Lambrovka

As part of my quest for Romanian shepherds who migrated to the east, I found out that one of them had settled in what is now south-west Ukraine.

Lambrovka is a village of some 120 households in the broadly undulating steppe of south-west Ukraine. If that sentence sounds authoritative, it's misleading. I haven't actually been there, and am relying on the few photos and an internet satellite view to give me a picture. Judging by them, Lambrovka looks like thousands of other east European settlements lost in the steppe: it's got rows of single-storey houses, each with its own sheds and a rectangle of land at the back, built around a framework of straight roads. That's only a superficial view because like the region it belongs to, Lambrovka has fascinating stories to tell. And those stories are not only about its past but concern the present, too.

Since the time of Ottoman rule (1484 - 1812), the region in which Lambrovka lies has been known as the Budjak. The name comes from a Turkish word for borderlands. It's appropriate because the Budjak is almost completely cut off from the rest of Ukraine by the Dniestr Estuary and is surrounded on its other sides by Romania, Moldova and about 200 kms of Black Sea coast. 

Covering roughly the same size as Northern Ireland or half the area of Vermont, about half a million people live in the Budjak. About half of them are Ukrainians, while the rest are mainly Bulgarians, Russians, Moldovans, Albanians and Gagauz (Turkish Christians). It was probably always thus: a quick tally of tribes and races that have lived here over the past five thousand years brings together a sparkling array of names: Phoenicians, Scythians, Sarmatians, Thracians, Greeks, Celts, Romans, Bulgars, Magyars, Cumans, Pechenegs, Bulgars, Tatars, Genoese, Jews, Germans, Roma, Ukrainians, Russians, Albanians and Romanians. There are surely others. 

If you're touring the Budjak, there's plenty to see without getting lost in its farmlands. You could start with the whacking great Genoese/Romanian citadel at Bilgorod-Dnistrovskii (aka Cetatea Alba and Akkerman) on the Dniestr Estuary, and head west to the pretty town of Izmail for the remains of a magnificent Turkish bastion. In Izmail you are on the northern edge of the Danube Delta, one of the world's great nature reserves, and even if you weren't tempted to cross the border into Romania, you could spend a happy day or two in the riverine towns of Kilia and Vilkove. 

Lambrovka can't compete with these beauty spots, but I was interested in it for another reason. It was one of the places which offered work to shepherds who migrated east from Romania's Carpathian Mountains. Many of the graziers concerned came from a group of villages in southern Transylvania called Marginimea Sibiului. Dating from around 1870, this pastoral diaspora spread right across southern Ukraine into the northern Caucasus and beyond. One of the families I was tracing had landed in Lambrovka. Their name was Ciorogariu and they came from the Marginimea village of Tilisca. 

They arrived in the Budjak during a period of massive upheaval.  At the time, this corner of Europe belonged to the Romanian region of Bessarabia which more or less corresponded to the present-day Republic of Moldova. Bessarabia was about to be swallowed by the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, but when the young Ion Ciorogariu settled there with his parents in the early 1930s, his capital city was Bucharest not Kiev.*

During our conversation at his Tilisca farmhouse in October 2007, the 77 year old Ion told me he had spent eight or nine years in 'Lambroca, somewhere west of Odessa, not far from Borodino'. Lambroca was one of several variants on Lambrovka's name (see ** below for some others). It had been a happy time: he said he went to the Yiddish School (which is odd since my research shows there was also a Romanian school in Lambrovka), and that he had many Jewish friends (he called them jidani). Ion claimed he spoke Yiddish better than Russian. He could not remember any words, but his face lit up at the memories, and he showed us a photo of his eight year old self wearing a double-fronted, Russian style coat and an astrakhan collar and hat. 

Lambrovka was founded in 1927 as an agricultural experiment, inspired by a philanthropic German-Jewish baron called Maurice de Hirsch. In 1891, de Hirsch founded the Jewish Colonisation Association (JCA or ICA) to help Jewish people who were being persecuted in Russia and Romania. He wanted to give them the means to emigrate - to Argentina at first - but the impracticalities associated with the wholesale resettlement of millions of people persuaded him to pour funds into projects where they already lived. Maurice de Hirsch died in 1896 but the JCA resettlement scheme continued, not only in Russia and Bessarabia but also in Canada and Palestine. A Palestinian branch of the Jewish Colonisation Association (PICA) was created in 1924 by the banking millionaire and leading Zionist, Baron Edmond de Rothschild. PICA acquired Palestinian land for collective farming schemes similar to the one Ion's father must have known in Lambrovka. Inadvertently, I had run across a cause of the Israeli-Arab conflict. 

Ion mentioned that the village was part of a special project but he did not say that Lambrovka grew famous because of its vines. A correspondent on JewishGen's Bessarabia forum came up with some links. One of them led to a wine-making company called Chateau Grona (motto 'Life is too short to drink bad wine'). Grona is owned by a Jewish family from Odessa who have rehabilitated Lambrovka's neglected vineyards. The family trades under the name of Agroyug. Following that lead I found a news report from December 2014 which says Agroyug is hoping its wines will enter the Dutch market this year, taking advantage of Ukraine's association agreement with the European Union. Returning to the history page on Grona's website, I read this:

'In the 20 years of the twentieth century ICA... created Jewish agricultural commune on the territory of the then Kingdom of Romania. The commune became the prototype of the modern Israeli “moshav”. In 1926 French agronomists visited almost all of Bessarabia looking for the best areas for viticulture. They chose a site near the town of Kaushan, which they named “the ideal plot”. The land (about 60 acres ) have been redeemed , and in 1927 “in an open field” the Lambrovka village was created. The Fund built 52 houses, a winery, and a dairy farm. Around the village, the 52 hectares of vineyards was laid down. Then the Fund moved to Lambrovka 52 Jewish families from nearby villages and towns in Bessarabia. Each family received a property of 1 hectare vineyard, cow and sheep 6. French agronomists and winemakers were managing the project. The winery was provided with the latest equipment at that time. In just a few years Lambrovka became one of most prosperous villages of Bessarabia and its wines were supplied all over Europe including France. In 1937 (sic) the area was annexed by the Soviet Union, but the Jewish community continued to exist until the beginning of World War II. The entire population of Lambrovka was evacuated to Central Asia, and after the war the colonists did not return to the village, moving mostly in the U.S. and Israel.'***

(According to Wikipedia, the Budjak was not annexed in 1937, but was assigned to the USSR in the secret appendix to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939, and became part of the Ukrainian SSR the following year. But the political chess game in which Bessarabia/Moldova has played pawn to various larger powers is eye-crossingly complicated - an article in The Economist from January 2015 says that the Budjak changed state hands nine times in 200 years, and it may still not have ended, if you take account of recent moves to make the Budjak independent - so to mention this may be splitting hairs.)

