbled submissively around him but could explode into 500 hydra at any minute.  His dog, an elderly, dark grey Puli bitch called Linda, was keeping close to Nicu’s heels. 

“What was it like in prison?”

“A fost, a fost.... între Dumnezeu şi dracul.  It was hell.  La început, a fost cumplit.  Horrible at first.  They kept moving me from place to place, so I never got to know anyone.  N-am potut să mă obişnuiesc cu nimic.” 

“Were you lonely?”

“Da. I felt like an animal’s prey.  Nobody helped you.  Have you seen those films about American jails?  It was like that.  Think about it.”

He was looking straight at me. 

“They beat me too.”

“Why?”

“I had a phone, and it wasn’t allowed.  So.... two or three of the prison inmates piled on top of me, and beat me up.”

His jaw was set. 

“This, this... stuff you’re giving me, it’s useless.”  He peeled one of the mandarins I had brought, along with chocolate and bananas, as a present for the shepherds.  “We need more than this.”

Who ‘we’ were, and what more, I did not ask.  It felt insensitive, as though I ought to have known: Nicu is one of the thousands of destitute Romanian kids who are struggling to make a decent lives.  And to make themselves heard, I thought.  When we met at Stâna Domnilor the previous autumn he told me he had been to school, but I did not believe his assurance came from book learning.  Nicu knew what the world was about, and he did not need any footling do-gooders muddying his waters.

“Ghiţa taught me to use the Bible.”  He opened his hands as though proffering a copy of the precious book.  So he could read after all. 

“Tu te sălbăticeşti.”  You get a little wild here.  Nicu's gaze wandered off to the horizon.  “Şi m-am întors la oile.  E liniştit.  E bine.”  ("I came back to the sheep.  It is peaceful.  It is well.") 

Before I could reply, he sped away: the flock was on the move and keeping them safe was his first and only responsibility. 

It was time for a discreet withdrawal.  Lambing had not yet started, and although
Ghiţa had said I would be welcome, my time was running out.  A friend, the abbess of a nearby Orthodox monastery, said I could stay for a while and I decided to go there before I flew back to a country where, in theory at least, a beneficent state looks after the weak. 

At the edge of the road that ran down to the village, I looked back.  The sheep had come over the ridge before me, and were heading slowly for the farm.  Nicu was concentrating on keeping the animals together and had his head down.  I called “Să trăiţi” – which means something like “Take care”.  He looked up briefly and shouted, “Drum bun!” 

In the farmyard, Ghiţa explained his outburst: “I was worried about you; you could have got ill.”  I was sad to have upset him, and moved by his care for me.  But I had wanted to hear Nicu's take on things for a long time.    


Who learnt the most from our meeting?  Spending time with Ghiţa and his shepherds had blasted my preconceptions about what poverty means.  There is a loyalty on both sides.  Travelling together over such long distances, far from help, they have to rely on each other.  I have heard hired shepherds complain about their conditions, and their bosses complain that their employees live in clover.  I could not endure the shepherd's life, but then I have not grown up the same way.  It is easy for people in remote offices to dictate how others should and should not live, while not really understanding what their lives are like.  (For a similar discussion which is much better informed, see anthropologist Katy Fox's doctoral thesis on life in two rural valleys of northern Argeş).  

I cannot bear to see small farms disappear in a welter of ignorant bureaucratic huffings, and financiers' greed.  They are destroying things which are beyond price - extended families and closely-knit communities which are part of a social order that works, not to speak of ecosystems, clean air and water...  


There is much talk about bad shepherds in Romania, where, as in Britain, farmers are generally despised.  No doubt there are dreadful, tragic cases, but I saw every instance of negative press about close shepherding and transhumance as another nail in the coffin of a tradition that had so much to recommend it, not only because it stands at the other extreme from factory farming, but because it gives people and animals a sense of belonging to the universe which you never get in an office - and certainly not in an animal processing plant.  That statement presupposes that Ghiţa's animals are humanely slaughtered, which I am pretty sure they are not.  

