Ghita Ciobanul on the BBC

This is the text of my piece about Ghita and the shepherds broadcast on 13th January 2014 on the BBC radio programme, From Our Own Correspondent:

On a dank Monday evening some weeks ago, a Romanian shepherd called Ghita left home with his sheep. He wasn't in a lorry but on foot, accompanied by several angajati, or hired men, some shaggy dogs, and seven donkeys loaded with gear. Ghita was off on his autumn transhumance, heading north for his winter pastures. It would take him six weeks.

For a country whose defining myth revolves around shepherds, Romania isn't all that keen on its pastoralists. The Ballad of the Little Sheep (Miorita) tells of a herdsman who lets himself be murdered by two rival shepherds even though one of his lambs, who has miraculously acquired the power of speech, warns him in advance. Miorita is sometimes taken as a metaphor for Christianity, another way of showing Christ's courage in turning the other cheek. It's also said to mirror the experience of the Romanian people who have endured numerous invasions, occupations and humiliations without, it is claimed, ever losing their identity.
When Romanians were agitating for independence in the 19th Century, Transylvanian shepherds were seen as the rugged pioneers of the nationalist movement. Long before then, they had established shortcuts over the Carpathian Mountains to seasonal grazing in what is now Hungary, Serbia, Bulgaria, the Caucasus, southern Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, Poland and the Czech Republic. Having crossed from Hungarian and Habsburg lands into Ottoman Turkey and Russia, they returned home to their more isolated communities with information, ideas and ambitions fired by the world outside.

A shepherd's CV has to offer some crucial USPs: caringness, self-reliance and dedication. He - and it's almost always a he, although in real life women did the same job - is synonymous with the kindly ideals of Christianity and for that matter Islam - but for all that, he is a humble, often solitary, sometimes rootless figure.

During Communism, certain Romanian sheep farmers did rather well. People still talk about Mr B from Poiana Sibiului who asked Ceausescu's permission to buy a helicopter. Mr B's flocks were hefted over several mountains, and he argued that being able to fly would let him keep track of them more easily. His request was refused, but Poiana is famous for other reasons - many of its shepherds built luxurious mansions at a time when most people had to stand in queues to buy food and lit their homes with 40 watt bulbs. Inaccessible to big machinery, many mountain farms escaped collectivisation, and the men and women who commuted there from the less exclusive plains, spoke of "going to America".

Like farmers worldwide, Romanian flock masters enjoy a good grumble. But things have got tough for them since 1989. Once guaranteed, prices for wool have plummeted. Although there is an international market for Romanian lamb, and sheep's cheese sells well, "slow food" has not made enough of a difference to the shepherds who find it healthier - and cheaper - to walk their sheep to far away winter pastures rather than keep their animals inside.

With its origins in the Bronze Age, if not earlier, transhumance is a form of semi-nomadism. It sounds romantic but in the past, Romanian shepherds occasionally resorted to transporting their animals by train, something they could never afford to do now.

Romanian shepherds still look archaic. They wear a long sheepskin cloak called a cojoc or sarica. With the shaggy fleece on the outside, it's also their bed, so when shepherds call the cloak their house, they aren't joking. When they sleep at all, it's outside, in all weathers. The hired men earn between 200 or 300 euros a month. They also receive daily meals, work clothing, and a cigarette allowance.

Romanians are generally learning more about their shepherds thanks to television.
In August this year, a well-known phone company* began an advertising campaign that highlighted real people doing real jobs. One of them was Ghita.
Dressed in his cojoc and rimless pot hat (another must-have piece of shepherding rig), sitting by a campfire and dancing with sheep, Ghita Ciobanul, or Ghita the Shepherd, has taken Romania by storm. Ten days after the phone company put him on Facebook, his page had clocked more than 200,000 likes. A month later, they had doubled.
In the past, Ghita has had to move his sheep illegally, during the night. Given the hazards of crossing Romania's rapidly urbanising, motorised countryside, it's the only way. Accidents and shootings have cost him scores of sheep and many dogs. Maybe this year, thanks to his new-found celebrity, Ghita will be luckier.

*Vodafone: but I think Vodafone should pay its taxes, and if you agree, see this link: http://action.sumofus.org/a/vodafone-tax-dodging/?akid=5701.863102.vCD__-&rd=1&sub=fwd&t=2

You can hear the audio version via this link; it should work for over a year from 13th Jan 2014:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01p2pcm

Another airing on the World Service, 7th March 2014: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01t399s 

For more information about my search for Romanian shepherds who migrated to Russia and the Caucasus, please visit this page and follow the links at the bottom. 