In eastern Europe, farming was not a traditional Jewish vocation because Jews were often not allowed to own land. Apart from Ion's memory, and the links provided by JewishGen and its contributors, my sources were limited and slightly contradictory: one said the Lambrovka project began in 1932, another implied that the village was not established on virgin soil and that somebody had been living there, or at least working the land, already.**   

Ion said his father had moved to Lambrovka from Tilisca, their Carpathian Mountain home, 'several years' ahead of his marriage (to another Tiliscan). In his words it sounded as though his dad had settled there long before Ion was born. But to a young child, a single year can seem like aeons. Ion told me they lived in a 'nice farm house', and that Ciorogariu Sr. raised not the traditional, hardy Turcanas that flourished in the Carpathians, but Karakuls. A black breed, also known as Astrakhans, Karakuls were imported from Asia. They were mainly raised for their skins. The lambs were killed at a few days old, while their coats were still curly, and their soft little fleeces became the collars and hats that were all the rage in those days. It's likely Ion's father's animals belonged to the colony: a list of its assets for the mid-1930s shows Lambrovka owned 500 Karakuls. But there was no mention of a Mr. Ciorogariu or his family.

It all fell apart when war was declared. Looking back, it seems miraculous that Lambrovka's colony existed at all. During the 1930s, hell-bent on creating the 'perfect' Communist society, Stalin deliberately starved most of Ukraine's farmers to death. He then turned his murderous attention to Poles and Jews. But when Nazi Germany entered 'the bloodlands' (as historian Timothy Snyder calls the territory between Berlin and Moscow) persecution came from the west as well. The Ciorogarius decided it would be safer to run. Packing their children into their horse-drawn cart, Ion's father and mother did a midnight flit. They sold their horses at the railway station and caught a train north to Chisinau (now capital of Moldova). Ion's father was thrown in prison for two months, but the family escaped back to Transylvania relatively unscathed.

In 1940, Hungary annexed northern Transylvania. Although Tilisca lies in the south of the region, after King Michael's 1944 coup turned Romania to the Allied side against Nazi Germany, the Russian army invaded most of the country, carrying out brutal raids in Transylvania (because of its German population) before the Moscow Armistice was signed in September 1944. Four years later, Romania's own, vile form of Communism would take hold but maybe the Ciorogarius enjoyed a few years of grace before political darkness fell again.   

Ion made his living as a hatter. He showed me the wooden formas for shaping the shepherds' traditional sapka, a tall astrakhan cap, and let us try some of his old ones on.

When Hitler's army - and the Romanians - invaded Bessarabia in 1941, Lambrovka's Jewish farmers fled to Russia. None of them returned. I appreciated something of the terror created by the Soviet and Nazi regimes when travelling by train across Romania in 2013. During a long, sleepless, freezing night in a couchette without bedclothes or heating, I noticed a frail elderly woman sitting up on the opposite seat, which she had not turned into a bunk. To withstand the cold, she had simply pulled her coat more tightly around her shoulders, and her face wore an expression of great serenity. Whoever she was, she was not bothered. In the morning, my friend and I asked how the woman had managed to survive such a dreadful ordeal. She gave us a ravishing smile and said, 'This wasn't so bad; I've been through a lot worse. When I was two, my parents fled from the Nazis in Bessarabia. They were retreating from their defeat at Stalingrad, and burnt everything in their path. My parents had no choice: they left all our possessions behind except our horse and cart, they put us inside it, and drove us to Bucharest. It took six weeks.  

After the Nazis' retreat, Lambrovka became a Soviet collective farm. In the 1950s, it fell into neglect until its recent revival as a privately-owned vineyard. Vlad Bliumberg, CEO of Chateau Grona group, told me he hopes to bring sheep farming back to the village.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *

My work on Romania's migrant shepherds received a huge filip with the 2009 publication of a collection of memoirs, 'Oieri margineni in Crimeea si sudul Rusiei' ('Sheep farmers of Marginimea Sibiului in Crimea and Southern Russia'), which was edited by Toma Lupas, an ex-mayor of one of the Marginimea villages. The book is wonderfully fresh and moving and it is full of information, but it still leaves a lot of stories untold or even more tantalisingly, half-told. Ion Ciorogariu's tale is not included, but even with the ones who are, I'm fascinated to know more about their lives. The Romanian book mentions shepherds who lived alongside Cossacks, shepherds who were bewitched by Caucasian sirens, shepherds who went to Moscow to plead for their fellows, shepherds who were deported, starved, murdered, shepherds who hoarded gold roubles and escaped with their loot stitched into belts and linings... There is one shepherd who took to the road so keenly that he ended up in Japan (though admittedly not as a shepherd), and others who having fled the Soviet terror, made it safely across the Atlantic to the USA. 

* Although the region had a new name, the Moldovan Democratic Republic, and its own government, or Council of Directors General, in Chisinau. 

** Lambrovka's other names. According to the JewishGen website, it was also known as Lambrivka [Ukrainian], Lambrovca [Romanian], Lumbravka, Gofman, Gofmana, Fol'vark Gofmana, and Ungravka. 

*** Lazar Vereta, son of one of the Lambrovka cooperative's founders, told me that the village actually dated from the early 19th century. At the time when the Jewish colony was being established, Lambrovka belonged to a Bessarabian-German landowner. He sold 1000 hectares to the JCA which set about building houses for 53 families, and some additional agricultural buildings. The colony was up and running by 1932. Its inhabitants had to repay 'large loans'. Lazar says that Lambrovka's sheep were managed by 'shepherds from neighbouring villages (or from Romania as in your case).' The shepherds did not practice transhumance.

Melancholy lady

Viorica lives in a handsome two-storey house in a quiet lane on the south side of Sălişte. In the centre, the fine old village – which became a town in 2007 - has a veneer of civic self-importance, but there are no such pretentions here. There are many such back streets in Mărgineni villages and each one is different. To my westernised eyes, the streets and the houses and the people who inhabit them look at ease with their identity. Even now, few of these lanes and alleyways on the edge of consciousness are asphalted. It’s amazing, or rather worrying how proprietorial I feel about these places. When a jeep or a motorbike screams up and down the tracks, I feel that they are the intruders. This may have something to do with the intolerance of middle-age. Or it could be that these old-fashioned settlements and their mountainous surroundings are extraordinarily beautiful. Whatever the reason is, my short experience of the ‘slow lane’ in Romanian villages makes me want more.

This particular house is detached and has good proportions. It also has the tall boundary walls which you find almost everywhere in traditional Transylvanian homes. But here it’s said that gospodăriile were built like fortresses because the shepherds of Mărginimea Sibiului wanted their daughters to live in total seclusion while they were away with the flocks. Not even a peephole was allowed. There were certainly none in these walls.

