Caroline Juler's Blog

Philosopher shepherds

is the title of a short film I’ve made based on interviews with three Romanian farmers. I’m offering it here as a taster:

https://youtu.be/iVHt9Uf98dQ

and would welcome feedback.

A shepherd’s taradiddle (not your normal blog post)

Go, go, go, go, transhumant sheep

Shorn of your reason for living,

May the toes of your feet not fester or curl

From inertia and factory farming

 

While the coarse sceptics cry “You are rosy-eyed twits

And your dreams have no possible function”,

the road to the pasture is buried in flak

and the herdsman is lost in corruption

 

Shepherds who roam with their flocks on the hills

See something commuters are wanting

Long days on the hike with no shelter or rest

Give their minds an extra dimension

 

There is joy in the work be it ever so cold

and the coldness is not of the boardroom,

and I’m counting the rhymes as I gaze at the stars

With the beat of my heart an oration

 

Oh I know I sound sad, and impossibly mad

To suggest we should turn the clock back,

But I’m not saying that – only look what you’re doing

By killing the seeds of creation

 

“We can’t feed the world”, say executive suits

Who calculate all by their profits,

“You are crushing the world” moan the ghosts of the whales

Cleaned right out of the ocean

 

“Ridiculous twaddle”, yell the sleek CEOs

As they lust over loot they will gather

“Suck it up, get a life, we need oil, we need strife

so the fewer can prosper the higher.”

 

The birds of the air and the sheep of the field

Run screaming from our depredations.

Go, go, go while you can, till barbed wire ends your plans

And no grass is left on the mountains.

Maybe I could set this to music, like Phil Ochs.

 

A shepherd’s story

It was Radu who started it.  A search for a meaning in all the mess.  He did it through firelight and fantasy, the story-teller’s way.  “Few people know that shepherds sailed round the world long before the Vikings discovered America, before the Irish crossed the Red Sea in their coracles or Magellan got stuck in his straits.  It would have been about the same time as the Polynesians were setting off on their balsa rafts to find the promised land of Africa, a little after the time that Jonah got a lift in the whale.  And thinking about it, it must have been long, long before the Flood which landed Indo-Europeans within spitting distance of the Atlantic – and a good deal earlier than Captain Cook. ”  Radu looked round at his companions to see how his tale was going down.   The embers of their recent meal lit their faces from below, hiding the expressions in their eyes, but nobody made any objections.  So he continued.

 

“Shepherds from our village rode the wide oceans on inflated sheep skins.  They brought back spices from India, potatoes from South America, tobacco from Tobago and jade from Peking.  They married Cherokee squaws and Siberian Maris; the Samis were their blood brothers and sisters and their cousins were Inuit and Aborigines.   When they came home they bred the handsome Turcana sheep which they found on the mountainsides of Nepal. “

 

“And they taught the Russians to make salt cheese…  Yes, we know”.   Ilie could bear it no longer: Radu’s flights of imagination made him writhe – the boy went too far.   “Come on, we’ve got to get going”.

 

It was late January in the north west Tranylsvanian county of Salaj.  The shepherds were hired men, not owners of sheep.  In Romanian they were politely called ciobani angajati, but their reputation was bad and many people regarded them as riffraff, drifters and ne’er do wells.  They worked for a monthly wage packet which varied according to their duties: the sterpari, those in charge of the non-breeding ewes and rams got most because they had the worst job, entailing the longest walks to pastures and the loneliest vigils– and they got their clothes, cigarettes, and beer thrown in.  Ilie complained behind Vlad’s back that their pay was rotten: 300 Euros a month compared to the princely 1200 Euros he had earned in Spain.  “And the conditions were better there, too: there you had a roof over your head at night, none of this sleeping out in all weathers”.

 

Their boss’s father Dan was the baciu, the head cheese-maker.  Everyone except him took a hand in the milking; Dan’s fingers were too arthritic to manage these days.   It took two of them two hours to milk 600 ewes; this had to be done three times a day in early summer, then it tailed off to two – when the late summer milk got fattier – then to one until the milk dried up altogether in September.

 

Ilie was not a mean character, despite his drinking.  He thought about their boss, Vlad: he was a fair man but prone to outbursts of rage which cowed everyone within hearing, including, especially, the dogs, whom most of the men treated like curs.

 

Radu and the others separated for the night: he and Ilie would take the first watch while Florin and Dinu dossed by the ashes, gaining what little heat they could from the embers and wrapping up tightly in their cojoace, the long sheepskin cloaks which gave them a prehistoric air.   Sleep would be short, even though they were no longer on the road: the freak winters had brought bears out of hibernation: in the autumn a bear had attacked a lone shepherd in the  Cindrel Massif, near their summer pastures, and before the snow had fallen, a bear took two piglets out of  a village orchard, climbing over the fence to get at them.   Kept active by the warmer air, and driven down from the high forests by the drought which made their usual prey scarcer, the gadina, the predators, were hungry.  So far this winter, in the Almaş Valley where their boss, Vlad, had his winter grazing, wolves had killed 180 lambs and eight goats.  They were so hungry they had even torn someone’s guard dog to pieces; it had had no chance being tied by the neck to a length of chain.

It was relentless, the shepherd’s life.  It demanded a special kind of self-reliance – or misanthropy – to spend so many hours on your own.  It was no place for the faint-hearted.  Although he looked no more than a child, Radu revelled in it.  He was small for his 21 years and looked half that age.  His bearded face was heart-shaped, his nose snubbed and his mouth as perfectly drawn as a baby’s.  As if contradicting these innocent features, his brows made a thick, single line, resembling a cross between a cherub and Genghis Khan.  Despising school, he had been with Vlad for eight years, and shepherding was in his blood.  Whether he would stay with his boss was anyone’s guess.  In his imaginings, he strayed further than the horizon, far beyond the Carpathian Mountains that rose like magisterial barriers to the north, east and south.

