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.

Tracking Romanian shepherds in Georgia (and travels with Devi)

In August 2014 I went to Georgia in search of Romanian shepherds. This is an extract from notes made at the time.

So far, without much luck: all I've got to go on is a book called 'Oieri margineni in Crimeea si Sudul Rusiei', a collection of memories, documents and photos charting some of the adventures that befell shepherds from Marginimea Sibiului, an enclave in the southern Carpathian Mountains, when they migrated east with their sheep.

One of the maps in the back of this great little publication has a big yellow stain marking the diaspora.  It began in about 1870 and lasted until Stalin put an end to any aspirations of prosperity the Romanians might have had.  Their move to the east was only one example of Carpathian shepherds' long-distance transhumant journeys, but while it lasted, they not only used the winter pastures available on the northern and eastern coasts of the Black Sea, but settled there as well, establishing farms and families in Crimea, eastern Ukraine, southern Russia and Georgia. Some of them went further afield, reaching Astrakhan, Azerbaijan and even Iran. 

I first heard about the phenomenon in 2007, and I've become rather obsessed by it, as though those particular pastoralists were heroes of some kind.  It's a tricky argument to maintain.  Shepherds are usually pragmatists: they'll go where they can find better, cheaper pastures, following economic principles not romantic ones.  There's a difference between sheep owners and hired shepherds, and nowadays the latter often live like dogs.  Yet talking to transhumant shepherds in Romania has revealed something else.  Masters and employees often relish the freedom and fellowship of the road and they have a relationship to their animals that belies mere functionality.

Over the past two and a half weeks, I've been travelling through Georgia following some of the clues in Toma's book.  There aren't that many, in fact the only concrete fact I have lighted on is that Stefan Nanu of Tilisca went to Georgia at some point, either while he was working as a hired shepherd, or afterwards, when he became some sort of fixer, or a businessman.  We know he tried to intercede on the Romanians' behalf with Kalinin, pleading the shepherds' cause so they wouldn't lose their hard-won wealth to the steely Soviet state.  We also know he wrote letters home to Tilisca, and they are still in his family's possession.  But when and for how long he went to Georgia is a mystery.   

Helping me in my quest has been Devi Asmadiredja.  Half Sundanese (Indonesian), half German, Devi deserves a book to herself.  She's been living in Georgia for the last three years, during which time she's learnt to speak Georgian and Chechen and has established herself as an intrepid mountain guide.  Devi loves the shepherding life, and thanks to her, we've been chasing up any leads we can find - names of people and villages mostly - to justify that yellow stain leaking into the space between the two chains of Caucasus Mountains. (Since Tara Isabella Burton wrote about Devi for the BBC magazine, Devi could well become a household name, so I've added some photos of her here - they may not appear alongside this post, so if you can't see them, try scrolling up or down.)

Our best hope on this trip was finding out that there are two villages with names exactly or nearly the same as margineni ones.  Both are in Javakheti, south-central Georgia, near the Turkish and Armenian borders.  Hearing the word 'Tilisca' made me jump out of my skin: it was one of Devi's friends who mentioned it casually, as a place near the town of Akhalkhalaki.  Devi and I hot-footed over there by marshrutka (minibus), a journey of 15 minutes costing roughly 50p each way.  Consusingly, the windscreen bore the name 'Dilisca' in Cyrillic letters: I still don't know which is the correct spelling.

Letters apart, I could hardly contain myself, but everything went rather flat when we met a 70 year old farmer from the Georgian Tilisca, or Dilisca.  He was said to know everything about the place but told us he'd never heard of any Romanians there.  On the contrary, it had been an Armenian village since Armenians were expelled from eastern Turkey in 1830.  Before that, it was a Georgian one, with a history leaping back to a misty past that didn't seem to have room for Transylvanians.  A family of Armenian folk singers that runs the Cultural Centre in Akhalkhalaki told us that Tilisca comes from 'tiliscari' which is a Georgian word.  It means 'the door of the morning'.  If only it had opened. 

We didn't make it to Vale, the other place with an identical name in Marginimea Sibiului, but a Georgian historian agreed with my hunch that the direction of influence could just as well have gone in reverse, with Georgian names being taken to Transylvania, not the other way round.

Both countries have a strong Orthodox Christian tradition, and in the late 17th century, Bishop Antimos, a Georgian from the southern region of Samstkhe, was invited by Prince Constantin Brancoveanu to visit Wallachia.

In 1694, Antimos was installed in Snagov Monastery, in the forests near Bucharest.  He founded a printing press and commissioned a lot of other monasteries, before being exiled to Mount Sinai for fomenting trouble.  Antimos supported Wallachia's struggle for independence from Ottoman Turkey and the Greek Phanariots who had a stranglehold on Romanian politics after Brancoveanu and four of his sons were murdered by the Sultan in 1711.