It was around 4pm in early October. The sun was starting its leisurely descent to night. Long shadows slanted off the blond stone, plaster and stucco edifices on either side of the lane, which sloped gently down and away from us, zigzagging as it went. On the upper side, a few hundred yards away lay the village boundaries with hayfield and forest. Darkening to black, the thick trees had so far held on to their leaves in spite of the lateness of the year.

Ilie rang the bell a few times. Eventually we heard footsteps coming slowly to the gate. A woman’s voice called out, ‘Cine? – who is it?’ Fingers struggled with the catch, pulled the door open a crack. A good-looking woman stood before us. She could have been in her 70s. She wore a nondescript floral dress that fell decorously below her knees, and sensible, lace-up shoes. But what struck me most was the grief on her face.

Viorica listened patiently to Ilie’s tactful explanation as to why we were there. As he spoke, she relaxed and drew herself up; her old Mărgineni dignity kicking in. ‘I’ve already told my story’, she said, her voice crisp and pleasantly rasping. She was not rejecting us, only tired. She opened the door wider, and we slipped through the barricades.

We got her name and a page of her recollections from Toma Lupaş.  What we read was short and tragic. I was hoping that by talking to her, I’d be able to appreciate better what her memories of her family’s life in Russia meant to her.

Perhaps I was raking over old sores. But the more I delved, the more astonishing and moving these Romanians’ Russian tales became. Having struggled against oppression at home (in the sense that until the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, Transylvania was dominated by Hungarian and Saxon landowners, leaving most peasant farmers - who were mainly Romanian - out on a limb, a situation which Miklos Banffy recognised in his great trilogy about the period), the shepherds risked their lives and endured incredibly harsh conditions, first in Dobrogea and then abroad, to improve their families’ chances. Many did grow wealthy and there was a period of about 50 years when things looked rosy. In Bolshevik terms, however, the rich shepherds from Romania were kulaks, enemies of the people. From 1917 until the Second World War, and for totally different reasons, they were vilified and hounded again. Those who returned safely to Romania during this time were soon plunged into the horror of Romanian communism and most of the gold stashed away from their glory days in Russia was taken by the Securitate (Romania’s secret service).  

To western sensibilities – or do I mean British? - shepherds are not supposed to be lords of mammon. The Jewish and Christian King David’s pastoral background was an indication of his meekness and concern for others, not his power. This is one reason why Gigi Becali [a flashy and vulgar Romanian politician and football club owner who claims to come from shepherding stock] looks like an aberration; his behaviour is not only offensive to polite, educated society but his vast riches get right up the noses of the old, landed, conservative ruling class [in which countries?] whose opinions about who should enjoy wealth and power and who shouldn’t go back to the 18th century at least.

In one way Becali has vindicated the rights of working men (never mind his attitude to women), but in another he insults them. People have questioned the legality of how he acquired his huge fortune. Some admire his incredible cheek and for them he is a kind of Robin Hood, but in most terms, he is not ‘decent’. Is it any wonder that Nicolae Petruţiu and Toma Lupaş wrote with such vehemence about the moral probity of the ciobani mărgineni. In Romania to be a shepherd used to mean you were a national icon but in Gigi Becali the shepherd’s image has been horribly distorted. I was starting to understood better why the Mărgineni appeared to be so closely-knit, and why they felt so beleaguered. But the question of Romanian nationalism is not even so cut and dried as that.   

We walked towards the house. Viorica's yard was actually a small orchard with low roofed, open-fronted barns enclosing its further side. There was no sign of any animals. The L-shaped area was generous for a town garden, measuring about 90 x 60 feet at its longest. It looked as though the grass had not been cut for weeks, and there was no sign of the pretty, sweet-smelling flower borders that I’d arrogantly come to expect. Large, bare patches on the walls of the house showed where the plaster had come off. The evening shadows had fallen right across the yard, leaving no trace of warmth. 

‘My nephews have promised to cut the grass’, Viorica told us. It was embarrassing that she felt the need to apologise. ‘They cut wood for me when I can get them to come here; I can’t do it for myself any more – I have to rely on others for everything.’ She heaved a deep sigh at this sign of failing energy and turned away, beckoning us inside. We climbed a few concrete steps to the first floor of her house; underneath was a cellar, following the layout of many traditional Romanian homes. On one side of the first floor was a verandah that was enclosed with windows. Outside the windows there was a long, flat cill wide enough to carry some red geraniums and one or two vigorous house plants in pots. They brightened the gathering gloom and Viorica smiled when I praised them.

Her kitchen had pistachio green walls and felt chill. There was no fire. Viorica had not been expecting us and I imagined she was saving her fuel for a rainy day. I decided to leave everything to Ilie who had sensed the delicacy of the situation and seemed keen to take the lead. While Viorica began her narrative, I pulled out my recorder and switched it on. In my haste I forgot to double click the record button which made me lose a minute of her introduction during which she told us that her family was from Vale, a mile or so away to the east of Sălişte. It means the same in English but you pronounce it the Latin way, as in Ave atque Vale. I was lucky to have Ilie to refer to, and it was another bonus that Mrs Popîrţan spoke so clearly (although even then I didn’t always understand her). Her articulacy showed me once more that the ‘peasants’ of Mărginimea Sibiului’s war-time generation were well-educated and proud of it.  

‘My grandad on my mother’s side was with the sheep in the Crimea...’, said the voice, husky now, though whether from emotion I couldn’t tell. She held herself with dignity and I reminded myself that we were asking her to revisit memories that were probably painful and which she had already written down recently for someone else. ‘...and my bunicu (grandad) on my father’s side was in Bessarabia.’

 ‘My mother’s father came home just before the (1917) Revolution – he and my uncle got together with some other Romanians, two brothers who were also from Vale.’

In her statement, she said that good pasture was plentiful in Crimea, so her grandfather rented his land instead of buying it. Because the climate was also mild, they didn’t have to do transhumanţa any more. 
‘They took it in turns to return to Vale once a year. After the Bolsheviks came to power, the borders closed and grandad couldn’t go back to Crimea. But his oldest son was still there; he was married.’

That was Ioan Stirimin, whose unfocussed gaze stared so intensely from the sepia photo Toma had shown us. We looked at my copy of it, and I noticed how formal it seemed as he faced the camera together with his melancholy, dark-haired, beautiful Russian wife and serious little boy. In the photo, Ioan had a strong nose, a broad forehead, slightly receding hair brushed down flat to his head and a splendid handlebar moustache. He wore a shirt buttoned tight up to his neck and a rumpled suit that looked as though it had seen better days. His wife – we still don’t know her name - wore a coat or tunic with a wide collar; this too was buttoned high. Knowing what we did of their lives, the picture made them seem defensive.

