Animal fair

Poiana Sibiului, 19th September.  It was my last day in Romania.  I had postponed my flight home to visit the annual animal market.  It's said to be the largest in the country, and according to those in the know, is unmissable for anyone with the remotest interest in sheep, rural life or woollen socks.  

Leaving the mountain-top village of J is like going to a fair in itself.  I had got on the 7 am bus, and as soon as we were off, the driver started spinning the steering wheel to negotiate the cumbersome vehicle round the dizzying number of kinks in the road to the north. 

It was a sullen morning.  An unbroken ceiling of flat clouds hung over the landscape.  It wasn't conducive to a holiday spirit but if I was feeling crest-fallen my companions were made of sterner stuff, and nobody from J was going to be put off by a bit of bad weather.  Otherwise the passengers were quiet; they could have been on a normal, weekday commute to Sibiu and back.  That it was Fair Day became clear when we narrowly missed a van with two donkeys in the back.  A couple were sitting next to me, dressed in smart clothes: both wore black leather jackets, the wife had a neat headscarf tied under her chin, the husband sported a pork pie hat.  Taking the jolt in their stride, they perked up at the sight of the donkeys.  He said to her: 'How many do you think there are?'  She replied, 'I don't know - I can't see: two I think.  What can you do with two donkeys?  Sell, them I suppose.'   In this shepherding area, it's not that two donkeys are too many, but too few: for a flock of 1000 sheep travelling on foot between winter and summer pastures, you need several shepherds, and six or seven donkeys to carry their food, cooking pots and all the other gear to make life possible during a journey that can last for six weeks.  The same applies if you are travelling between your village house and one of the summer folds. 

We had just cleared the forbidding fir wood that separates J - supposedly founded sometime in the late 1300s by a ravishing heroine whose name means Fairy - from the mundane world.  Far below, to the left, the Transylvanian Plateau opened before us; to the right, I recognised Mr. B-S herding 30 sheep in tight formation over the rounded hillocks beside the road.  It's only four kilometres to Poiana Sibiului, but I have got so used to seeing sheep in vans and transporters at home in Britain, that I still did a double-take.  

Poiana Sibiului, they say, is home to the wealthiest shepherds in Romania.  Instead of the humble hovels and bothies you might expect in a pastoral haven such as this, the streets are an unbroken facade of block- or brick-built houses with reflective glass windows, balconies, panelled wood doors and pretentious pillars.  Top of the range cars have replaced the horses and carts.  But I had a hunch that the people were still down to earth - in touch with their bucolic roots and practical enough not to turn their noses up at your money.

The village centre was busy already: there were stalls all over the wide square, on both sides of the main through road.  It took me a while to realise that the animals were at another location, out of sight of the square, in a properly rural setting much further down the hill. 

Mesmerised by all the activity, I wandered past stands of tat: the kind of skimpy, garish clothes you can find at every street market in the world.  Gypsies were selling candyfloss, and one of them was tending a little spinning game where, if the pointer landed in the right place, kids could pick up a colourful plastic gizmo or brooch.  One or two of the traders were purveying fine, Astrakhan caciuli, the tall grey or black curly-coated, lambskin hats that shepherds wear in winter.  I carefully avoided the hat-sellers' eyes, torn between horror because of the way the lambs are treated - killed when they are 48 hours old, before their wool loses its curls - and the desire to handle such attractive objects.    

Along the street leading to the animal market, elderly women were laying out stacks of gorgeous, hand-made woollen clothes.  There were scores of these matrons, each one ready, if not desperate, to capture passing trade.  Was it because of the leaden sky that nobody was buying?  The range was limited but within it, the choice was phenomenal: socks; check-patterned wool jackets lined with real fleece; brown and white check stoles called ţoluri which shepherds use instead of raincoats, embroidered and fur fringed sheepskin jackets; piles of jerseys and cardigans in natural colours.  Feeling one of the jerseys I was taken aback: they were full of oil and as stiff as boards.  Made for real mountain men and women, not wimps, obviously.  