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.  



 







 

Sheep in diaspora

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eye-balling sheep

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

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

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

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

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

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

A wedding, and lambing not yet started

Ghita and his shepherds reached the winter grazing grounds in November, after many of the usual alarms and excursions.  How hard it was, I will never know, because Ghita is reticent about disasters: he has to save his energies for the present.  Apart from the two dogs which the hunters killed near Cluj, wolves took 30 of his sheep sometime in December or January.

Just after Christmas, I got a phone call from Ghita's mother.  I was at home, thinking of anything but, and when she rang, I couldn't understand who it was:

Drrrn-drrn, drrn-drrn, drrn-drrn.

Me: Hello?

Other end: (Silence)

Me: (slightly sharper) Hello?

Other end: ALO!!!!!!!

Me: (startled, then incredulous)  Paraschiva?

Other end: DA!  Ce mai faceti?  

Me:  (still incredulous, Paraschiva never wastes time on the phone, and to
receive a call from her in Wales is unheard of)  Bine, si Dumneavoastra? 

Paraschiva: Bine!  Asteptam o nunta, si daca sunteti in tara pe 20 ianuarie, veti fi bineprimiti.

Me: (bowled over)  Da?  Extraordinar!  Sper sa vin.  Doamne ajuta!

Other end: (click)

So Ghita and Andreea were getting married!  It was wonderful, glorious, heart-warming news.  I was recovering from an eye operation and hoped I'd be well enough to get out to Romania in time.

Thanks to providence, the good surgeons of Swansea, and my kind, supportive cohabitee I arrived in the village of J three days before-hand, in time to help with the wedding preparations.  These consisted of making vast quantities of food in the old Camin Cultural, one of J's two community halls.  This building, made of concrete and painted a thankfully fading acidic green, was freezing as regards temperature but blazing with good will and laughter.

Inside the hall, the main chamber was a lofty, cavernous space whose walls were clad with brown-painted wood-pannelling to above head height, and whose floor was a well-worn parquet, stained to a discreet, muddy colour from years of good use - ranging from formal public meetings to carefree celebrations such as the one that was about to begin.  Ghita's wedding was an occasion for everyone to revel in, and that it had brought them an unexpected relief from post-New Year dreariness.

It was bustling with activity: it seemed that the whole village was involved in one way or another.  Friends, neighbours and relations - people often combined all three categories - rushed about merrily, chopping freshly-killed, home-grown pork and mutton to be served as steaks or minced into long sausages on an industrial mincer, dicing cooked carrots and parsnips for beef salad, arranging vast saucepans of delicately folded sarmale (stuffed cabbage leaves) into beautiful whirlpool patterns, singing and joking as the steam rose from red faces, necks and fingers.  After an hour or so, one of Ghita's five sisters laid food out on long trestles for the helpers and we were regaled with delicious meat stew, cake, plum brandy and the dreaded orange drink that begins with F.

There was a lump in my throat because all these near-strangers had brought me into their hearts as though I was one of their own.  It felt like a colossal privilege.  I hardly saw Paraschiva: she was like a flash of black lighting, here, there and everywhere, directing operations with a sure mind trained by years of bringing up six children, one husband and numerous quadrupeds all of whom needed guiding in one way or another.

Paraschiva is one of J's true matriarchs.  She is capable of flashing anger and if it breaks over your head, you'd better watch out because her words can be sharp and penetrating as daggers, but if you're prepared to stand and take your medicine, nobody is more forgiving and sunny in the afterwards.  In his book on the Margineni shepherds who led their flocks to southern Russia and the Caucasus, Toma Lupas wrote in praise of Margineni women, whom he says are the most wonderful combination of feminity and strength.  In Paraschiva, you see one such personified.

On Sunday, the wedding day, I arrived at 10.30am, as requested: the day was cold and snow lay in wet solid banks, and where it had compacted the ice was treacherous.  Like everyone else, I was wrapped up in overcoat, scarf, and about twenty base layers on top of my elegant wedding gear, and I wore my trusty old Swiss hiking boots instead of court shoes: hardly elegant, but it was more important to be there.  Dragos Lumpan had arrived too, with his state of the art cameras: Ghita was his friend before mine, and Dragos is in the final stages of making his film, The Last Transhumance, in which Ghita and his men feature several times.