 ‘We didn’t hear anything from him at all until the Second World War started. I think it was in 1942. Mamica (mummy) had a letter from him. It said he was a translator in the Romanian army.’  Toma had a photo from this period too: there was Ioan in a suit next to three Romanians in uniform. His hair is grey and his moustache has gone but the shirt and suit could be the same ones.

‘He said he wanted to be repatriated. So my mother helped to get his papers and he returned. He was with his Russian wife; they had a little girl of four. That was in ’44, before the Armistice. My uncle was very ill; after six months he died, and when the Russians came - Săliste was evacuated in ’44 for about a month - his wife took herself and the child off with Russians. She didn’t speak Romanian and I didn’t know anything about her...’ Viorica explained that Ioan had married twice; she didn’t know what had happened to the beautiful girl with the soulful face or to the little boy from that first marriage.  

The evacuation was news to me but not to Ilie, ‘Da, da, da’, he replies, understanding, fascinated. ‘And your uncle and grandfather, beforehand, did they have many sheep?’

‘Da, au avut multe oi, foarte multe – many, many sheep.’ Her emphasis reminded me of a conversation I’d had a couple of weeks before in Timişoara with a Romanian professor who was obsessed by the derivations of words. He told me that the ancient Latin word pecus, a flock, used to be an indication of a person’s wealth as in the English pecunious. The 19th and early 20th century flocks of Crimea would have been too.

‘And when did your grandfather first go to the Crimea?’

‘I don’t remember; the girls (my mother and aunts) were young... He was one of seven children; the oldest ones took themselves off to Russia, to the Crimea.’

‘You don’t know the name of the place?’

‘I don’t know; it will be on the stamp on that photo that I gave to Tomiţa (Toma Lupaş)... I don’t know because I was too young, all I remember is that my granddad had problems with his stomach. I’m not sure how he got home but maybe he had to swim across the Nistru (River Dniestr); perhaps he swallowed the freezing water and the cold went to his stomach.’

‘Right, so was he avoiding the borders so as not to get caught?’

‘Yes; and my uncle stayed behind with the sheep; I don’t know if they were taken by the Whites or the Reds; we knew nothing about him, but grandad couldn’t go back’. Her story was full of broken shards. In the statement she gave to Toma, Viorica said that the Bolsheviks or some of his hired hands had stolen the sheep – she used the word jecmanit which my dictionary translated as ‘fleeced’ – and legal documents which proved his ownership of them as well. I had to piece the bits together like a conservator mending a shattered antique vase. [Sometimes the pieces didn’t quite fit.]

‘Grandad brought mummy home because he wanted to die in his own country. He’s buried in Vale.’

‘Da’, Ilie sympathised grimly. His own family had left Russia much earlier than Viorica’s and had avoided these horrors. He looked down, reflecting on life’s tragedies.

In a statement that Viorica published two years later, she said that Ioan Stirimin had married for the first time in 1925, and his son had died at the age of six or seven. He remarried in 1938, had a daughter with his second wife, and it was this family that Ioan brought home to Romania just before he died.

The story kept taking different turns.

‘The brothers Suciu from Vale; after the Revolution, they went to America’. This was another strand of the Transylvanian shepherds’ exodus: a lot of them went to the United States (some went after escaping from the Soviet Union) and introduced brânza to the people of Montana.

‘After two years, they came home. There were four people from Vale in Crimea. One of the Suciu brothers married a cousin of my mother.’ [Was that Paraschiva Roşca?]. Her precision helped to bring the reality home but tantalisingly I still couldn’t patch the bits together.

Paraschiva had taken advantage of her generosity towards the bookish Dumitru to help Ioan Stirimin get home during the Second World War, that war which Romania waged for personal reasons with the Soviet Union and then changed sides. (?) When Ioan told his family in Vale that he wanted to get out of Crimea, she went to beat on the vice-governor’s door. That’s how in the spring of 1944 the Stirimins from Vale and Sadu were waiting for him on the platform at Sibiu’s railway station. But he was very ill from the terrible conditions he’d suffered, and in the autumn of the same year, aged 54, he died.

‘My father was from Sălişte but granddad was from Vale’. Again that sense of pride in where you come from: many of the older generations of Mărgineni still have it and Viorica was no exception.

Interested for his own sake as well as mine, Ilie got back on the shepherding case, ‘So what did they do in Crimea? Did they concentrate on sheep?’

‘Yes, yes, sheep. Before the Revolution, many Romanians had a very good situation in Crimea, each person had about a thousand head.’ Less than the 20,000 recorded in mid-19th century Mărginimea but still a sizeable flock by anyone’s standards.

‘What kind of sheep were they? Merinos?’ Pronouncing it the Latin way, Ilie guessed well: it was from their life among the Russians that Romanians learnt that the old Spanish breed produced better wool than the sturdier, dread-locked Ţurcana.

‘Who knows...’ Viorica is not a shepherd and anyway it was before her time. But the probing brings results.

‘One of dad’s sisters stayed in Bessarabia. She married a Săliştean out there. We knew nothing about what happened to her for many, many years. Then we had a letter from them; a grandson came here, and we went to Bessarabia to see matushka. We got out at the Gara Basarabeasca and they were waiting for us with a horse-drawn carriage. And even there, there was a Săliştean; he had a restaurant’ she laughs at the irony and Ilie joins in – these Mărgineni get everywhere.

At this point Viorica Popîrţan pulled out yet another strand of the tale.

‘His sister/cousin? Paraschiva and her husband [Dumitru Şandru] were shopkeepers in Sadu (another Mărgineni village). In the same comuna (district) lived a poor family with 12 children. Their father was a furrier. One of the kids, called Dumitru, had an agile mind and he loved reading. Paraschiva and her husband helped him get through school and my father prepared him for university [so what did her father do?].

In 1944 Dumitru was a university lecturer in Bucharest and during the war, he was vice-governor of Transnistria. He used to visit Sadu from time to time. Paraschiva and my mother were good friends and used to see each other a lot. Knowing that her brother was desperate to leave Crimea, mummy begged Paraschiva to ask Dumitru to intercede on his behalf. He arranged everything and a month later, Ioan came home by train. But he was very sick by that time, and he died the following autumn.’ 

Visibly upset by confronting so many sad stories at once, Viorica changed the subject: ‘You are from Sibiu?’ she asked Ilie.

‘Yes’.

‘Retired?’

‘Yes, I’ve been retired since I was 50’.

‘What pension do you get? 50%?’

‘I wish’, bridled Ilie, thrown onto the defensive, ‘Poveşti - That’s just lies!’

He stretches a little and looks at me.  It’s time to go.

‘Na bine – OK’.

(For more information about Romanian shepherds who migrated to Russia, please visit these pages on my website.) 