I made a detour to the wooden church, slipping in through the curlicued metal gates.  A few people were decorating family graves; there were masses of flowers both real and artificial, on the tombs and plenty of them growing in the ground.  The graves were lavish too: black and white marble slabs, gold lettering, sculptures.  Poiana Sibiului looks after its own, or at least, its dead, I felt.

Then to the animals.  I went downhill, past another graveyard, and into a natural amphitheatre with an even more spectacular view of Transylvania than before.  On one side of the track leading onto the fairground, there were more socks, more ţoluri and more stiff jumpers.  My heart bled for the knitters and weavers but at least they had each other for company.  

I stopped to get my bearings.  There was so much going on, and more people were coming all the time, in cars, vans, lorries, or on foot.  There were stalls selling all kinds of farming gear, sheep's bells in at least ten different sizes, decorated leather horse harnesses, nylon headcollars made in China, sheepskin cloaks, ropes, stainless steel buckets.   Everywhere I looked there were small groups of sheep, mainly the long-fleeced Turcana breed (but one of an Austrian variety, bred for its meat, whose heads were too large for their bodies).  

The sheep were clustered in pens or herded by shepherds on the tussocky banks that surrounded the fair ground.  There was atmosphere of bustle and excitement and, as the hours went by, of increasing joviality.  Beady-eyed, ruddy-cheeked men and women assessed their own and other people's animals.  Deals were struck, hands slapped noisily in agreement.  It seemed a far cry from the world of banking and international lonas, and of constricting EU legislation for that matter.  Was I getting a glimpse of Transylvania's counter culture, its alternative economy, of its only true democracy, even? 

It wasn't a good day for taking photographs but as if that gloom weren't enough, I was troubled by the issue of cruelty.  Not because I saw any glaring examples, if you exclude the legless man who was begging in the village square, but because most of the animals I was looking at were there because one way or another they were going to slaughter.  Many of Romania's lambs get sent by ship to the Near East while they are still alive.  Well, you will say, farming animals is cruel, and what did you expect if you visit an animal market?  Most of the Romanian farmers of my acquaintance are caring people, but they can't afford to be sentimental.  So, apart from all of us becoming vegetarians (which may be the only answer), how can we make the killing kinder?

Farmers - and for the sake of simplicity, I'm not including or even trying to define agribusiness here - are Romania's backbone.  There are still such things as 'farming villages' where people support each other, where there is inter-dependence, mutual reliance and trust.  The Romanians call it tovarășire, or comradeship - a word that came into use long before the Communist period.  It is the same sort of phenomenon that inspired George Ewart Evans's books about rural Suffolk in the early 20th century.  These clusters of kinship, of mutual friendship and practical back-up have no commercial value.  Break them up and what are you left with? 

Hairy Carpathian sheep dogs were chained in the backs of vans, or on the ground, cowering, snarling, or looking lost.  I had to pinch myself to leave them alone.  There were horses - a magnificent strawberry roan stallion built like a tank, a glossy black mare with a cergă (a stripy, loose-weave, woollen blanket) over her back; cows with calves, cows tied up to acacia trees which stood in little spinneys on the edge of the fairground, pigs in carts.  A couple of huge animal transporters, lots of small trailers.  I made the rounds, glad to say hello to people I knew, to feel I belonged, by proxy if nothing else, before going to my own home, several thousand miles away. 

Dinu B was there, with a penful of handsome rams with spotless, bouffant fleeces.  (You couldn't say the same for all the animals.)  I met Gheorghe Căţean, who had just returned from his epic, international transhumant walk from Rotbav to Koniakow in southern Poland.  