You can find a discussion of how sheep are treated when they leave the farm in the post, 'Stand up for sheep', in this blog, but both shepherds and animals need understanding if we are not to disappear down the Polish road demonstrated by Tracy Worcester's film, Pig Business.  (As to that, Smithfield, the giant American food corporation, has already arrived in Romania so my bland hopes are also too late.) 
 
Nicu and Ghiţa are among the shepherds whom Dragoş Lumpan has interviewed for his forthcoming film, The Last Transhumance.  
 

*Ghiţa’s sheep are Ţurcana, whose ancestors scampered about in the Himalayas.  Although their wool is too coarse for fine city clothes, they are good all-rounders, and hardy enough for the bitter Carpathian winters.   

During the Communist period, Romanian shepherds were persuaded to abandon the Ţurcana in favour of fattier types which gave softer wool (Ţigaie and Merino), but since 1989, most oieri (sheep farmers) have returned to their trusted long-haired breed.  (During Ceauşescu’s rule, Romanian sheep farmers benefited from fixed prices for milk, meat and wool.   

After the Revolution, the market for Romanian sheep’s wool more or less collapsed, in line with global trends.  Competition from New Zealand forced Romania’s lambs’ meat and wool trade down further, and although there are signs - in Britain - of new uses for wool, for example, as buildings’ insulation as well as a revival of wool as clothing and carpets - exporting lambs for meat is Romania’s great hope in terms of making sheep farming a viable business.  Romania has one of the largest national sheep flocks in Europe.) 

 
 

   

   

Calling the bear

As she invites me into her modest kitchen-cum-sitting-room-cum bedroom, Maria Sterp appraises me warily.  Am I going to turn out to be one of those literary vultures who have been using her work to promote their own glory?  It is a forgivable thought, since as a prolific creator of verse without any institution to protect her, she is vulnerable to all kinds of exploitation.    

Maria had loved making up poems as a child but never had the time to concentrate on this passion until a bout of illness in her 60s prevented her from returning to her work as a cheese-maker in the mountain folds.  

Her writing is simple, repetitive and direct, but its content is profound.  It embraces everything she knows and cares about, the real people and places that have shaped her life.  Maria models her poetry on strigături, the taunting call-and-response sequences between men and women, accompanied by a lot of stamping, that are used to entertain audiences at traditional dances and concerts. 

Here she is talking about why she writes:

Tot am vrut să fac şi eu

Ceva pentru satul meu.

Daca aş fi ştiut cânta,

Îmi stâmpăram inima.

Dar dacă glas n-am avut,

M-am gândit la ce-am putut:

Să scriu despre fiecare

Care unde moşii are.

Aşa am vorbit cu drag

De toţi oamenii din sat

Şi am vorbit cu mare dor

Despre moşiile lor... 

(Everything I have wanted to do

Has been for my village.

If I had known how to sing,

It would have soothed my heart.

But if I didn’t have a voice,

I had to think what I could do:

To write about everyone

Who has their family here.

So I have spoken with love

About everyone in my village

Am I’ve written with longing

About their homes...*

(*This is my translation.)

I first read about Maria in a book she collaborated on with the film-maker, Dumitru Budrala.  This publication, called Ultimi Păstori and put out by the Astra Museum, Sibiu, in 2006, reproduces many of her verses, is full of luscious photographs, and it gives a good deal of historical background about the village of J.  Although Dumitru Budrala praises Maria Sterp's unique talent, you could be forgiven for assuming she is a rather naive, unschooled individual, and that he ‘discovered’ her, in the same way that Svengali discovered Trilby. 

It was not until I met Maria herself that I realised that she was nothing like this image: she is not only beautiful and distinguished-looking, she is nobody’s fool, and although modest, she would pass for an intellectual in any company.  Maria has written several books of her own about J (they are published by Editura Salgo in Sibiu).  What drives her is a passion for her birthplace, her fellow villagers and their history. 