Raining in Râmnicu

Last week I went by bus from Sibiu to the village of Vaideeni.  It meant travelling south from Transylvania, along the pass which the mighty Olt River cuts through the Carpathian Mountains, to the province of Oltenia, in south-west Romania.  Vaideeni lies in the forested foothills, 40 km or so to the west of the county town of Râmnicu Vâlcea, and is part of a network of shepherding communities that has linked southern Transylvania with Oltenia, crossing national and cultural boundaries, for more than 200 years.  

Having jumped from winter to summer in a fortnight, the weather had turned thunderous; going through Râmnicu, the skies clouded over again, prompting the poem which you'll find at the end of this post.


Vaideeni has blood ties to the Marginimea Sibiului, a cluster of 18 settlements in the Cindrel Mountains, whose income has traditionally from sheep breeding.  In the late 18th century, people ran away from Marginimea Sibiului to Oltenia, which was then part of an Ottoman Turkish buffer state.  In the west we called it Wallachia; the Romanian name is Ţara Româneasca, The Romanian Land.  Vaideeni was one of several villages that received an influx of Ardeleni, those Transylvanians who fled from Marginimea Sibiului, bringing their sheep and their folklore with them.  They were escaping from the tyranny - as they saw it - of Habsburg rule, which included conscription into regiments of border guards, from Hungarian feudalism, and from the persecution by the Roman Catholics of their own Orthodox rites (viz. General von Bukow's raids of 1761-62).


From Râmnicu Vâlcea, the road passed the struggling Oltchim plant, a state-owned chemical factory which has been facing closure because of huge debts.  Oltchim is one of the largest producers of chemicals in South East Europe; it employs around 3500 people.  Its specialities include pvc, propylenes, caustic soda and construction materials.  The IMF has decreed that Oltchim must be privatised or close, raising fears about job losses.  I had no idea how big Oltchim was physically till I saw it last Tuesday: it stretches for a mile along the River Olt, I guess.

Seeing it for real made me ask why I dislike of this kind of industry, where real people work, which gives them a foundation for life, without - bits of - which (plastic?) I probably wouldn't be writing this blog.  Is it an indulgence that only the privileged can afford?  What kind of life?  Surely there cannot be anyone left on the planet who denies the role of manmade CO2 emissions in global warming; this and the loss of forests and of other natural habitats is terrifying, but maybe universal gloom is not the answer.  Having had conversations with the likes of ecotourism consultant, Gavin Bell, and Jim Turnbull, the founder of the Transylvanian Food Company, I found them upbeat, although not exactly gung-ho, about the future of Romania, if not of the planet.  Encouraged by their positive attitudes, I plunged back into David MacKay's 'Sustainable energy without the hot air' - free download, folks – which I have tried to read before.  As its title implies, the book tries to put the arguments for and against fossil fuels on clear, flat ground.  Second time around, it was a lot less hard-going: what has changed: the world or my head?  

Musing on the minefields thereof, I stayed in Vaideeni for two days.  I received a gracious, generous, easy welcome which reminded me of earlier visits to this part of western Romania, when I had spent time in Targu Jiu, where Brancusi's war memorials, The Table of Silence, The Gate of the Kiss, and the Infinite Column, testify to the city's stand against German troops in the Second World War.  It is a beautiful area, at least to the north, where you can still see the mountains.  Although its villages are always interesting and there are striking, towered manor houses called cula to visit, Oltenia's undulations become wider and less interesting the closer they get to the Danube.  

Vaideeni, first mentioned in the 1400s, was populated by Wallachians who had their own problems - often with the local monastery of Bistrita which owned the village even under the Turkish regime, and wanted its dues in labour and tithes.  The bastinasi (original inhabitants) left their homes in droves, before the Transylvanians arrived, highlighting the fact that Romanians have become used to the kind of instability that the British on their isolated islands know little about, and find hard to appreciate.  Come the Ardeleni, and transhumance: local historian Vartolomei Todeci has traced the routes of the crescatori de oi (sheep breeders) across what is now Romania's frontiers, and across the Danube, hundreds of miles to the south and east but also to the Banat (in the west).  As always when I see these route maps, charting walks on foot over mountains paths as well as near well-established trade routes, it underlines the shepherds' practicality as well as their courage, because they were driven by necessity rather than adventurousness. 

Two days in Vaideeni gave me the chance to meet and interview four people: Vartolomei Todeci himself (now in his 80s, he has to have kidney dialysis but is a mine of information and manages to play a mean flute), Adam Banciu, a retired sheep farmer, and Mr and Mrs Ghencea - who seemed much younger than their probable age (70s?) - and were full of enthusiasm, he for the ancient craft of shepherding, and she for weaving, which she does at a wooden loom that almost filled her small sitting room.  My lasting impression is how energetic they were, how passionate they were about their nation, and how nostalgic they felt about - the undoubtedly tough - shepherding life.

Mild-mannered, eager Mr Ghencea told me he had had to leave Oltchim because of an accident.  Farming was his only option, but he said, 'I was not ashamed to become a shepherd, not at all'.  Which suggests that he was aware, at least a little, of the stigma involved in taking to the outdoor life, in some social circles at least.  

They were great.  For me Vartolomei Todeci, known as Vicu, was the most interesting: his depth of knowledge, enthusiasm and modesty caught my imagination - I could have happily talked to him and his Moldavian wife for the rest of the day.      

Vicu has written several books including a weighty history of Vaideeni and a collection of poetry by local shepherds; like the other two men he plays the fluier, and for many years, he was musical director of the village folk choir.  On the walls of the family dining room there are photos of the group in which everyone looks resplendent in their traditional dress - white clothes embroidered in black for the women, white shirts, trousers and black waistcoats for the men - and are posing stiffly in that unsmiling, unmistakeably communist, style at one or other of the annual folk music festivals, or at Căntarea a României, the biennial competition that Ceauşescu founded in the early 1980s to encourage traditional Romanian culture. 

Rândunica (The Swallow)
Pe-o frumoasă rândunică
Dorul am trimis în ţări
Şi să-i treacă fără frică,
Peste codrii, peste mări.
Şi pe iarnă să-l ierneze
În ţînutul cald, frumos,
Când veni-va-n primăvară,
Vie şi ei sănătos.
În frumoasă primăvară
Când s-o-ntoarce iar la noi,
Rândunica vreau să-i poarte
Şi pe deal, şi pe zăvoi.
Şi-n bordee, şi-n palate
Până-n sănul tuturor.

This poem was written in 1937 by Dumitru Vartolomei Tărtăreanu (born 1891), and comes from the collection, Păstori poeţi, Vaideeni, Vâlcea, edited by Vartolomei Todeci (Râmnicu Vâlcea, 2009).  