And there was Mr B-S, who had arrived safely with his little flock.  After hailing me with conspiratorial glee, he was quickly distracted, looking around keenly for buyers.  Many soon materialised, although they all affected indifference: animal trading involves the same stand-off between sellers and potential takers the world over.  Mr B-S is a natural salesman, nothing daunts him, which is lucky because as we were talking, his sheep disappeared over a bank.  When he had rounded them up, I asked him how much he was asking for his ewes.   '200.' he told me.  200 lei a head - RON, that is, roughly equivalent to £40.  Mr B-S was too busy to chat, so I moved on.  As he waved me off, he hissed, 'Aduceţi clienţi!'.  I said I'd be sure to drive people to his threshhold in their thousands.  Even if I'd been able to, it was an empty promise, because, mesmerised by the brooding view and the curious sights, I promptly forgot all about it. 

An hour went by in pleasant wanderings, enjoying the Romanian version of Irish craic.  The sun came out, in parts.  It helped to anaesthetise some of my frankly hypocritical angst - I'm a meat eater. 

I had another bus to catch.  Before turning my back on the animal fair, I saw an old woman walking through the crowd, hawking wooden donkey saddles.  They were just bent frames, made of I'm not sure what type of wood, but with absolutely no padding.  The saddles were like the ones you see in medieval illustrations.  They were meant for carrying sacks, not people, and if you were going to ride on one, you'd have a sheepskin or two to cushion your backside.  The old lady had two of the saddles slung on her back: hardly enough, I thought, remembering the conversation I'd overheard on the way to Poiana. 

On my way back to the village centre, I bought a pair of socks.  They were knitted in two different kinds of brown, both of them natural - beautiful, soft colours.  They cost 10 lei, the same as the rather nasty sandwich I'd bought to stave off my hunger.  £2: hardly enough to keep a body, let alone a household, going for long, even in Romania.  



 







 

Coliba life

Mid-September 2013.  I am back in the Southern Carpathians, staying with the D family at a coliba a couple of miles to the south-east of J.  It is my third time in this place, but the first that it has rained enough during the summer to turn the pastures green.  Since my earlier visit, things have changed in the family too.  The son, Ghiţa, has married his sweetheart, Andreea; they have a baby daughter, Georgiana, who is four months old.  

Not only this but Ghiţa has become a celebrity.  He has been signed up by Vodafone for a tv advertising campaign.  Dressed in his cojoc (or sarică, another word for the long, sheepskin cloaks with the fleece turned to the outside), and his tall, black, pot hat made of stiffened lambskin, Ghiţa is shown in a series of quickly changing vignettes: sitting with a fellow shepherd by an open fire, sampling a typical but untypically well-presented supper of onions, slănină (pork belly) and mămăligă (polenta made from sweetcorn flour), dancing with sheep, and exulting in his new role as a cool, switched-on dude, with his tablet, smartphone and facebook page.  

All of which has up-ended a common perception of shepherds as numbskulls.  Ghiţa's family is a bit bemused by all this: his parents still wake at 4am to milk 700 ewes, staggering in to the cabin for a bistro breakfast at 7; at least they only have to do this twice a day since the yield has started to dry up.  (When the ewes are first separated from their lambs, in June, they have so much milk that the shepherds have to collect it three times a day.)  There are daughters to help now, too: Ionela, while she is on school holiday, Maria when she's not at home looking after the house in J, and three or four hired shepherds, who may or may not stay from one day to the next.  At least Andrei is still there; this is his fifth year of working with the Ds.  (I have a special affection for Andrei because he was such a sympathetic companion when I spent five days following Ghiţa's flock in April 2012.) 