The more I read of Maria’s - and other local writers’ - work, the more I want to know.  It seems to me that this village has a special personality: it is both rural and sophisticated, down to earth and spiritual, go-getting and relaxed.  It has these qualities because there are still a lot of children and young people here as well as maturer bodies, and because it is far enough away from the big urban centres to be a self-reliant community.   

It is said that the people of J were proto-capitalists when the rest of the country was still communist.  They have certainly had some advantages – managing to avoid certain taxes which allowed individuals to build up their own, personal flocks, but the village has made plenty of sacrifices, too.  During 1761-62 when Nicholaus Adolf von Bukow, an Austrian general acting for the Empress Maria Theresa, ordered all Transylvania’s Orthodox churches to be destroyed, many people from J and other Mărgineni communities fled over the mountains to the south taking their animals with them (1).  Those who remained clung to their churches and refused to become Roman Catholics.  J was one of the villages that held on to its Orthodox Church, and very pretty it is too. 

Later, though, the men of J were persuaded to join the Habsburg army as border guards; in return J received a great deal of mountain pasture which it preserves to this day: its gain was other villages’ loss.  An often-quoted statistic says that J’s total land holdings cover same area as Bucharest but the land in question is pasture rather than built-up, and it still looks and feels like a village.

A legend says that J was founded by a fierce, brave woman from Oltenia who led the original inhabitants up into the mountains to escape from persecution by the Saxons.  Her name was Zina, which in Romanian means something like Fairy.  This happened in the 1390s and the first houses were built on a hill to one side of the present-day village; it is called Nedeie, commemorating the annual girls’ fair that was held there, in June.   

Wandering there one hot day last October, I found a handful of lonely-looking colibi (summer farms) and an overgrown cart track leading through a wood of tall silver birches.  Passing an orchard I caught sight of Ghita’s uncle tending his apple trees.  He gave me a bottle of spring water to quench my thirst.  A flock of sheep came down from the hill top way above our heads.  Ghita’s uncle asked me, “What on earth are you doing here?”.  It was quite a sharp question, as though I had no right to be so far from civilisation.  Yet we were only a mile or so from the centre of J.  The ground was dusty and practically bare, because of the drought and so much grazing.  On my way down a steep lane to the valley before Nedeie, I had startled a black squirrel, but the heat was searing and there were hardly any other signs of life. 

As the shadows lengthened, the deep silence of the mountains and the pure, warm air created a feeling of languour and reassurance.  It was as though the mountain was mine.  From where I was standing, you could survey a quarter of the Transylvanian Plateau, its business trifling and remote.  Tiny puffs of white smoke rose from the huge wood processing plant in Sebeş to the west, and on the horizon you could just see the gap in the Apuseni Mountains where Cheile Turzii, The Keys of Turda, cut its way through the karstic ranges some 70 miles away.   

On my way down from Nedeie, I saw wild boar rootlings.  When I got home to my lodgings, my hosts, Ileana and Ion, scolded me for going there on my own – the danger of gadina (wild beasts) is no joke - but their admonishments only made me feel gladder that I had done it.   

Two days later I was sitting at a table with Ileana’s sister in law – also called Ileana - in her neat kitchen.  Ileana is a large, friendly, direct woman who understood perfectly why I wanted to know more about shepherding.  She had invited some of neighbours to come and talk to me about their lives in the folds.  

After offering everyone shots of cherry brandy, Ileana said that she and her mother had been employed as baciţe (cheesemakers), at a time when three or four flocks were kept up at a coliba together.  They had cows there too – as they still do today, when some families, including Ghiţa’s, decamp to folds in either the hotarul de jos or hotarul de sus (hotar is a boundary separating the lower and higher pastures, and separating J’s pastures from those of other villages), with all their animals including pigs and hens.  

Ileana recalled how it was during the 1950s, when she rotated between three different mountains in four years: Haneşul, Şerbota and Salane (the first two belong to J, the third to Poiana).