Vicu says that Dumitru Tărtăreanu ‘attended the first five classes at Vaideeni school, then became a shepherd.  He was an intelligent man, but, his father having died when Dumitru was a child, his family had few chances to get an education.  However, Dumitru liked writing, and during the First World War, he wrote a poem to Queen Marie.  She gave him a prize which could have opened the doors to university, but he chose to go back to the shepherding life... His poems appeared in county newspapers and in Stâna (The Fold), a magazine published by the Romanian Sheep Farmers’ Union in Poiana Sibiului’.  Poiana Sibiului, a name to conjure with in shepherding circles: a village that perches high above Sibiu, is famous for its enormous houses, and hosts the largest annual stock market in Romania.  It was a man from Poiana Sibiului who asked Ceauşescu for permission to buy a helicopter – to keep an eye on his flocks which were so large that they grazed over several mountains.  

This trip has underlined what a fascinating, attractive, talented, conflicted country Romania is: so many wheels within wheels, so many bruised egos, so many insecurities, so much pain to heal, and so much simple faith and common sense whiich could do it, if anyone would listen, would believe in themselves a bit more. My head is spinning from listening to so many contradictory opinions in Romania: politicians, journalists, church leaders.  I heard so many expressions of doom, frustration, anger and their polar opposites:  the genius of the people, their talent, their enthusiasm. Just one example: the teenage soap Lala Band on Pro tv.  I found it while channel surfing during an idle moment, and was captivated.  Lala Band tells the everyday stories of the mixed-up youngsters who play in a band together - soppy stuff you might think but rather than looking and acting like human Barbie dolls, the characters are realistic, the angst that they portray is understandable, their problems are sympathetic, and, given that they are fictional and limited by time, the way their stories are resolved is convincing.  If these are some of the advantages of coming from a 'backward', 'isolated' country (not my opinion!), then bring them on. 

Raining in Râmnicu
An umbrella opens like a flower
On a patent leather street:
Râmnicu Vâlcea in a thunder storm.
Liquid mirrors the city's harder architectural past
Dripping subversion into concrete ears;
Then someone tells a joke.
Humour is rainproof against the official clattering:
A sun-yellow, spring action coverall
Smelling of roses.

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... 

La baie (To the sheep wash)

[This post relates to a few days in the second half of October 2012 just before the autumn transhumance began.]

Of all the events in the shepherding calendar, washing the sheep causes the most ribaldry.  It takes place over a week or so from around 14th October (which could be Sanmedru or St. Dumitru's Day?), when the flocks have come down from the summer pastures.  La baie signifies that the autumn transhumance is at hand, and for the handful of sheep farmers who continue long-distance transhumance from the village of J, once the sheep and the dogs have been subjected to a ducking in the chemical dip, there is nothing to hold them back.

I had been waiting to catch this ceremony for several days.  Meanwhile I was staying in J with a friend who has founded her own pastoral museum and had been amusing myself by wandering around the village, exploring the many paths that lead out into the mountain pastures, interviewing local characters and generally settling in.

Trying to pin shepherds down as to date and time is impossible.  It takes time and a great deal of patience to learn that they do not organise themselves like we do in the city, planning everything by the clock, opening and closing their offices according to a pre-published schedule.  Everything depends on the sheep and the weather, and if you want to fix an appointment with a shepherd, you might as well attempt to coordinate thistledown.  This is the beauty as well as the pain of shepherding life.  As for waiting to see the sheep come to the bath, there was no public announcement (why there would have been, I'm not quite sure!), and I had to gauge things by hearsay.  I was thrilled when, one morning at 6, I heard a patter of feet like a hailstorm and the warm, deeply reassuring, though off-key, melodies of sheep's bells, passing right by my window.

It was not Ghita's flock but his would soon be along, I had heard.  I wanted to see what was happening anyway, so I hurried down one of the steep, sandy lanes that leads to the bottom of one of J's many valleys.  The village has sprawled over a series of peneplains, steep rounded hills and valleys that contain orchards or gradini as they are called here (it's a word that normally means gardens, but a garden in J can be an orchard, paddocks and fields combined), and some of them converge right in its heart, so that you can get a grandstand view of one of the most dramatically plunging valleys of all from close to the main street.  Plans for a commercial ski run were well advanced, and the sheep wash stood at the bottom end of the newly-excavated slopes, with here and there a tall Evening Primrose plant defying the bulldozers.  The poplars were in full shiver, and the temperature was well into the twenties: it had been another scorching summer with very little rain.

Watching sheep being washed may not seem like a huge deal of fun, but for me it was another chance to see shepherds at work, and enjoy their good humour and boisterousness.  I sat on a hillside and clicked my camera, wrote notes and absorbed the sunshine, the subtle smells of wet sheep, ammonia and mud, and the cacophany.  And at one point I found myself in charge of the sopping flock as it mauthered its way up the same hillside, chewing on the few dry stalks that remained to be chewed, and threatening to drift entirely out of sight.

This flock seemed to have about 1000 sheep in it.  One of the shepherds kept an eye on the main body of the flock, while another three cajoled about 100 into a small ring, and proceeded to shove them, often head over heels, into a narrow channel which was fed by a hosepipe from the nearby stream.  Eventually I recognised one of the men: he was the father of Dinu, and of another boy who had got married in J. on the previous Sunday.  I had spent a pleasant if sad half hour talking to Dinu's mother, who told me her eldest son had been killed by a traznet, a lightning strike, two years earlier.  His dog and two of his sheep had also been killed.  She showed me photographs of her son before and after his death - in life, he had been an extremely handsome young man, and his passionate devotion to his flock had shone out from his mother's tearful description of the prizes he had won at some of Romania's agricultural shows.  They were all good friends with Ghita. 

"We put the shepherds in here too", joked Dinu's father, whom I knew only as "Dumitru Lupescu", a nickname, like that which I now recognised Paraschiva, "Chiva lui Dochie", meaning Paraschiva daughter of Evdochia. 

Ghita himself appeared half an hour later, to give his friends a hand, and then Andrei appeared in purple shirt sleeves, to help dunk the unfortunate animals who crawled out of the slurry with eyes, ears and mouths streaming, then huddled in an unhappy little metal-fenced squash until they were released to shake themselves properly and begin drying in earnest.

Dappled shadows played on the red clay and sandy soils, on the dung coloured sheep and the brown faces and limbs of the shepherds.  They did the job with the maximum of shouting and the minimum of fuss, glad to be together with friends after four and a half months on the mountain tops. 

What the chemical content of the sheep wash consisted of I could not say; it was just a plastic bottle emptied into the channel, and it had to be some guard against the ticks and other infestations that would otherwise plague the animals to death.         