These conflicting strains showed in his character.  Radu was articulate but retiring.  He could not only spin a yarn but had an ability to ask the most awkward questions, disconcerting his interlocutors who expected his mind to show the same childlike simplicity as his face.  In his own words, he had ‘retras la oile’ – withdrawn into the shepherd’s life as a hermit might withdraw to a cave.

 

Radu’s recent background was this: he had served a prison sentence for attempted murder.   Two years earlier, he and Dan were driving half of Vlad’s flock towards their winter pastures at the end of a six-week trek from the mountains in the south.  After two weeks together, Vlad, Ilie and Dinu had gone a different way to keep the non-breeding ewes and the rams separate from the manzarii, the females who would start giving birth in February.  Vlad’s group took with them six of the seven donkeys which carried their supplies, and four of the remaining five dogs – one had been shot by hunters on the edge of a village near Cluj.

 

Sheep feed in fits and starts, you cannot hurry them and they must eat as they move.  Sometimes this leads to misunderstandings.  On this occasion, there had been an argument over the land they were grazing.  It was dusk and a farmer, guarding a precious half hectare of lucerne which like much of Romania’s farmland was unfenced, thought the ewes had strayed over it.  Normally, Vlad made sure that their road was clear for his animals by agreements with landowners and payments of rent.  In the old days the ways had been much clearer, and in the Communist period, shepherds had a virtually free hand to pasture their flocks where they wanted.  Memories of letting the flock loose on unharvested maize and wheat from the collective farms were a bitter glow in Vlad’s mind: he had walked these roads since he was eight, when his mother as well as his father had gone dupa coda oilor – after the sheep’s tails.  For all he knew, they were following in a tradition that was as old as time, transhuming as their Mesolithic forebears might have done.

 

Since the Revolution, small parcels of nationalised land had been given back to private owners if they could produce papers to prove their rights to   it.  The amounts varied from one to ten hectares: Romania had become a patchwork of strips supporting individual families.  Agribusiness was on its way but the landscape still had a medieval aspect, and small farmers felt especially vulnerable.  Rumour had it that more land had been restored in Romania than actually existed but one of the effects of these restitutions was to break up the ancient transhumant routes which no maps had ever legalised, and with every year that passed more quarrels took place.   The farmer, re-enacting a long-hallowed conflict between ploughman and shepherd, had not waited for an explanation and he had knocked Dan senseless.   Radu -who later swore on oath that the sheep were nowhere near the lucerne – paid the farmer back in the only way he knew: he raised his thick staff and whacked him with all the fury of outraged loyalty.  First, he broke the man’s forearm – the smallholder had raised it to defend his head – then Radu bashed him on the side of his cranium.   The farmer went down without a murmur.

In jail, Radu grew up.  They moved him from place to place so he could not make friendships; they permitted him ‘counselling’ that consisted of a few five-minute sessions with a bored psychologist who trotted out theories like a slot machine.  Vlad paid for a lawyer and told Radu to read the Bible.  “I was somewhere between God and the Devil”, he said to the British woman who wandered into his orbit, looking for picturesque snippets to feed to a travel magazine.

 

The farmer survived. Radu’s 15 year sentence was commuted to 18 months.  Vlad and Dan took him back.   “Si m-am retras la oile, unde e libertate si linistie.   M-am selbaticit.   Asta e”.  (“And I retreated to the sheep, where it’s free, peaceful and quiet.  I’ve got a bit wild.  That’s how it is with us”.  He gave the travel writer his bewitching, heart-shaped smile but his eyes were narrowed; they had the cold, calculating ferocity of a lynx.  The woman’s interest had tickled him, but he was wary of intruders: she was certain to write drivel.

……………….

News report:  two hired shepherds murdered a sheep farmer in western Transylvania who had employed them to look after his animals.  At their trial, the men stated that they had killed him because he had refused to raise their wages.

News report: a philosophy graduate from Sibiu has given up his university research job to raise sheep in the Orastie Mountains; he has a blog so that fans can stay up to date with his activities.

News report: a Chinese company has bought a flock of 5000 sheep in Oltenia, southern Romania.  The animals will not be exported to China but kept where they are, to supply the firm with carcases as and when required.

Statement from the Ministry of Agriculture: Romania exports two thirds of its lambs live to the Middle East.  Syria is the largest national consumer of Romanian lambs.   (Since the ‘Arab spring’, sales of Romanian lambs to the Middle East have fallen.)

 

MAFF report: the EU will pay a subvention of 23 lei* per head of sheep to farmers who graze their animals for more than 90 days a year in defavourised, highland areas. (*This figure is from January 2018.)

MAFF report: Romanian sheep farmers may only walk their sheep so many kilometres a day.

Rumour or truth?  Sheepfarmers who are caught walking their sheep across county boundaries will be fined at the rate of 2000 E a time.

News report: a hired shepherd raped a 65 year old village woman at the end of the summer, which he had spent on his own with the animals in the mountains.

“We love this life”, quoted by three sheep farmers whom the author met in 2012; all were in their twenties and thirties and were still doing long distance transhumance.  Hired shepherds’ responses are usually more guarded.

Overheard:  A sheep farmer from Cluj county wanted to retire and sold all of his 600 sheep.  Three months later, he bought some more.  He told his friends, “I couldn’t live without them”.

………………………

 

Transhumance, n., the seasonal movement of animals between pastures.  To cross the ground, to change location, in effect, to move from one place to another.  Transhumance is not like nomadism, because it assumes a going and a coming back.  To poets, the word sounds like transmigration, a soul thing.

Nobody knows when it started, but domesticated herds of goats and sheep picked their delicate way across the dry hills of the Middle East long before Christ was associated with the innocence of lambs.  It was the Greeks and the Romans who brought sheep to Europe.  The practice crept northwards and westwards from the south and east.  Romanians, whose antecedants were Dacians and Celts and Romans, were a pastoral people with firm roots in the Carpathian Mountains and on the Transylvanian Plateau before the Slavs and Tatars and Hungarians arrived to add spice to their blood.  There are stone-built shepherds’ huts in the Carpathians that take their design from Mesolithic dwellings.