“Every day began with making caş (sheep’s cheese), and then brânză de burduf (caş which is salted and chopped into fragments, then stuffed into a sheep’s stomach or a tube of pine bark), jintiţă (a curd drink) and urda from zer”.  Urdă is a much softer cheese made from boiling the whey left over from the caş.  Nothing got wasted.  “In the second half of the season, but before Sfânta Maria (15^th August), we’d make telemea”.  Telemea is a creamy, white cheese, sometimes made with added water so that it is soft, like feta.  “We also made sheep’s butter.  And after Sfânta Maria, we’d make brânza de burduf, but it wasn’t easy to sell that; the price wasn’t high.”  

A jolly looking, blue-eyed man who looked much younger than his 72 years, chipped in to say that he had been a shepherd from the age of 12, in 1952.  His name was Mitica.  

“My dad had sheep, and I went up to Şerbota.  We had an angajat (a hired man) called Nicolae.  We had 1200 head and Nicolae built up his own herd while working for us; he had 50.  So we had 700 mioare (female lambs) and we ran two folds with between 400 and 500 mânzare (breeding ewes), and each fold had 20 cows.  Boy, it was hard work but we had fun up there!”

Mitica recited the names of other folds and mountains belonging to J: Grupata, Gungurezu, Domnilor, Oaşa, Muncelu, Picioarele Cailor, Groapele...  

“Each fold had four or five baci – or baciţe – who milked their employers’ sheep and made the cheese in each communal flock.  In the autumn they took the cheese home, having stored it in barrels to keep it fresh.”

They sat round the table, reminiscing about days long gone.

“In October the farmers took the sheep away for iernat (over-wintering), to a place they had rented – it could be near Satu Mare (a county on the north-west border of Romania, some 300 km away).  They weren’t part of the state or cooperative farm system.”

Ghiţa and a handful of other young shepherds that I know carry out the same routine, but compared with the hundreds of transhumant shepherds that Mitica was talking about, they seemed isolated and forlorn.  

“How did you sell the cheese in those days?”

“The same as now: negustori (traders) came and bought it from each household.”

“And how was it on the road?” I meant transhumance.

Mitica took a while before answering.  There is so much that happens on transhumance, both good and bad.

“Deci, la drum, as now, the ewes lambed on the road, and it could rain for a week.  Then your cojoc (long sheepskin cloak made from hairy Ţurcana skins) became terribly heavy and all you could do was to sit by the fire – in rain, wind and snow.  You know we call the cojoc ‘casa ciobanului’ (the shepherd’s house).” 

I nodded but wondered: I had heard other shepherds say that the cojoc was designed to withstand rain – it was meant to roll straight off the oily wool – but I could imagine the sodden leather hanging around your shoulders like a dead weight.  These cloaks are bulky enough to handle even when dry.  

Ileana, sparkling in congenial company, told me that the women would spend the winter weaving.

“They made their own clothes, bags, dowries; they dyed their own wool and wove it on their own looms.”  

“In the communist days, a good fleece weighed three kilograms but two kilos had to go to the state.  All the sheep were counted – a fost plătit slab (we weren’t paid well).  And from every 100 sheep, we had to give ten to the state.” 

It was a different story from the ones I had heard - and read in learned articles - about the enormous wealth that Mărgineni shepherds accrued under Ceauşescu’s rule.  What Ileana and Mitica told me did not invalidate the other tales, but it showed how important it was to take individual cases on their own merits.  

The radiant faces in Ileana’s kitchen told me two things: that their memories of working up in the summer folds were good, and that they wished that life was still possible.  Nedeie, a festival which allowed local youngsters to get to know others from more distant communities (and presumably to strengthen the gene pool), was a marriage opportunity, and an important part of that life – although there was lots of socialising on other occasions.  If young people got engaged on the mountains they waited until they came back to the village in the autumn before getting married.    

Listening to their reminiscences reminded me of Maria Sterp’s poetry, in which every location has a special character, and a particular meaning to those who spent so much time there. 