In the hall lobby, a three-man Gypsy band played their socks off - jinking and bouncing with their saxophone, accordion and drum, the guys had come from Bordeaua, J's Gypsy district, and in the chill blast that came in from outside, they certainly helped to keep everyone feeling cheerful.  (When I went to visit Bordeaua, the people I met there told me they are not Roma but Baiesi, that is, descendants of the poor, 18th century miners who came to J from the Apuseni Mountains in search of a new start in life.)  More guests arrived every minute: with an inward yelp of delight I recognised Andreea's pretty mother and sister, and her sister's husband, but embarrassingly not her father, who did recognise me, and was - naturally - quite offended that I could not remember him. The bride's party had driven up that day from Salaj in a minibus because unusually the wedding was being arranged - and presumably paid for - by Ghita's parents, and I felt a pang of sorrow for them because they really should have been the hosts and they looked a little shy and uncomfortable.  After a five-hour journey, it was not surprising.  But like everyone else, they soon radiated happiness. 

The hall itself looked immaculate: instead of the two trestles I'd seen on the Friday, they were covered in swathes and flounces of red and white net and satin, and arranged in diagonal rows, herringbone fashion, one row along each of the two side walls, leaving a decent space for processions in the middle.  A large red and white heart fixed on the wall at the back of one other table, placed parallel to the wall, showed where the bridal party would sit.  There were more tables on the stage and at the opposite end, near the door, a smaller stage was cluttered with electronic gadgets and cables ready for the musicians to take their stand there. To the other side of the door into the hall, a step led down into a two-room kitchen from which steam floated aromatically: the four or five volunteer cooks were there again, hair plastered to their scalps, bending over the huge vats of bubbling liquids in which I thought I could see sausages, dumplings, soup, stew.  Here too were a new group of people, dressed in smart black and white waitering gear: this is certainly going to be a serious, no holds barred affair, I can see, I told myself.

Ghita was (thanksbetogoodness) in evidence, in a very smart white waistcoat and shirt, black jacket, trousers, and dickie bow - an Adonis in person.  He looked absolutely joyous.  He must have come from the winter farm in the past couple of days as well; he only has a couple of hands to look after the flocks (split as last year into two halves, one for lambing ewes, the other for rams and non-breeding ewes).  Immediately after the wedding, he had to return to work - no romantic honeymoon for this dedicated couple.  

At 11, Andreea herself arrived, looking more regal and lovely than I had ever seen her, and completely different to the diffident slip of a girl who had greeted me in Paraschiva's kitchen on the Friday morning.  At that moment, I had not clapped eyes on her since the previous April and was not sure if it were she.  Andreea had broken the ice for both of us by stating, quite truthfully, that it was hard for strangers to know where to put themselves at a time like this!  I guess she was talking about herself as well as me, and felt for her.  It has not exactly been a whirlwind romance but Andreea's people live a long way from J and she has not had time to get to know his family well.  I was sure they would treat her well, but could understand her nervousness.  Not to speak of the momentousness of getting hitched in the traditional Romanian style.  An option such as mine - to live with someone else without being officially married - would not be open to her and Ghita, and I'm sure they wouldn't have wanted it, but this was a daunting occasion nevertheless.
    
What the bride wore: a full white dress embroidered with tiny, shiny silvery-white beads and a fluffy white jacket to keep out the cold.  She had white flowers in her hair which is dark blonde, and which she wore up.  She came into the lobby with a basket on her arm.  In the basket were little flowery tokens for each guest: she went around each of us pinning the tokens to our chests.  Boy it was packed in there!  Everyone wanted a picture.  The kids who were nasi, that is godparents, to the bride and groom, stood out by their special costumes, that sober and extremely elegant combination of clothing which is confined to black and white, but the little girls wore fine veils of cream coloured material as thin as gossamer which made them look a bit like Dutch milkmaids.  How beautiful and dignified all this was is hard to describe. 

And so, the day began: after the giving of posies, the couple went to the Primaria (town hall) for their civil wedding.  In J, the primaria is next to the old camin (and to the new one, but you don't need to know that just yet).  Urged by Ghita's sisters, I followed the procession into the building, up the white marble stairs to the first floor, and into another lobby, where standing as far back as I could, I heard rather than saw, my two friends tie the knot.  The deputy mayor conducted the service in a serious but relaxed manner.  After his kindly speech - the deputy mayor was amongst friends, you could tell from the briskness and not infrequent joshing which he allowed himself - we had glasses of champagne and bonnes bouches which helped to keep out the cold a little, and mildly tiddly, I followed the procession back down the stairs and outside again, where a crowd of villagers was waiting in a dutiful phalanx to enjoy the spectacle of one of J's favourite sons getting married to this little-known girl from outside the county.