 

From those eyries, Romania’s pastoral traditions must have begun.  They are still alive, linking the distant past with the present.   But nobody knows for sure when the treks began.  Documents show Wallach shepherds wintering their flocks in Poland and eastern Moravia as long ago as the 1450s.  In the late 18th century they were crossing the Danube and spreading across Turkish-held Dobrogea; between then and the 1950s, sheep farmers from the Southern Carpathians had established trails down through Bulgaria, Serbia, Macedonia and Greece; they spread east to southern Russia, the Crimea and the Caucasus; more conservatively they settled in the Banat and Crisana.  Romanian shepherds from Transylvania helped bring news and knowledge to the mountain villages; returning with books after selling their sheep in the south, their adventurousness sparked a thirst for learning and for freedom; shepherds were the heralds of political change, leading to emancipation for the ones who downtrodden under the Hapsburgs and the Hungarian landowners.   Transhumance had a heyday in the mid-19th century.  Shepherds from the high mountain villages of Poiana Sibiului, Jina, Rod and Tilisca ran flocks of 25,000 head, and in the long winters it made sense to take advantage of pastures that were free even if far away.  Emile de Martonne watched them in Dobrogea, half hidden by the tall, waving grasslands nobody else wanted.  Shepherding is one of Romania’s most basic activities, sanctified by tradition, ingrained in religion.

Romanians transhume without animals.  Hundreds of thousands of workers leave their homes and families to make a living abroad.  This human transhumance is often seasonal: many of the people involved do agricultural or hotel work in Italy, Spain or Germany where they can make as much in two or three months as they would in a whole year in their own country.  Since the economic crisis of 2008, Spain and Italy are no longer so welcoming or attractive but Germany still provides a chance.  Romanians have started coming to Britain, too, though it is further away and the prospects unguaranteed.

The movement began shortly after the Revolution out of economic necessity: factories were closing; the West beckoned with promises of prosperity and well-being.  People had escaped the Communist regime before, seeking political asylum; but after 1989 when they were in theory free but desperate for jobs, and before the European Union embraced Romania too, they went to western Europe illegally, risking their lives by travelling under trains, in airless truck containers, even in the holds of aircraft.  The lucky ones made money and returned; the cliché is that they spent their wealth on ostentatious villas and top of the range cars.  Their children either went with them or, more often, remained behind with grandparents.

This people drain has left something between 4 and 5 million of working age in Romania itself from a dwindling population; when last counted it had fallen from 23 to just under 20 million.

………………………….

There is a cameraderie between shepherds who go on the road, like that between sailors on ocean voyages, or between astronauts.  They rely on each other absolutely.  Even though they use mobile phones – loading car batteries along with all the other gear they need onto donkeys – they avoid roads and human habitations wherever possible, and cannot be sure of getting help when they need it.  Dangers are legion.  Sheep can get eaten by wolves, run over by trains, injured by traffic, drowned in rivers or buried in snow.  People can be hostile, authorities unsympathetic and obtuse.  Illness and disease can attack men and animals at any time.  Lack of rain makes grazing scarce; water wells may be contaminated or dry, rivers and streams low, springs hard to find.   The shepherds themselves are fallible – as shown above, hired men sometimes turn nasty.  They can get drunk, they can steal, they can get fed up and vanish without explanation, leaving their bosses in charge of hundreds of wilful animals.  A few commit murder. Even so, sheep owners have to trust their employees, to take a chance, and these relationships can be as deep as brotherhood.

 

………………………

This story was written in 2014, since when Romanian migration to Britain has risen, and then begun to fall again, inevitably, with the prospect of Brexit.

References to news reports and government subsidies in this story are based on real sources, the only problem is that in the excitement of discovery, the author forgot to record exactly what they were.

MAFF refers to the old British Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food which has long since been superceded by Defra. (MAFF was dissolved in 2002.)

The photo at the top was taken in a summer kitchen belonging to the Avram family of Jina. My thanks to them for their kindness and hospitality.

In the footsteps of Romanian shepherds (noises outside my head)

They say facebook is an echo chamber, a closed circuit masquerading as cosmic freedom. Your comments, likes and shares get mirrored back to you, implying you’re at the centre of the universe while actually life is elsewhere and you couldn’t matter less. But a lot of vital information comes from facebook and without it, it would be harder for me to communicate with friends and contacts abroad. Sometimes I get that echoing feeling on the moor outside our house. It’s when the sheep are there, bleating to each other in urgent, almost intelligible messages. I’m a bit wary of getting drawn in to their social media, though. Once I overheard a BBC radio broadcast warning people not to listen to sheep too often, because they’d end up only being able to say ‘Baa’. Maybe Wittgenstein could have written about that. The narratives around sheep and shepherding are so conflicted these days: some say the animals are stupid and we’ve got too many of them (we should eat less meat, grow more trees, reduce the amount of methane in the atmosphere), while others bless the shepherds and their charges (they are a source of not one but two kinds of food not to speak of old-fashioned sheep’s tallow – for when the electricity cuts out, they provide one of the best textiles known to humankind, they keep the countryside looking like it should – pace George Monbiot, they nourish the soil, spread seeds which encourage biodiversity, inspire a sense of well-being, are metaphors for selfless piety, and they send children to sleep). You can see which side I’m on.

[image error]Sheep loose on the road outside a town in north-east Romania

My view is simple: there is a fascination in other people’s lives, particularly when they come from cultures that are different from your own. Having had the luck to watch Romanian shepherds at work in beautiful but dangerous surroundings, it was natural to want to know more about them. How, dangerous? Like herdspeople of Central Africa, Romanian shepherds keep their animals in the open countryside and have to protect their flocks day and night – the threats coming from big carnivores, storm and drought. There are other more pernicious dangers in that the landscape itself is being consumed by urban development, roads and pollution.