Changes in the climate are more abrupt than I anticipated: on the Transylvanian Plateau the temperature was much higher than here.  On my first day, on a three-hour hike down to Stănişoara from one of the higher folds with Dan and Bogdan, two of the hired men and some 300 lambs, I regret not bringing better insulation.  My rainjacket is fine for city storms (from which you can usually escape), but it isn't much of a match for the chilly winds which were a distant rumour when I was on the levels but have suddenly become real.  As I discovered the next day, the hi-tec coat lets in water under the kind of steady, relentless downpours which I was warned about but didn't really believe.  My trusty Swiss hiking boots, bought over 30 years ago and as comfortable as gloves, have started to leak as well.  Never mind: it's exhilarating to be out on the mountains, 2000 metres above sea level, in scintillating light, getting whiffs of wild thyme and sage, and being part of witty, down to earth company.  And that's only the sheep. 

When she has time and is in the mood, Ghiţa's mother, Paraschiva, tells me about her life.  I learn about her grandfather, the father of Evdochia, the 'Dochie' from whom Paraschiva gets her local name, Chiva lui Dochie.  Her grandfather left her grandmother and their children for a richer woman.  At first I assume he had abandoned his peasant bride without another thought but Paraschiva says he was good to his first family, gave them money for clothes and - if I heard aright - education, too.  

Paraschiva is as sparkling and sharp as the quartz in these mountains; even when laughing - and her merriment is volcanic - her manner inclines towards asperity rather than softness.  Her tirades are terrifying, so it's a surprise when she takes me into her confidence.  It feels like a privilege too. 

She is seldom free to chat and I am curiously gratified when she asks, or rather tells, me to do chores: take care of the lambs for a couple of hours while the other shepherds are milking, fetch water from the spring that lies in a half-hidden pool a hundred yards down the slope, lift the milk cauldron from the fire and haul it with her into the barn.  Then I watch fascinated as she adds cheag, a commercial thickening agent, that sets the liquid (thicker now at the end of the season) into a jelly.  

At a rough guess the daily milk yield contains 100 kilos.  (Is this crazy?  Writing here in a hurry, I'm not sure of my facts and will have to calculate more carefully.)   In any case, it only takes 20 minutes for the large tub of milk to solidify.  The next stage is to ladle the jelly into a stainless steel trough to drain off the whey, cut it into chunks that are roughly the same size (a kilo or two in each one) and press them together with wooden slats.  

When Paraschiva is satisfied that the chunks are consistent enough, she soaks them in salty water, called saramura, and packs them into plastic tubs for transportation down to the village.  This type of sheep's cheese is called telemea, and it's said that Romanian shepherds learned the technique from Greeks who settled in Dobrogea, at the time when that magnetic coastal region was still under Ottoman Turkish rule.  (Most of it now belongs to Romania although a southern portion lies in Bulgaria.)  Telemea is basically the same thing as feta.  It's the most popular type of sheep's cheese on the Romanian market because it keeps through the winter, and for that reason sells more easily.    

It's from Paraschiva that I hear there are more transhumant flocks in J than I thought.  According to her, some 30 sheep farming families still walk their sheep north in the autumn, and back again in the spring.  They mostly go to Salaj, a county of smaller hills, lower altitude and milder weather on the north-west edge of the Transylvanian plateau.  She rattled off a few names - far fewer than 30 - which I tried to jot down.     

I want to meet the other transhumant shepherds.  Paraschiva tells me one or two of the families live quite close by; why don't I go and talk to them?  Like the Ds, most of them rent the summer farms, the colibi or stâni as the Romanians call them, from private owners: the days when J controlled the majority of izlazuri - a huge area of common land that reached to the outer boundaries of the village, are gone.  (One of the statistics often mentioned in histories of J says that this remote mountain comuna encompasses the same area as Bucharest, Romania's capital city.  I once made a note of what the measurement actually was but have long since lost it; Bucharest is probably a bit larger by now!)

Closest of all is the A family.  Iancu A, known, like all respected elderly males, as moşu, will be able to tell me about many of the other transhumant farmers.  'Can I get there in a day?' I ask, rather naively.  Paraschiva looks baffled, as if I ought to know that they live barely a brisk half-hour hike from here.  All I need is to follow one of the many cart roads that criss cross J's outlying pastures like the ribs of a leaf.  