If there is a wider connection between Georgia and the Romanian principalities, Antimos could well be one of the keys.  But there are other links: eastern Romania and the Caucasus were once part of Cumania, a Turkic polity that ruled a large area to the west and east of the Black Sea for several hundred years after the Roman empire ended.  Cumania gets its name from the Caucasian Kubans, whose forebears came from Syria.  There is a fortress called Cumania on the northern slopes of the Caucasus Mountains.  Coman is a well-known Romanian Christian name.  One of the Romanian sheep farming families I know in Marginimea Sibiului traditionally gives the name Coman to one of its boys in each new generation.

Why start with Georgia, when there are firmer accounts of Romanian shepherds settling in the northern Caucasus, Crimea and eastern Ukraine?

Maybe it's just a coincidence of names that made me want to start there:  St. George being the patron saint of England, who may have got his horse-riding attributes from the Sarmatian knights who careered over Caucasian pastures and sent their chivalric traditions to western Europe, Ghita the Romanian shepherd whose spring walk I followed, and whose name is short for Gheorghe, a beloved godfather whose name was George...  It comes from a Greek word for farmer, or someone who works the land.  Georgians are famous for their practicality - they are born farmers.  It had to be Georgia. 

And now it's nearly time to leave, saying goodbye not only to the first stage of what I hope will be many other Georgian journeys, but also to the other travellers I've met here: adventurous young things who have been stopping off in Tbilisi for a few days - or sometimes weeks - while crossing entire continents on cycles, motorbikes, by hitching, on horseback or in a tuktuk (that one was Romanian!).  Fearless of political or psychological propaganda that might persuade others to stay at home and cover their heads, they've made me want to get up and go even more. 

And then there is Devi: her story, and her struggle, are for another time, and would be told better in her own words.  Without her help, I'd have got nowhere, without even the small progress made so far.  I wouldn't have met Kists (Chechens of Pankisi), Ossetians and Svans in their own homes, I wouldn't have shared chips and onions with the shepherds of Patara Khanchali, or met Ani, a German woman who's working with destitute villagers to give them new ways of making a living from their land and their skills.

Without Devi and her imperious subversiveness, I wouldn't have hitched lifts with Turks and Georgians, spent nights in an abandoned workmen's cabin or sleeping on a verandah with the Caucasus Mountains for my curtain.  I would have missed the protesters who want to stop a seven-storey hotel being built in Vake Park.  It's unlikely I'd have found myself under a lime tree in the dusk sipping wine with its maker who showed us the ceramic pots that he'd buried two metres in the ground, copying the ancient fermentation method in which everything is chucked into the mixture and left there over winter: grape flesh, skin, seeds, stalks and all.

Sadly we didn't make it to Tusheti this time, but I'm saving that up for cooler weather, and when my blisters have healed.

I could have done without being marched through the streets of Devi's favourite village in 40 degree heat 'to show to my friends what a tourist looks like', and I got a bit hot under the collar when she kept ordering me, with mock-Germanic severity, to 'SIT DOWN'.  Without her warnings not take photos or notes in sensitive situations, I might have more accurate records of people who've been living on the edge, caught in a no-go area which the outside world regards with suspicion - or doesn't regard at all - and whose daily lives are fraught with difficulties.  She was right: it could have been dangerous for everyone if my journalistic greed had got the better of me.  Learning about other people's lives, and understanding their points of view, is about listening patiently, not just clicking camera buttons.  As I think about buying stamps for last minute postcards and packing my gear for my early morning flight, I know that without Devi, I wouldn't have got nearly so far, and I wouldn't have had so much fun.

For more information on my search for Romanian shepherds in the Caucasus, visit this page and follow the links.

Piping shepherds

August 15th is a huge day in the Romanian Orthodox calendar.  It marks the Dormition of the Virgin Mary, also known as the Feast of the Assumption, celebrating the belief that after she died, Christ's mother was assumed straight away into Heaven before her body had a chance to decay.   Other names for it are Assumption Day or Mary's Day and it's not only a national holiday, but also the occasion for pilgrimages and solemn parades at many Romanian monasteries, including the famous ones of Moisei in eastern Maramures, Nicula near Cluj in Transylvania, and Putna, one of the magnificent churches that the 15th century prince, soldier and saint, Stephen the Great, founded in Moldavia.   As with many Christian feasts, the Dormition replaced a pagan festival, in this case, one that was associated with the harvest.  In Tilişca, a village in the Cindrel range of the Southern Carpathian Mountains, they reserve Assumption Day for the annual sheep breeders’ festival.  A couple of years ago, I went to see what it was like.  

Celebrating saints is something Romanians excel at.  Religion is worn on the sleeve and often mixed with a vigorous dose of pagan mythology.  Folk beliefs and folk music are closely intertwined, so adding the practical side of pastoralism to this holy event doesn't strike the wrong note.   

Up in the mountains south of Sibiu, and other regions where transhumant shepherding continues, raising sheep is regarded as an art as well as a vocation, and sheep farmers still play pipes.  It's a way of whiling lonely hours away.  True, you’ll probably see more young shepherds listening to their mp3 players than tuning up their panflutes or their single pipes but come festival time – and most festivals are linked to a saint’s day, because here every day of the year has a saint attached - young and old alike delight in showing off how well they can tootle a pretty tune.  Musical competitions – singing, dancing and playing an instrument – come naturally to the Romanians.  Their folk music was bowdlerised under the Communists – especially under the forced homage to Ceauşescu called Cântărea al României – but the simple beauty of shepherds’ impromptu piping survives.   Clad in their sheepskin cloaks the shepherds resemble the god Pan himself.  