[image error]View from a bus window on a journey from Cluj to the Maramures

In Romania, there was another phenomenon to dream about: transhumance. The more I looked at transhumance, the more exciting, adventurous and poetically alluring it became. On paper. In films. But on the ground? In books, I found that Romanian – usually Transylvanian – shepherds walked their animals hundreds of miles between seasonal pastures. They’d been doing so for hundreds of years. They did it for practical reasons; they made their living from sheep and when the grass ran out at home, it made sense to find it elsewhere. In the environmental, economic and political climate that they found themselves in, that sometimes meant travelling across frontiers into lands where people spoke different tongues and had completely different expectations. A putative map of Romanian pastoral transhumants could encompass a large hunk of Europe; if you allowed shepherds who travelled overseas (but without their sheep), it would reach the western United States. My fancy was caught by the idea of their journeys to the east, to Bessarabia (present-day Moldova), southern Ukraine, the Crimea and the Caucasus. Maybe even further east. Making them up in my head, it was easy to see them as pilgrims, although religion wasn’t what motivated them. But transhumants weren’t driven solely by money either: they couldn’t be, given the realities of the road. Some faith, or at least a kind of gung-ho adventurousness was essential, surely? I wanted to find out.

[image error]Andrei, a hired shepherd who was working for Ghita, a young sheep farmer from Jina in the Marginimea Sibiului area. The photo was taken during eight days I spent with the flock at the start of its spring transhumance from Salaj to Sibiu in April 2012. Ghita later became famous as Ghita Ciobanu, featured on mobile phone ads on tv and hoardings across the country. He also took part in the national protests against Romanian laws that discriminated against shepherds.

What time period are we talking about here, anyhow? At first I concentrated on the late 19th century, after the Crimean War (1856) and the Romanian War of Independence (1877-78) when Tsarist Russia got the upper hand over Ottoman Turkey and the Orthodox Christian shepherds (if they weren’t pagans or a mixture of the two), left their homes in the Carpathian Mountains (dominated by the Habsburg-Hungarian regime), and walked (sometimes in long-drawn out stages of a year or two) into Muntenia (between the Carpathians and the Danube), to Dobrogea (that mysterious maritime province between the Danube and the Black Sea), and north into the steppes where the grass grew up to their ears. And then on to the east, to the Crimean peninsular with its balmier climate, and yet further east to the soaring Caucasus Mountains with their extraordinary, archaic polyglot culture… And the more I looked the earlier the transhumances became – obscure mentions of 16th century shepherds walking into Russia, while other people found connections between Carpathian herders and south-east Moravia and the Beskid Mountains dating from the 15th century and earlier. Probably. Shepherds didn’t keep written records, but customs authorities and tax collectors did. Doing a double backwards somersault brought me to the Mesolithic imaginings of ethno-archaeologists. Such as John Nandris, whose meticulous methods combine with a romantic vision that make it possible, likely, and totally conceivable that after the last Ice Age, Thracian, that is proto-Romanian, sheep breeders haunted the Carpathians and built folds which were a model for ones you can still see today. I may not be being totally accurate about the ethnicity of these trampers of the mountains but when talking to Romanian students of transhumance, it’s clear they believe that sheep-rearing was a speciality of their ancestors, the Dacians, and I am not in a mood to contradict them. Leap-frogging over the millenia can be dizzying, so I will return to my main theme: Romanian transhumant shepherds trekking east.

In search of individual life-stories, I was lucky enough to meet Toma Lupas, a former mayor of Saliste, a market town in the Cindrel foothills near Sibiu. Toma struck a match on my research idea, and in 2009, he and several colleagues brought out a book that documented the personal histories of scores of local people, all of them linked in some way with eastern transhumance. Some were characters that I had met myself, but most were new to me. “Oieri margineni in Crimeea si sudul Rusiei” was not only a gift to Romanian culture, it encouraged me to look further too.

 

[image error]Photos of Romanian shepherding families who settled in Mariupol, southern Ukraine from 1912. (Thanks to the Preda family of Tilisca, Marginimea Sibiului.)

 

Some of the individuals we rediscovered have been described in this blog already. Today I’m mentioning the latest twists in the saga’s tail.

 

Twist 1: After Pastoralism Journal published Dupa coada oilor, in 2014, I received a message on facebook telling me I’d been talking bullshit. O-oh. It was to do with what I’d written about a breed of sheep called Tigaie. My critic was Dan Zloteanu, a businessman with a passion for the subject of Romanian transhumant shepherds. He told me the hardy but fine-fleeced Tigaie are not related to luxuriant Merinos as I’d averred, but had been around the Carpathian Mountains and the Balkans yonks before Merinos arrived. Once he realised I was also fascinated by the shepherds’ eastward treks, Dan gave me his personal take on them, firing off a wealth of information which I’ve condensed: “They started in the Ottoman period, after the Russo-Turkish war of 1770. The Russians wanted to repopulate the areas they’d taken from the Tatars. Now part of southern Ukraine and the Crimea, they were known as the Nogai Steppe, after the Nogai Tatars whom the Russians had recently ousted. The tsar sent agents to Muntenia (that part of southern Romania next to Transylvania and then ruled by the Ottoman Turks), as well as Bessarabia, Bulgaria and even Serbia, in order to lure shepherds to bring their sheep to the now empty lands where the grass was abundant and the winters bland. All the Russians asked in return was the payment of customs duties when the sheep crossed their borders.”