Taking a makeshift staff to ward off unfriendly sheepdogs - and possibly wolves - I set off past Simion and Dan, looking after the lambs which are due to be sold any day now.  Simion, Ghiţa's father, looks happy in his environment, if a little wizened.  It is beautiful today: very calm under a half-blue sky.  Rolling hilltops bar the horizon.  There are clusters of tiny yellow and white pansies in the taller, dying grasses.  Wild boar excavations have scarified patches of the open grazing.  Someone has been cutting down invasive birch trees, probably taking advantage of the current EU grants to aid sustainable farming in mountain areas.  

I sing to myself as I head into a clump of fir trees whose low-swinging branches obscure the exit, and make everything dark.  My walk brings me over the brows of several hills, into the dips between, fording streams and clambering up the other side.  The going is harder than I thought; after a summer of sitting at the computer I am unfit.  Half an hour becomes 45 minutes, and I wonder if I'm going in the right direction.  There is no-one to ask and my phone has no signal.  I feel singularly alone in the vastness and solitude of the mountains.  It all looks so peaceful, so bland, so almost-Home Counties, with the curves of the hillsides swooping down into valley bottoms, the decorous woods, the smooth grass - but that's an illusion: here, potentially, be dragons.  Telling myself I'm an idiot, my heart-rate rises.  

At last I see it: the rust-coloured corrugated iron roof of a coliba, nestling in a hollow behind some wire and palisade fencing.  Inside the perimeter, the grass has been mown to Home Counties perfection.  Nobody is playing tennis.  Mrs A is tending her cows, which have the freedom of the three or four well-groomed hectares which surround her shieling.  She is, I guess, in her 70s.  As soon as she realises I'm there, Mrs A points to the gate, round the other side of the corral.  Relief: a chance to sit and talk with other human beings.  Something I've taken for granted.  

Mrs A and her daughter, Maria, invite me into a little timber shed, a narrow rectangle with a sloping roof.  It stands a few yards away from the main coliba.  It is surprisingly comfortable and cheerful inside the shed: instead of a window, a section of wall is missing from the top of one of its longer walls, and this lets in a lot of light.  There is a stove in one corner, next to a large table which is being used to prepare food.  

Apart from seeing to the cows and their calves, they have been harvesting their cabbages, hoping to salt them for winter.  But the slugs have got there first, leaving shredded stumps instead of nice fat leaves.  Disappointing.  Mrs A sighs at the waste but is not cast down for long.  She sits me on the only chair and plies me with food: bread, slanina, telemea, tomatoes, peppers, coffee, creamy chocolate cake...  Maria comes in and out, checking on her mother, the cabbages, and her six month old baby Ioana who is in the house.  

Maria is slight and wiry, with a sensitive face; physical work and winter winds have worn her lean with no extraneous flesh.  She and I have met before, at Ghiţa's wedding.  'I looked a bit different then', she jokes, pointing to her flat belly.  Both women have accepted me without reserve.  No wonder I feel so at home.  

A number of interesting objects hang from nails along the back wall.  The morning sun falls on them casting sharp shadows: a patterned cloth, turquoise plastic sheeting, enamel mugs and cooking pots, a rolling pin, a radio hanging from a wooden frame.  Set against the log walls, they look like a still life composition.  

Mr A is away down in the gully, chopping wood.  Would I like them to call him?  He is the only one who is supposed to know the other transhumant shepherds.  Of course I would, if it's not too much trouble...  

It never is: the clear atmosphere of the mountains makes its people clear and uncluttered too.  If you ask, they will say yes or no.  There is hardly ever any shilly-shallying.  (Later the same week, after I returned to J, Ileana told me that 'people here are hard, but they are sociable and communicative too.  When you live like us, sometimes never seeing another person for days on end, meeting someone is a real event.')