Maria has not only written her own, original verse, but she has collected hundreds of poems and songs from other people in the village.  When I was with her last October, she mentioned a custom that caught my attention right away.  It was to do with calling bears.  Bears are magnificent, beautiful creatures but they are also a menace.  Climate change has affected Carpathian brown bears like everything else.  Warmer winters have provoked them to stay awake instead of hibernating.  A bear that is awake and active is also hungry.  Cases of bear attacks on shepherds as well as sheep have grown in recent winters and when I was in Sălişte last November my hostess told me a bear had taken two piglets from an orchard on the edge of the village the previous night.  So Maria’s mention of the traditional bear call got me thinking.  What was it all about?  On my flying visit in January I grabbed the chance of asking Maria to tell me more about this odd ritual.    

What follows is an excerpt from a recording that I made with Maria Sterp in January 2013.  I am attaching part of the interview to this post (it is in Romanian, and to hear it, please click here).  Below is a transcription of another section of the recording - please forgive me for any mistakes.  I have added a brief English summary at the end of this post. 

CJ  Am vorbit despre strigătura impotriva urşii.  De ce e vorba de, de, fetele, de fete care sunt la, la coliba?

MS La stâna

CJ La stâna, da

MS Daca s’întimpla ca sunt doua fete baciţe într’o stâna, şi cu acelaşi nume, să sui intr’un brad, întoarsa una intr’o parte, una a cealalta, e să lasă pletele pe spate, stau cu capu gol, şi lasa pletele pe spate, şi striga cât pot pe tare să s’aude, cât mai departe:

Uiuiu, fecior de popa,

Cât se aude glasul meu

Nu calce piciorul tău

Şi atunci, aşa se zice ca ursu numai vine pe acolo, pentru ca el ar fi fost ce ştiu un băiat unui preot, un fecior de popa, şi ce or fi făcut de tata sau l’o blestemat, l’o şi ajuns să urs şi nu îi place sa vine urs, pe acolo numai – ce zice cineva “fecior de popa”, gata!  Nu ştiu daca e adevărat sau nu, dar, aşa avea de vorba de popor...

Mr Sterp breaks in here, about “oaie” (sheep)

CJ  Şi aţi auzit poezia narativa asta din J, de la J? 

MS  Da

CJ  Numai de la J sau altoriunde? 

MS  Daca or fi şi din alta parte nu mai ştiu.  Nu ştiu.

CJ  Şi cine v-a spus...

MS   Peh, asta o ştiu din, de la bun... de la strabunici!  Din, de cănd, ca oarecum a fost, um, aşa de la multe vorbe care, care le spuneau, dar înca, atunci nu mi-am dat seama ca o ajunge să scriu, şi să am nevoie de ele, numai ramas memorate ceea, căte ceva, şi atunci sunt slabit de tot memoria.  Acuma aud, acuma uit, acu nu me l-ai pot zice dar, tot cazul aştia, nu le am ştiut de mult.  Da...

CJ  Foarte interesant, când au început.

MS  Vă să, ce se aude...

What is this all about?  Maria told me that when there were two girls with the same name working in the same sheep fold, they would go outside, climb a pine tree, face in opposite directions, and with their hair flowing down their backs and their heads bare, they would shout as loudly as they could:

Hey, hey, hey, my dear priest’s son,

As long as you can hear my voice,

Don’t you dare bring your feet anywhere near me.

The conceipt of turning the bear into the person of the priest's son is very curious - especially given the evidence of a prehistoric bear cult discovered in Romanian caves - and I'd like to know if anyone else has come across it.  

(My thanks to the novelist, Mariana Aionesei, for helping me translate the bear call.)  



(1)  A Romanian writer called Ioana Postelnicu (1910-2004) wrote two epic novels about this phenomenon, Plecarea Vlaşinilor and Întoarcerea Vlaşinilor, published respectively in 1964 and 1979.  Both stories were made into films.  Ioana Postelnicu had family ties with another village in Mărginimea Sibiului which von Bukow persecuted.