Shepherds who kept their flocks on the high mountains sometimes need to call to neighbouring farmers: to do this, they used an alphorn called a bucium, or just shouted, as they do today, hollering across the valleys to make themselves heard. 

Romanians are intensely proud of their Dacian heritage, especially here, so close to the Dacians’ strongholds.

Back to St. Mary's Day in Tilişca.  To start the proceedings, there was a meeting in the town hall.  After the protocol speeches, voices were raised in anger: what’s going to happen to our small-holdings if nobody will collect the milk from one or two cows, or a handful of sheep and goats?  It didn’t matter that this was a shepherds’ gathering, the points were valid: the cooperative and state farm systems had destroyed some feudal estates along with a lot of what was good, but the European Union’s farming model was not designed for purpose either.  Nor was it proof against local perversion.  

Some peasants country folk still took a few litres of milk by hand to Bucharest, where city dwellers were hungry for real-tasting food and happy to pay for it.  But they couldn’t go on making these long journeys indefinitely.  ‘What happens when we get too old to work?’  ‘How will we maintain our meadows?’  Since the 1989 Revolution when some land was given back to its pre-Communist owners, Romania has become a nation of tiny farms.  Most of them are under a hectare in size, and while they provide inestimable benefits to the environment, they are deemed too small to count in the so-called ‘free’ market.  Reforms to the EU's Common Agricultural Policy which come into effect in 2014 are supposed to take account of this. 

But at the shepherds' annual meeting, the questions went unanswered.  It was easy to feel that the assembled authorities, the mayor and president of the sheep-breeders’ association who sat in a jolly row facing the audience, didn’t really care.  They were here for the party: and so after sending a few blandishments in the protestors’ direction, they led the company to the church.  

It wasn't a long service, and afterwards, there was a parade.  Teams of folk dancers and musicians had come from far and wide.  They were of all ages too, from tots to totterers.  One behind the other, the folk groups processed down one street, over a river bridge, along the main road, and back into the village centre along another street.  Their flutes and pipes played plaintive rhythms that were out of sync with each other and changed key with the Doppler effect as they passed.  They were rousing though; a wake-up call that rang against the rock walls of this tight little valley, asking for a response that didn’t come.  

Then we all went up the road to the caminul cultural (the community centre) for a slap up meal. 

People bowed their heads for grace, but after those few seconds of silence, the noise was devastating: raucous chatter and laughter reverberated around 30 trestle tables where red paper napkins adorned snowy cloths and a wealth of food met our eyes.  Now and again, you could hear the shepherds playing their pipes for fun.  We ate loads of soup, meat and bread, and drank each other’s health in plum brandy.  We gorged ourselves on local specialities such as bulz and balmos, milky, cheesy dishes based on the bright yellow sweet-corn flour that makes one of Romania’s most famous dishes, a spongy staple of every peasant home, that polenta or porridge they call mămăliga.  And then there was dessert: sweat, creamy layer cakes so squidgy they are almost obscene.    

With sated stomachs, the company drifted out.  Before we left, my friend and I thanked one of the beaming, bustling middle-aged women who had provided the feast.  We asked her if she had her own farm, and how she survived.  Her face crumpled.  ‘We get nothing’, she said; ‘less and less each year for more and more work. And we are growing too old.’  

The sheep-breeders’ party reconvened in a natural, grassy amphitheatre on a hillside overlooking the village.  At the bottom was a high wooden stage replete with amplifiers.  On this, the folk troupes sang, twirled and strutted to the jerky rhythms of time-honoured dances.  The rest of us lolled on a carpet of grasses so varied in shape, colour and smell and so riddled with cornflowers, bugloss, tiny pinks, sage and thyme that we were drunk with the abundance of it all as well as the alcohol we’d consumed.  The only solution was to doze in the shade of the willows, with only half an ear on the proceedings. 

Above us in the beech woods lay the remains of Tilişca’s own Dacian fort.  It was only a ten-minute walk away, but nobody went to look at the few remaining stones, the beautifully engineered, square-cut blocks which are one of the Dacians’ hallmarks.  

It was easy to imagine the Dacians lounging about here too, in more or less identical black and white get up.  They would have been shepherds, miners, builders and metal-workers.  Thanks to the Communist propaganda, we have been taught to think of them as proto-socialists, ordinary folk with no pretentions but their courage.  Their farmers might have had the same kind of shielings that Romanian shepherds use today. 

Lying there among the grasshoppers, I couldn’t help feeling the Dacians would have made a stand against the corruption that’s bringing Romania to its knees.  And that their true heirs were not the demogogues who love to call themselves simple shepherds, but the querulous pensioners who had had the courage to pipe up in the town hall.