The Romanian shepherds in question were mostly natives of Transylvania who had already moved east of the Carpathian Mountains. Many of them came from the Marginimea Sibiului, that enclave of shepherding villages in the southern Carpathians I had come to know well. As the mocani, as those particular herders were known, walked north and east, they stopped off in Moldovan villages in Bessarabia and the Budjak region (now in south-west Ukraine). Eventually they spread to the northern Caucasus (where there were other Moldovan settlements, founded after the Russian conquests of 1812). In fact, the distances aren’t so great, and some of the shepherds went even further – one settled in northern Iran.

But in 1910, the Russian authorities changed their attitude towards the shepherds. They began sequestering Romanian flocks, which is how the Tigaie – in Russian, Tigaiskaya – was introduced to Russia. Tens of thousands of sheep were requisitioned and shepherds were forced to remain in Russia too. This was news to me, because I thought the shepherds had been free to move about as they liked until the October Revolution and the Civil War. (Other enquiries had shown that one of those Moldovan villages had been near Krasnodar, the north Caucasian city where my Russian teacher and historian, Vasile, lived. Vasile volunteered to look for it on my behalf. It turned out that Moldovensko as I think it was called had disappeared. But it reminded me that another Russian friend, Elena, whom I stayed with in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, was the daughter of a Moldovan woman whose family had been exiled during Stalin’s time. As my enquiries developed, I began to hear of many more experiences like that. A poignant picture of forced diaspora began to overlay the happy-go-lucky image I had of transhumance. Here’s a link to a map showing some of the Moldovan villages.)

Twist 2: The person who alerted me to Dan’s criticism was Ion Aproteosei, editor of a facebook group called Dialectologie romaneasca si paralele romanice to which Dan also belongs. Ion is a natural diplomat, making it easier for Dan and me to risk a conversation, and he put me in touch with other people, one of whom was Vlad Cubreacov. This Vlad hies from the town of Crihana Veche near the south-western edge of the Moldovan Republic. Crihana was a stopping point for transhumant Romanian shepherds, but they came from a different part of the Carpathians to the one I knew: the majority were from Poiana Sarata, a village between the Nemira and Vrancea ranges in Bacau judet. That is much further east than Marginimea Sibiului and belonged to a now-defunct county with the picturesque name of Trei Scaune (Three Thrones). Vlad has been collecting data on individual families from church and other records. He has compiled lists of family names and nick names that reveal a mixture of Romanian, German and Tatar heritages.

Twist 3: The other person Ion connected me with was a Romanian diplomat called Vasile Soare. He has served as ambassador to the Central Asian republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. While there he revived interest in the Romanian communities that had taken root there after tens of thousands of were deported to Central Asia by Stalin. Here’s a link to an article about his work.

 

These are the some of the echoes reverberating round my head thanks to facebook and other sources.  They seem real enough to me.

[image error]Ion Ciorogariu was the son of a shepherd from the village of Tilisca (Marginimea Sibiului), southern Transylvania (Romania). Ion spent his early childhood with his parents and siblings in the Budjak area of what is now south-west Ukraine but was then part of Greater Romania. Ion called the settlement Lambroca but it’s better known as Lambrovka, now Lambrivka, and was founded specifically to help Jewish people who wanted to work their own land as farmers. In  fact, Lambrovka was part of a wider agricultural scheme that became a model for kibbutz farming in Israel. Lambrovka had a flock of 500 Karakul sheep and Ion’s dad was hired to look after them. I met Ion in 2007, thanks to Ilie Martin, a native of Rod, whose great grand-father had kept sheep ‘somewhere in Russia’. Dan Zloteanu told me that the shepherds of Rod had been forced to stay in Russia after 1910, leaving their Romanian birthplace bereft of its menfolk. Rod is just a few miles from Tilisca.
[image error]Tataraseni is a village in Dorohoi, a judet in the Romanian province of Moldova (not the Republic!), and gets its name from the fact that it was reputedly sacked by Tatars in the 18th century.
[image error]From Tataraseni, I was driven by cart to meet one of the sheep farmers who still work in the nearby steppe. (Thanks to Steve and Liliana Humphries for their hospitality in Tataraseni.)

 

 

[image error]Shepherd near Tatareseni with his herding dogs, his sheep, and in the distance, his fold.

 

 

 

Noises outside my head

They say facebook is an echo chamber. Your comments, likes and shares get mirrored back to you, implying you’re at the centre of the universe while actually life is elsewhere and you couldn’t matter less. Sometimes I get that feeling when walking on the moor outside our house. It’s when the sheep are there, bleating to each other in urgent, almost intelligible messages. I’m a bit wary of getting drawn in though. Once I overheard a BBC radio broadcast warning people not to listen to sheep too often, because they’d end up only being able to say ‘Baa’. Maybe Wittgenstein could have written about that. The narratives around sheep and shepherding are conflicted anyhow: some say the animals are stupid and we’ve got too many of them (we should eat less meat, grow more trees, reduce the amount of methane in the atmosphere), while others bless the shepherds and their charges (they are a source of not one but two kinds of food not to speak of old-fashioned sheep’s tallow – for when the electricity cuts out, they provide one of the best textiles known to humankind, they keep the countryside looking like it should – pace George Monbiot, they nourish the soil, spread seeds which encourage biodiversity, inspire a sense of well-being, are metaphors for selfless piety, and they send children to sleep). You can see which side I’m on.

[image error]Sheep loose on the road outside a town in north-east Romania

My view is simple: there is a fascination in other people’s lives, particularly when they come from cultures that are different from your own. Having had the luck to watch Romanian shepherds at work in beautiful but dangerous surroundings, it was natural to want to know more about them. How, dangerous? Like herdspeople of Central Africa, Romanian shepherds keep their animals in the open countryside and have to protect their flocks day and night – the threats coming from big carnivores, storm and drought. There are other more pernicious dangers in that the landscape itself is being consumed by urban development, roads and pollution.