Maria and I walk down a steep slope into trees, climbing over fences.  Iancu, her father, is moving logs.  Like her, he is lithe and quick but when we get closer, I see with a shock how old he looks.  Would he be any better off sitting in an old folks' home?  I doubt it.  Bearded and bristly, he is at one with the timber.  Maria explains why I've come, and without complaint, her dad shoulders some branches and we clamber up the hill again.  I take photos of Iancu, who sits on a log beside the shed.  Mrs A kindly arranges a tol for me - this is a type of brown and white checker-patterned woven wool rug which shepherds from the Cindrel range of the Carpathian Mountains use as a rain coat - but I am afraid of missing anything, and squat on the ground as close as I can get to Iancu's face.  I ask him about transhumance.  His voice is fragile and hoarse with fatigue.  I can hardly make out what he says.   Dismayed, I ask if he'd mind if I make a recording.  

Iancu says that when he was growing up, in the 1930s, most of the villagers had animals, and transhumance was a normal way of life.  He had looked after sheep in Cluj county with someone called Nicolae, some forty years ago, but the words are so difficult for me to understand that I can't really make out what he's saying.  Odd bits do get through my language barrier.  

'How long have you had this land?'  At first I mishear him: 'Forty six years?'  'One hundred and forty six!' Iancu puts me right.   

I could insist on his repeating every sentence so that its meaning is clear to me, but I haven't got the heart.  Iancu is tired and this is not a good moment.  The conversation wanders.  We veer off course to the Second World War and the injustices which he and his family suffered under Ceauşescu.  He is vehement about this, and Mrs A chips in to smooth the waters, telling me, 'for some, they were better'.  I had heard, read, or assumed somehow that life was easier for the people of J and the neighbouring village of PS in the 1980s, because of their remoteness, and the advantages that some shepherds had in a system that guaranteed fixed prices for meat, milk and wool.  It is well known that some people in Marginimea Sibiului did do well: the tales of four-storey mansions with lifts, and marble-lined stables were not false.  But it seems the As were not so fortunate, and they do not agree with the opinion that is repeated often in these uncertain times that things were better for Romanians under Ceauşescu than they are now.  'They were hoţi (crooks)', says Iancu A, but he is more exercised by current inequalities, adding, 'Lady, the people who raise animals are not well paid; others (I assume he means middlemen) get the money; we are just the slaves.  What we have now is not democracy; it's daylight robbery'.  Tears fill his eyes.  

Maria shows me her baby.  She has been married before and has older children; this relatively late arrival is bonny, cheerful and cherished, surrounded by warmth and plastic toys.  Maria and her mother tell me I could stay with them overnight, but, although reluctant to leave their cheerful company, I'm also embarrassed by their generosity and decline.  At around 3pm, I take my leave, anxious to get back before dark.  I say I will send them copies of the photos, and keep in touch.  Outside the As corral, a sheep dog bounds up to me: another flock is moving ground; I see it in tight formation a quarter of a mile away, too far for me to yell.  

I keep my cool and the dog hesitates, but Mrs A sees what's happening and runs to the fence with a stick for me.  It's one that she made for herself.  'Take it, don't worry', she says when I hesitate.  'Go that way, turn right by the tree over there, it's quicker'.  She points to the left of a memorial cross, and I see a direct line across one deep valley to Stănişoara, the Ds' fold.  The growling dog has retreated.  I would have liked to look at the memorial, wondering if it's the one that Mrs B had put up after her eldest son was struck by lightening in August 2010.  But discretion wins the day, and I head off into the wide expanse of grass where there are no signposts to direct my way.  