  

Stâna Domnilor (The Gentlemens' Fold)

[This post refers to events that occurred between 26th and 28th September 2012]  

It is sometimes hard not to stamp your feet when people are surprised by Romania's loveliness, as though the country were such a sink that it could not possibly be awe-inspiringly beautiful, too.  Standing bleary-eyed at Sibiu airport at four one September morning, I suppressed such an urge as I said goodbye to another group of British visitors who had come, seen, and been delighted by Romania's people and landscapes.  Probably I am not cut out to be a tour guide, because you need nerves of steel and a hide like an ox, but I have to remember that not everyone has been as lucky as me, with twenty years of experience to go on, and the benefit of the most wonderful Romanian friendships to guide me around the country through most of those years.  To pass some of my love, enthusiasm - and gratitude - on is the aim of this blog, if I don't always manage the same courtesy while on the road as a guide!

As soon as the visitors had left, I high-tailed it back to the hotel for a few more hours of sleep, and then caught a bus to the mountain top village which is home to my friends who are shepherds.  I had not seen any of them since May, at the end of the eight days I had spent following the sheep on a kind of preliminary transhumance, and I was eager to get back there, to people I had grown to respect and love.

The Transmixt coach leaves from the autogara next to the railway station, about as brutal a contrast in travelling comfort as you can imagine: the Austro-Hungarian period train station has been done up and looks splendid; the bus station is an asphalt apron with a cold, dark, blue-painted ticket hall and a waiting area that usually offers interesting scope for sociological observation, if nothing else.  Like the railway station, it is also a place where prospective hired shepherds gather when looking for work.

If the old bus that serves the Margineni villages leaves a lot to be desired in terms of elegance, it is the place where you get the first whiff of homecoming: usually, the passengers regard each other with suspicion until they are sure they are friends and neighbours.  Then the floodgates open.  It is one of the joys of journeying around Romania that these country buses still exist, and are still needed.  If you want to take the temperature of this nation, go by bus.

Having successfully asked the driver to leave me at the brutaria (the first bakery) so I could reach my friends' house quicker, I felt that lightness of step that accompanies the shearing off of responsibility and the anticipation of pleasure.  My job was done, whether well or badly I could not tell, but I was free again, and boy, it felt good!

My aim was to find Ghita and the shepherds before they descended to the village.  I did not know where they were, and, my phone conversations with Ghita always being a little stilted, was not sure I would find out.  At his home, his mother, Paraschiva, greeted me as though I had never left, gave me one of her quizzical smiles as much as to say, "You may be a crazy dreamer, but I'm damned if I'm going to admit it!", and as usual, instructed Nicoleta, one of her bonny grand-children, to lay the table so I could eat, while Paraschiva vanished back to one of the myriad tasks she had to accomplish every day in order to keep the household afloat.  Nicoleta was ten and lived with her grandparents so she could attend the local school while her mother worked in a faraway town. 

Rule 1, in this - and most rural Romanian households - all visitors share in the board, and as the battery-powered kitchen clock ticked its inexorable, jerky rhythm and the flies buzzed lazily in the window, I noshed on the home-grown fare which I had come to relish: delicious meat, slanina (cold pork fat), sheep's cheese of varying descriptions, onions, peppers and white bread from the nearby bakery, washed down with water.

'Where is Ghita?', I asked, once these formalities had been accomplished and during one of Paraschiva's brief apotheoses.

'Sus', Paraschiva jerked her head upwards to indicate somewhere in the vast expanses of the mountains to the south.

'Is he at Stanisoara?' - the name of a coliba (summer farm or shieling) and grazing area where I had been the previous autumn.

'No, Domnilor'.  It was a lucky coincidence: Stana Domnilor was about the only other sheep fold I had heard of, and having found it on a clever little map bought from the Erasmus Bookshop in Sibiu twelve months beforehand, could remember the name and location pretty well.  It was the highest if not the most remote of all the folds belonging to the village, and my senses quickened: could I get there?

'Can I go there?' I asked, following thought with question, which meant, of course, is anyone else going there and can I get a lift?  

It turned out that Ghita's father, Simion, was planning to drive up there the next morning.  I could go, if I could get up in time.  He would be leaving at 3am.

I had learnt not to ask too many questions, and did not want to annoy Paraschiva by bombarding her: there is a time for everything, and she looked more than usually harrassed.  I wondered why, then realised it might have something to do with Ghita's impending departure.  Paraschiva and her family were used to transhumance; they had grown up doing it, and she herself had been on the road, to and fro from winter and summer pastures, for many years.

Still, since the Revolution (and the restitution of farmlands to their private owners) the practice was getting trickier each year, and something else she said, something about Ghita and Andreea, his girlfriend, something seemed to have gone wrong...  but I could not make out everything Paraschiva said, and did not want to pry.  There were other problems too: the family did not know if their leases on the grazing land would be renewed when they came to an end the following March.  Added to which, because of the drought, the grass had made the milk less abundant, and that in turn had changed the taste of the cheese from which this family derived at least a half of its income.

Simion appeared from somewhere, looking weary but undaunted: both Ghita's parents have an indomitable air combined with a sense of humour that always makes me feel welcome.  They may have wondered what on earth I was doing by turning up so often, but had been well-briefed by Dragos Lumpan, the photographer who was making a film about transhumance (and with whom I had collaborated in Wales), and they accepted me without any awkwardness.  

Well, I had made it there, and they had offered me the kitchen sofabed for my rest, so at somewhere around nine pm, I set my alarm and settled down to the most restful sleep I had had in weeks.  Fresh mountain air, frank people, good food: what more could anyone want?

Three am came, and I was hovering like a nervous fly.  On the previous evening, Simion had loaded a trailer with all kinds of provisions, heavy tubs, batteries, cords, churns and what have you, while I looked on, wanting to help.  While I hovered, he walked steadily back and forth, making the arrangements, cracking odd joke, just getting on with things.  Stars sparkled overhead.  A warm wind whispered sweet nothings.  Hens burbled in their sleep; the pigs did the same in theirs, only in a lower key.

Hai, la masa!  Simion waved me back into the kitchen.  Eat something at this hour?  You must be joking!  I stuffed some cheese and bread down my reluctant throat.  Simion checked his watch.  Were we expecting someone else? 

At half past four, someone else arrived.  To my shame I did not recognise him until the afternoon, but it was Tica, Aurica's son.  (Aurica was another sheep farmer with whom I had stayed the previous summer.)  Tica was going to be our driver.  We clambered into the old jeep with its battered fabric hood and were off.  With Tica at the wheel, the leisurely drive I had anticipated evaporated with one palmed swing of the steering wheel.  Tica was young, very young - early twenties, and full of glamour.  And then I realised, we were taking the Transalpina road, the new alpine highway that drew all the boy racers from Bucharest in the summer.  It is a wonderful road, or rather it goes through wonderful scenery, and it links the Transylvanian Plateau with the other side of the Carpathian Mountains, the region called Oltenia, to the south.  The Transalpina is an old sheep road; 'discovered' by King Carol II of Romania, it then became known as the King's Road (Drumul Regelui), but its present manifestation, a hard-surfaced switch back that soars over the mountain tops makes it fast and dangerous and terribly exciting.