[image error]View from a bus window on a journey from Cluj to the Maramures

In Romania, there was another phenomenon to dream about: transhumance. The more I looked at transhumance, the more exciting, adventurous and poetically alluring it became. On paper. In films. But on the ground? In books, I found that Romanian – usually Transylvanian – shepherds walked their animals hundreds of miles between seasonal pastures. They’d been doing so for hundreds of years. They did it for practical reasons; they made their living from sheep and when the grass ran out at home, it made sense to find it elsewhere. In the environmental, economic and political climate that they found themselves in, that sometimes meant travelling across frontiers into lands where people spoke different tongues and had completely different expectations. A putative map of Romanian pastoral transhumants could encompass a large hunk of Europe; if you allowed shepherds who travelled overseas (but without their sheep), it would reach the western United States. My fancy was caught by the idea of their journeys to the east, to Bessarabia (present-day Moldova), southern Ukraine, the Crimea and the Caucasus. Maybe even further east. Making them up in my head, it was easy to see them as pilgrims, although religion wasn’t what motivated them. But transhumants weren’t driven solely by money either: they couldn’t be, given the realities of the road. Some faith, or at least a kind of gung-ho adventurousness was essential, surely? I wanted to find out.

[image error]Andrei, a hired shepherd who was working for Ghita, a young sheep farmer from Jina in the Marginimea Sibiului area. The photo was taken during eight days I spent with the flock at the start of its spring transhumance from Salaj to Sibiu in April 2012. Ghita later became famous as Ghita Ciobanu, featured on mobile phone ads on tv and hoardings across the country. He also took part in the national protests against Romanian laws that discriminated against shepherds.

What time period are we talking about, anyhow? At first I concentrated on the late 19th century, after the Crimean War (1856) and the Romanian War of Independence (1877-78) when Tsarist Russia got the upper hand over Ottoman Turkey and the Orthodox Christian shepherds (if they weren’t pagans or a mixture of the two), left their homes in the Carpathian Mountains (dominated by the Habsburg-Hungarian regime), and walked (sometimes in long-drawn out stages of a year or two) into Muntenia (between the Carpathians and the Danube), to Dobrogea (that mysterious maritime province between the Danube and the Black Sea), and north into the steppes where the grass grew up to their ears. And then on to the east, to the Crimean peninsular with its balmier climate, and yet further east to the soaring Caucasus Mountains with their extraordinary, archaic polyglot culture… And the more I looked the earlier the transhumances became – obscure mentions of 16th century shepherds walking into Russia, while other people found connections between Carpathian herders and south-east Moravia and the Beskid Mountains dating from the 15th century and earlier. Probably. Shepherds didn’t keep written records, but customs authorities and tax collectors did. Doing a double backwards somersault brought me to the Mesolithic imaginings of ethno-archaeologists. Such as John Nandris, whose meticulous methods combine with a romantic vision that make it possible, likely, and totally conceivable that after the last Ice Age, Thracian, that is proto-Romanian, sheep breeders haunted the Carpathians and built folds which were a model for ones you can still see today. I may not be being totally accurate about the ethnicity of these trampers of the mountains but when talking to Romanian students of transhumance, it’s clear they believe that sheep-rearing was a speciality of their ancestors, the Dacians, and I am not in a mood to contradict them. Leap-frogging over the millenia can be dizzying, so I will return to my main theme: Romanian transhumant shepherds trekking east.

In search of individual life-stories, I was lucky enough to meet Toma Lupas, a former mayor of Saliste, a market town in the Cindrel foothills near Sibiu. Toma struck a match on my research idea, and in 2009, he and several colleagues brought out a book that documented the personal histories of scores of local people, all of them linked in some way with eastern transhumance. Some were characters that I had met myself, but most were new to me. “Oieri margineni in Crimeea si sudul Rusiei” was not only a gift to Romanian culture, it encouraged me to look further too.

 

[image error]Photos of Romanian shepherding families who settled in Mariupol, southern Ukraine from 1912. (Thanks to the Preda family of Tilisca, Marginimea Sibiului.)

 

Some of the individuals we rediscovered have been described in this blog already. Today I’m mentioning the latest twists in the saga’s tail.

 

Twist 1: After Pastoralism Journal published Dupa coada oilor, in 2014, I received a message on facebook telling me I’d been talking bullshit. O-oh. It was to do with what I’d written about a breed of sheep called Tigaie. My critic was Dan Zloteanu, a businessman with a passion for the subject of Romanian transhumant shepherds. He told me the hardy but fine-fleeced Tigaie are not related to luxuriant Merinos as I’d averred, but had been around the Carpathian Mountains and the Balkans yonks before Merinos arrived. Once he realised I was also fascinated by the shepherds’ eastward treks, Dan gave me his personal take on them, firing off a wealth of information which I’ve condensed: “They started in the Ottoman period, after the Russo-Turkish war of 1770. The Russians wanted to repopulate the areas they’d taken from the Tatars. Now part of southern Ukraine and the Crimea, they were known as the Nogai Steppe, after the Nogai Tatars whom the Russians had recently ousted. The tsar sent agents to Muntenia (that part of southern Romania next to Transylvania and then ruled by the Ottoman Turks), as well as Bessarabia, Bulgaria and even Serbia, in order to lure shepherds to bring their sheep to the now empty lands where the grass was abundant and the winters bland. All the Russians asked in return was the payment of customs duties when the sheep crossed their borders.”

The Romanian shepherds in question were mostly natives of Transylvania who had already moved east of the Carpathian Mountains. Many of them came from the Marginimea Sibiului, that enclave of shepherding villages in the southern Carpathians I had come to know well. As the mocani, as those particular herders were known, walked north and east, they stopped off in Moldovan villages in Bessarabia and the Budjak region (now in south-west Ukraine). Eventually they spread to the northern Caucasus (where there were other Moldovan settlements, founded after the Russian conquests of 1812). In fact, the distances aren’t so great, and some of the shepherds went even further – one settled in northern Iran.