Half way down the hill, I meet yet another flock, outridden by five hairy Carpathian sheep dogs.  I stay very still and hold out a hand.  The leader sidles up and licks it.  The others follow, half cringeing, their back ends wagging, teeth bared in ridiculous, ingratiating grins.  Two shepherds are making their steady way up towards me, one middle-aged with an open friendly face, one young, hooded and startlingly handsome.  They walk steadily forwards, poles in hand, like pilgrims.  'Where are you going?' I ask.  To Alba, says the older shepherd.  'Are they your sheep?'  'No, they belong to a priest in...' and he mentions a village in the next county that I haven't heard of.  For all I know it could be several days' walk away.  They have been summering the sheep in the Cindrel's high pastures.  'How many have you got there?'  Five hundred head.  They move off with the same deliberate, unhurried, tread, like apparitions of antiquity.

A shepherds' village

It is a balmy afternoon in late September.  Lying on the edge of the Cindrel Massif, the village of J basks under a cobalt sky.  From some angles, its houses look as if they are going to tumble into the Transylvanian Plateau, 600 metres below, and its terracotta roofs are like tentacles that grip the sandy ridges of the worn-down hills. 

If first impressions make J look precarious, they are deceptive.  This is an energetic, closely-knit community.  Sure, there are tensions between the old and the new part of the village - 'new' applies to the district called Bordeaua only because, unlike the other quarters which trace their origins to the 14th century, Bordeaua began in the 18th, when its inhabitants, miners for the most part, came south-east from the Apuseni Mountains to find a new life as wood-cutters and farmers. 

You only have to walk along J's main street to see how vibrant it is: firstly, there are the prosperous looking houses, built cheek by jowl following the Saxon fashion.  They present a formidable, united front, even if the old lime-washed, wooden homes are vanishing in favour of brasher, concrete edifices with chrome balustrades, uPVC windows and psychedelic colours.  Many of J's town houses are more like villas than farmsteads, and some proudly proclaim their owners' names in plaques over the gated courtyards.  Each household is a mini-fortress, and going inside is like entering a fiefdom.  These courtyards are usually spotlessly spic and span, with pretty plants in borders or pots, wafting sweet scents across the earthier ones of cow and horse dung that come up from the streets.  

Secondly, there are the people themselves.  If you meet them in the street, they are often openly curious, and will want to know who you are and where you come from.  To a diffident visitor this attitude can seem confrontational, and sometimes the question is put rudely, but more often it is the result of simply wanting to know.  If you visit the villagers at home, you will be treated like royalty, and offered the best in terms of food and drink that the house can manage.  These are hard-working folk, used to heavy physical labour, and they know that a body cannot survive unless it eats.  So, the words that ring in my ears most often are, "Mancati!"  ("Eat!")  and "Ce pot sa va dau?"  ("What can I give you?").  Their hospitality is as natural as breathing.    

So far, J has not fallen prey to the disease which affects so many other rural communities across eastern Europe when their youngsters leave.  J's population numbers about 6000, and the age range is very wide. 

It was August 2011, and my first visit to one of J's sheepfolds.  For cognoscenti, the fold would have been satisfying on its own, but, devoted as I was to things sheepish, I would have had to be blind to ignore the charms of this village, its people and legends.  Besides, J and its neighbours are the fountain head, the Mecca, and the Washington DC of Romanian sheep farming rolled into one.  Mention J or Poiana in the same breath as sheep, and people fall back with respect.  Uttering their names shows that you know a thing or two.

Links between these particular villages and shepherding are said to go back to Dacian times, and some historians believe that pastoralism in this part of the Carpathian Mountains began in the Mesolithic Age. You can believe what you want, of course, but in my mind's eye it is easy to conceive of the sheepskin-clad mocani (which is what shepherds round here are called) herding sheep in these parts since the end of the last great freeze. During the communist period, J and other mountain villages managed to escape its worst rigours and they became famous - or notorious - for their comparative wealth. Shepherds benefitted from fixed prices for milk, meat and wool, and able to avoid some of their taxes, did rather well.  People who came up from the plateau to work in J and its neighbours spoke of "going to America".  Rumours of cow stalls lined with black marble, four-storey mansions with lifts, and shiny, four-wheel drive cars hiding behind the courtyard gates became rife.  The times were favourable to transhumant shepherds too: they could wander more or less at will, and some managed to bribe the officials in state and collective farms into letting them avoid paying the going rate for grazing.  A story still does the rounds of a certain inhabitant of Poiana who asked Ceausescu for permission to buy a helicopter so that he could keep a better eye on his flocks, which were so numerous that they spread over several mountains at once. 