Tica thought it was exciting too, and once we had filled up with fuel in Sugag, and the cassette player was blaring (to do him credit, it was a tape of traditional Romanian folk music - by the time we had got to the fold, three hours later, I knew at least one of the songs by heart), we were truly on the road, with the trailer bouncing along hysterically at our rear.

It was magical to be abroad at that hour; the mountains were in total blackness and only a very few other drivers - one or two trucks labouring up the inclines - shattered the illusion that we had the whole world to ourselves.

We mislaid the turning onto the forest road and stopped to get out once in the eerie stillness, then bumped up narrow logging tracks between tall pines, and out onto the summit, and over the grass towards the flock.

Everything was still in darkness; a royal blue light in the east was the only sign of dawn.  As the sun rose, a vapour trail crossed the sky, but below, it felt as though we were the only people alive.

The sense of grandness and isolation was intoxicating.  We were in a heathland and forest paradise.  I made myself scarce, taking pictures, while Simion, Tica and the others unloaded the trailer - I would have helped but they did not want me to.  Two Carpatin pups played round the fire.  A couple of donkeys wandered about, looking purposeful.  A small, green and white towing caravan showed where the shepherds slept and kept their food.  There was a wooden hut, put up by them as a temporary store.  The turla, the sheep pen, was surrounded by six-foot high mesh fencing - some measure of protection against the gadina, the predators, the bears and wolves that habitually threatened the sheep's lives.  Around this, their camp, lay a vast wilderness, grander by far than any I had seen on my Romanian travels until now.

Of the aforesaid Stana Domnilor, there was no sign.  I asked Simion where it was.

"Vedeti acolo", he said pointing to the west.  In the far distance I could see the grey-beige outlines of a wooden cabin, the deserted building of a once-thriving coliba (the same as a shieling or hafod if you speak Welsh.  A summer farmstead).  Ghita and his shepherds might have used it earlier in the summer, but now it looked forlorn, like so many of his village's colibe: the old days when whole families would take up residence for the milking season were vanishing along with the nedei, the wonderful mountain top parties when people danced and sang, and young people got together, and became engaged.  Maria Sterp, the village's most famous poet, had shown me some of the verses she had written in praise of shepherding life, and the life of the coliba came across as the most profoundly satisfying of all. 

It had been my intention to stay a few days, but one of the shepherds, Nicu S, showed signs of being fractious.  He had been on the booze, and there was nothing anyone could do with him.  He was nice enough while I was there, although his jokes became more suggestive with every minute, but I did not want to risk calamity.

Nicu S was helping the others to harry and shuffle the ewes towards the comarnic for milking: it was very late in the season for this, and I understood it was the last time they would milk them that year.  Apart from Nicu S, there were two other hired ciobani (shepherds), Nicu R and Ilie.

Nicu R I had heard of by repute: he had been in prison when I went on the April transhumance.  I did not know why, and it had seemed rude to ask.  Nicu R was very short and much younger than I expected - he looked barely old enough to wear long trousers, but turned out to be 21.  When he went to collect water from a stream in the forest, I went along too, and asked him about himself.

"How long have you worked for Ghita?"

"Five, six years".

"Do you like it?"

"Yes".  He looked determined, efficient, and although I thought my questions might seem nosey, he did not show any animosity towards them.

"I've been doing this for eight or nine years.  Straight after I left school. It's my life."  Nicu fed water from a mossy spring into the plastic can and I followed him thoughtfully as he banged it awkwardly homewards, to the camp, springing over the soft ground between afine (blueberry) shrubs whose leaves were bright red, and overshadowed by stately spruces whose branches rustled in the early morning breeze.  I thought of bears and shuddered a little: it was beautiful in the forest, the pale and dark greens of the mosses, reeds and grasses, shafts of golden light alternating with cool shadows, the damp, rich, aromatic smells of early autumn would make anyone frisky, let alone bears.

Ghita and Nicu R milked the sheep while Ilie kept an eye on the sterpe (literally, the dry sheep, ie, those who had not bred lambs, either because they were too old or too young, and had no milk, and the rams).  I justified my existence by taking photos, to the shepherds' amusement:

"Dragos has never taken photos of me milking!", laughed Ghita.

"Will you put us on the telly?", "Send us copies", but nobody objected: there was too much else to do, and they get lonely in their sheep folds, so any new company is a pleasure.

"Are you going to stay here, and sleep with us?" queried Nicu S.  Unaware that he was steaming, I parried.

"I'm not sure... I'm not very well prepared".  (Again, I had not planned this venture, having had one chance to live as a shepherd in April, but just wanted to see if I could.)

The milking over, it was time for some food.  To my shock, I realised that it was already 12 noon.  And I was famished.  Nicu S emerged from the caravan, his cheeks stuffed like a hamster's; Simion beckoned me inside, "Mancati!" ("Eat!").  I entered, and made myself a sandwich.

Outside, Nicu kicked the pups off his cojoc, which in his absence, they had been using as a blanket:

"Get off it, you're making it smell worse than a Gypsy!".  A common curse even though I knew, as does anyone who has spent any time with the Roma, that they are scrupulous about cleanliness.

"Doamna!  Stati, sau nu stati?"  Are you staying or going?

The milk loaded, Ghita was impatient to leave.  He was swapping places with Simion, and I could stay, for an undefined period, or until the next time someone took the jeep to Stana Domnilor, or I could go.  He was indifferent; it was up to me.

Choosing discretion over valour, I decided to hop it.  Who knows how long I could be stuck up there with an inebriated and probably very powerful Nicu S, and it would be stupid to put myself and the others into a difficult position.

Driving down the mountain again, Ghita scoured off the severe trappings of boss-hood: like me 24 hours previously, he was suddenly, exultantly, free, and he revelled in it.  As Tica drove, gunning the engine at every opportunity, Ghita let himself breathe again.

We stopped on the way to collect mushrooms, clambering over branches and through great curtains of branches, sucking in the fragrant, musky smells of resin and pine needles, moulds and mosses, our voices echoing through another part of the forest which seemed so pretty, timeless and full of promise.  Where else on earth could you find such places?  How long would they survive?  Why did people have to ruin every natural thing?  It was only I muttering to myself about such things: the two boys were far too happy, looking forward to life, not regretting it.

Back on the habited roads, we pulled up at a cafe.  Ghita bought me a coffee and sweets because I had left my change at home (unintentionally!).  I asked him about Andreea.  His face became softer and more inward-looking.

"She is well," was all he said. 

For those of you with access to Romania's tv channels, and especially Protv, you can see Ghita in the new Vodafone ads, which went out from September 2013.  He has become a star.  Proof of this is his facebook page, Ghita Ciobanul, which attracted more than 200,000 Likes in little over a week.