But in 1910, the Russian authorities changed their attitude towards the shepherds. They began sequestering Romanian flocks, which is how the Tigaie – in Russian, Tigaiskaya – was introduced to Russia. Tens of thousands of sheep were requisitioned and shepherds were forced to remain in Russia too. This was news to me, because I thought the shepherds had been free to move about as they liked until the October Revolution and the Civil War. (Other enquiries had shown that one of those Moldovan villages had been near Krasnodar, the north Caucasian city where my Russian teacher and historian, Vasile, lived. Vasile volunteered to look for it on my behalf. It turned out that Moldovensko as I think it was called had disappeared. But it reminded me that another Russian friend, Elena, whom I stayed with in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, was the daughter of a Moldovan woman whose family had been exiled during Stalin’s time. As my enquiries developed, I began to hear of many more experiences like that. A poignant picture of forced diaspora began to overlay the happy-go-lucky image I had of transhumance. Here’s a link to a map showing some of the Moldovan villages.)

Twist 2: The person who alerted me to Dan’s criticism was Ion Aproteosei, editor of Dialectologie. Ion is a natural diplomat, making it easier for Dan and me to risk a conversation, and he put me in touch with other people, one of whom was Vlad Cubreacov. This Vlad hies from the town of Crihana Veche near the south-western edge of the Moldovan Republic. Crihana was a stopping point for transhumant Romanian shepherds, but they were often from a different part of the Carpathians to the one I knew: a lot of them came from Poiana Sarata, a village between the Nemira and Vrancea ranges in Bacau judet. That is much further east than Marginimea Sibiului and belonged to a now-defunct county with the picturesque name of Trei Scaune (Three Thrones). Vlad has been collecting data on individual families from church and other records. He has compiled lists of family names and nick names that reveal a mixture of Romanian, German and Tatar heritages.

Twist 3: The other person Ion connected me with was a Romanian diplomat called Vasile Soare who has been an ambassador to the Central Asian republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. While there he revived interest in the Romanian communities that had taken root there after tens of thousands of were deported to Central Asia by Stalin. Here’s a link to an article about his work.

 

These are the some of the echoes reverberating round my head thanks to facebook and other sources.  They seem real enough to me.

[image error]Ion Ciorogariu was the son of a shepherd from the village of Tilisca (Marginimea Sibiului), southern Transylvania (Romania). Ion spent his early childhood with his parents and siblings in the Budjak area of what is now south-west Ukraine but was then part of Greater Romania. Ion called the settlement Lambroca but it’s better known as Lambrovka, now Lambrivka, and was founded specifically to help Jewish people who wanted to work their own land as farmers. In  fact, Lambrovka was part of a wider agricultural scheme that became a model for kibbutz farming in Israel. Lambrovka had a flock of 500 Karakul sheep and Ion’s dad was hired to look after them. I met Ion in 2007, thanks to Ilie Martin, a native of Rod, whose great grand-father had kept sheep ‘somewhere in Russia’. Dan Zloteanu told me that the shepherds of Rod had been forced to stay in Russia after 1910, leaving their Romanian birthplace bereft of its menfolk. Rod is just a few miles from Tilisca.
[image error]Tataraseni is a village in Dorohoi, a judet in the Romanian province of Moldova (not the Republic!), and gets its name from the fact that it was reputedly sacked by Tatars in the 18th century.
[image error]From Tataraseni, I was driven by cart to meet one of the sheep farmers who still work in the nearby steppe. (Thanks to Steve and Liliana Humphries for their hospitality in Tataraseni.)

 

 

[image error]The shepherd, his herding dogs, his sheep and his fold.

 

 

 

Catching up

All my good intentions about keeping the blog up to date have been blown to bits since I got involved in Cardigan’s community resettlement scheme for Syrian refugees, but here’s a summary of highlights from my last trip to Romania:

Meeting Marcu Jura, Romania’s philosopher shepherd. Marcu is a wonderful phenomenon, as rare as the Unicorn. His background is in academia – a star student, he studied ethnography to doctorate level and worked for one of the country’s most prestigious open air museums, before taking to the shepherd’s life because he could not bear the lazy, apathetic attitudes of his colleagues. He’s now in his mid-30s, married with two children, and has about 150 head of Ţurcana ewes and rams which (apart from occasional trips to ethnographic festivals) he tends every day, from dawn until dusk and often beyond.

His devotion to shepherding has been absolute, but he still finds time to write original and pithy articles for national newspapers, most often the on-line journal, Republica, which is edited by Cristian Tudor Popescu and known for its challenging views. I’d been wanting to meet Marcu for at least a decade. Last November, thanks to his and his wife’s super hospitality, I made it, and spent a couple of days with them in their hamlet near Petroșani. Marcu’s take on the pastoral life combines the spiritual with the practical: he profoundly believes in the benefits of small-scale farming and self-sufficiency to the soul as well as the body. What fascinated me most were his stories of growing up in the wild, his fearlessness of bears and wolves, his sympathy for his own animals, and his knowledge of mythology and superstition. On the first morning, Marcu invited me to go with him as he grazed his sheep in a neighbour’s field. I asked him if I could record an interview, and once he had brought his sheep into the field, he found an old bench which he placed on the top of a little mound, so we were like the kings of the castle, able to talk to each other and survey the animals in comfort. Gently, sometimes hesitantly, Marcu then started to explain his philosophy of life. As I sat listening to him in the winter sunshine, surrounded by the snow-tipped Părâng Mountains, the silver barked birch forests, and his peacefully grazing sheep and friendly dogs, I fell under a spell. Something of that charm has I hope been caught by my amateurish video clips, which I will be posting here as soon as I can find time to edit them.