Having a few days to spare, and nowhere else to go, I decided to get to know J better.  Soon, I will be writing about the people I have met there.  To whet your appetites, they include two poets, a sheepskin cloak maker, and several musicians.  Oh, and not forgetting some of the Baiesi, J's Gypsies, who live in their own enclave from which they view the world quite differently. 

Walking with shepherds, a poem

 [I wrote this a few days ago, to remind myself of the week I spent living outdoors with a group of shepherds in Sălaj at the start of April 2012.] 

Walking with shepherds

They fling themselves full length on the cold ground

Reaching for ciggies, mobile phones, a handkerchief;

Chuckling at the chance to rest,

Five, ten minutes max, then up and off again,

Sheep won’t wait, and if you once let them drift

You’re done.

And will be in for a bollocking.

Sheep converse with each other between

Staccato snippings and delicate guzzling of spiky herbs,

All there is at this time of year,

Their jaws move like electric motors in spurts,

Heads jerking in rhythm

Fleeces shivering on spindly legs,

The not-stupid, herd mentality perfectly explicable

To other sheep.

Later, Andrei leans on his bâta, chin on hands,

Which are as brown as chill-roasted chestnuts,

Taking time out to show you spring flowers:

Yellow-petalled mistletoe with white berries bundled together like untidy nests in comatose trees, and

the singular, poisonous-looking Monk’s Orchid

that pokes its bent stem up through

Last autumn’s leaves; white against the buff-pink mulch -

whose pungent smell would be like breakfast

if you had had any - and whose speckled leaves

scream, “I am different”, in the morning fog.

Spring transhumance.  The first day out after lambing. 

An April morning somewhere in Sălaj, a county slotted in between the Carpathian eyries of western Transylvania, like a forgotten moment in the

grand scheme.  A lapse of memory, that let the invaders in – Celts and Free Dacians who threatened the Roman limes of old Porolissum. 

 

We walk ten, twenty miles – it seems like a hundred –

before nightfall dopes the flock,

and it settles down, this wool-clad hydra, in its temporary parking place,

By woods and sluggish ditches, by open fields of fresh grain shoots

signalling spring in the dazed aftermath of winter,

On rough and tumble mountains worthy of the name;

And 1500 pairs of eyes twinkle in your LED headlight, denying you sleep. 

Shepherds do not sleep on transhumance; you are an exception except when it comes to daybreak, when laggards will be left behind. 

On the fifth night, shriven by cold, you wake at 2, in the pouring rain.   

Wolves are about, the guard dogs paroxysmal.

You stay by the camp fire, which is like an island of safety

In an ocean of fear.

A grey shape moved up the grey hillside, eons away, but

Only 50 feet from you.

And there are shouting and barking and flashlights criss-crossing the sky

like anti-aircraft, while, quiet as gossamer

The predator gets its prey.

You see nothing of this; and the shepherds don’t realise their loss till daybreak.  A lamb sacrificed before Easter. 

For elevenses, you eat pork fat grilled on a stick, with hunks of dry white bread

and mauve onions.  “No salt, please.”

The journey unfolds in your head like a saga, and you are proud like a hero,

Though to them, it’s all a day’s work, on bad pay – they say –

and good jokes, of which you are sometimes the butt; nothing too racy though, because you are a guest, and must keep your distance. 

But it is enough to make you feel more than welcome, like 

One of the boys,

wearing the T-shirt -

if there was one.

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.