We walked up the hill to the second of J's two Orthodox churches, which is Ghita's parish church but looks like a miniature cathedral.  It is an early 20th century building, very white with a tall circular arcaded tower - not as charming as the older one but it is an imposing landmark and lives up to its nickname of the Cathedral of the Mountains.  Inside, Dragos and the other official photographer performed gymnastics with their cameras, taking pictures from all angles, back, front, sideways, from above in the balconies, and from down below, nipping about all over the sacred spaces, while the priest got on with the solemn business in hand, and while Ghita and Andreea stood, knelt and stood again, exchanged vows and rings, and then eventually tender smiles and a kiss (sure I could write for Mills and Boon...).  And we all trooped out again, down the slippery paths and steps to the icy road, and back to the hall.

Where chaos broke out.  The well-behaved procession of nasi, little ones and larger, suddenly descended upon bride and groom and an unseemly rough and tumble ensued in which Andreea seemed to be given away for a bar of chocolate and Ghita for, well, I couldn't make it out, it all happened too fast, and my Romanian, pretty serviceable at a steady trot, gave out under this gallop.  As I heard later from my friend Ileana who keeps the Pastoral Museum, the nasi pretend to sell off the mireasa and mirelul (bride and groom) before the wedding feast begins.

And feast it was, for the eye, the ear, the nose and the stomach: the hall was decked with red and white satin bows and streamers, and there were gadroons of food and drink, not only what you could see at the start, laid out decorously on the trestle tables, but course after course which issued out of the steaming kitchen, to delight the carnivores, herbivores, cake gluttons and drunkards among us to the point of unbelievable satiety.  There were hot soups, grilled meats, rice and potato dishes, and cold collations with (a recent innovation this) plenty of fruit and salads - including the salata de boeuf which I'd helped to dice - to offset the traditional hunkiness of Romanian cuisine.

And of course there was music, non-stop, mostly live and definitely boisterous.  It was pop-folk music, and apart from the digital recordings, it came from two bands (one a Baiesi Gypsy group from Bordeaua, an upwardly mobile ghetto attached to the northern side of J), and from two glamorous female singers who sang raunchy solos on the floor of the hall, and from Dinu B, one of Ghita's closest friends, who gave a virtuoso fluier performance of such melancholy and longing that it set my spine on fire.

And of course there was dancing - I wish I could remember the differences between the Jiana, the Hategana and the Invartita but we had all of these rounds or horas as people call them, linking the dances to the brandy, the double-distilled horinca which of course flowed like rivers).  And there were spectacles such as fireworks which sprang out of the floor in silver flares (one of them practically under Andreea's feet), and dramatic, candle-lit entrances by the waiters and waitresses, dressed in black trousers, white shirts and elegant waistcoats, bearing the next course.  Of course.  

Andreea and Ghita's wedding went on all day, and all night, until 5am.  There was a short break around 5pm, when the guests went home to feed their livestock.  When they came back they had changed out of their warm, day clothes, emerging like butterflies out of chrysalises in silk and satin and velvet, the women in high heels, with their hair piled in shining coifs that defied gravity, the men in smart suits that made them hard to recognise as the tough guys in all-purpose khaki who I was used to, stomping around the village and charging about in their 4x4s.  Some of the younger kids stayed at home after this watershed, but others came back to the hall, to run around amongst our legs until very late.  At one point I noticed the floor: soft wood planks stained black with decades of drink and the other inconsequential things that we chuck away when we are very happy.  People treated the floor like a friend, and lay on it for rest.  Or maybe I was enjoying myself so much that the floor looked like the deck of a ship in a rolling sea, rising up to greet me.

As for me, I held out until 3am; by that time Dragos had long since disappeared.  Walking home to Ileana's by night, I realised that all my inhibitions: fearing I wouldn't fit in, would be seen as an interloper, an awkward presence in the midst of all the celebration, had evaporated.  The air smelt icy and sharp, ready for anything.  I knew that after a few hours' rest, I would be too.     

Update: Thanks to Vodafone and Protv, Ghita has become a star - you can visit his facebook page, Ghita Ciobanul.  We wish him and his family every success.