The Preda family reunited. One of the reasons I wanted to follow the old shepherding routes to the Caucasus was to see if the Romanians had left any traces. Thanks to the book which Toma Lupaș and his friends produced in 2009, we have some records of the families who put roots down in Ukraine, Crimea, and southern Russia during the period of mass migrations from c. 1870 to the First World War. I was lucky enough to be introduced to a few of their descendants who still lived in the Carpathian Mountains’ great sheep-rearing hub, Mărginimea Sibiului. There are 18 separate communities in this famous shepherding nexus including a village called Tilișca. There the Preda family gave me a copy of a letter sent in 1989 from one of their cousins whose father had settled in Mariupol, by the Sea of Azov. Before then, the Romanian and Ukrainian Predas had not been in contact since the time of Stalin’s purges. A series of happy coincidences, including a chance meeting with a very bright Ukrainian doctor (with whom I worked on a video about the war in the Donbas), meant that I was able to put the two branches in touch again, by letter and telephone at least. In November last year, Pavel Preda and his daughter Monica drove me to Tilișca from Sibiu so that I could look at photographs they had found and fill in more gaps in their family history. What transpired was that the father of the Mariupol-based cousin had been exiled to Kazakhstan for many years. There too he had worked as a shepherd. Pavel Preda and his family were wonderful hosts and I will be posting some of the recordings I made at their house. These threads make up part of the narrative in the book I’m working on. Its working title is Carpathian Sheep Walk.

Reflections on the way to Sibiu

Today Cluj is the coldest place in the country, about 1° C, if the meteo report is right, and the sky is a flat white, so I whiled an hour or two away in the Retro Hostel and then walked a couple of miles to the bus station. There is a welcome fug in the waiting room and it’s alive with bawling babies. I’ve got a ticket for the 12.30 and have 45 minutes before it leaves.

What can I make of the past two days in Cluj? I spent some of them talking to Alina, an archaeologist and staunch royalist whom I met first at a protest meeting about Roșia Montana. Alina’s take on politics is always entertaining and often hair-raising: there is the endless corruption which has reached everywhere including her own professional life – ever since I’ve known her she has spoken out against institutional fraud and has been punished by jeering, ostracisation and losing her job. Now her ambition is to map, and so save, Romania’s cultural patrimony. Or what’s left of it after the scandalous leaking of priceless, national heritage to antique shops around the world. Alina is never too depressed for humour and was laughing at the ingenious ways in which Romania’s supposed cultural elite has betrayed the country and its treasures. Apparently, the latest ploy is to hide behind ‘the British model’, i.e. to be restrained, considered, and if you can credit it, ‘elegant’ – and of course to evade pertinent questions whenever possible. She loses me there because Ioana favours the current president, Klaus Iohannes, and his ‘technocrat’ Prime Minister, Dacian Cioloș (who replaced premier Ponta when the latter was accused of “forgery, tax evasion, money laundering and conflicts of interest” – see http://www.wsj.com/articles/romanian-prime-minister-victor-ponta-rejects-calls-to-resign-over-corruption-allegations-1433526498 ), and I don’t know enough about the other individuals or parties involved: Social Democrat, Liberal, and the new Party of Romania founded by Nicușor Dan (for whom Ioana has a lot of respect because he tried to prevent the demolition of one of Bucharest’s finest old districts.) When it comes to elegance, I’m reminded of Alina’s tales about her father, a noted dandy and army officer who used to wear suits of the finest, Romanian wool. He sounds almost mythical in this day and age: a man who rode his mare back from the Battle of Stalingrad, the horse picking her way safely over the land mines because some sense told her where they were.

Before we set off, the Fany driver makes an announcement. He tells us politely to keep our tickets because there may be an inspection, and not to bring hot food or alcohol into the bus. This is a first – both the politeness and the warning!

Now we are sliding out of Cluj again, through the centre this time, with the radio discreetly dimmed. We pass Ioana’s flat in its Art Deco corner block, but most of the other passengers are subdued like me, heads down and intent on our smart phones, tablets abnd laptops, or snoozing as well as we can. I look up to appreciate the Habsburg architecture which really is elegant even if rundown, and the impressive yellow- and red-brick municipal buildings on Unirii Square, which quickly give way to the gigantic but still unfinished Orthodox Cathedral, which seems so pompous in its aspirations snow tinges everyhing but seems a bit sad and old hat now. And up we go, past the glinty facades of the car showrooms, and stores selling granite and marble tiles, the engine straining a bit to cope with the long pull to the south towards Alba Iulia and Sibiu. Then suddenly we are in open country, where rows of fruit trees cover the hillsides like frizzy hair, bronze and orange against the white scalp of the snow.

What can I make of other recent conversations, like those I had with Ana, a retired farmer and primary school teacher, whom I stayed with in Maramureș. Ana is quite different from Alina. She has brought up two children (Alina is childless), slogged away in her orchard and farmyard for 30 years and set hundreds of village kids on their educational paths. I’ve never seen her teaching, but as a mother know her to be firm but loving. Quick to smile and fond of a good joke, Ana embodies what my anthropologist friend Georgeta says about the best Maramureș people – that they are wholesome, just and very special. But Geta, who was also a museum curator and has collected a huge database of Maramureș craftspeople, assiduously promoting their work, told me the real people from this region no longer exist. Or rather their values have evaporated. That Maramureș is no longer what it was is a sad fact that the most enthusiastic tour guide can’t deny. Geta was my first mentor in the ways of Maramureș, back in 1995, and her commitment and passion were extraordinary. And I know what she meant: the exodus of (mainly) young people to find better paid jobs northern and western Europe has diluted their pride in their own culture. Among those who have returbed, many have lost their love for the traditional wooden buildings and the hand-woven clothes, seeing them as dreadfully unfashionable, impractical, and expensive too. I’ve heard this and been sad about it so many times that I can’t react much any more. A few individuals like Geta, and the British campaigners, Jessica Douglas Home and William Blacker, have really understood the value of Romania’s rural heritage andvtried to save it. But they are often derided for being too conservative or privileged, and their messages have often got lost in the race to modernise and profit from anything that can be sold. Symbolic of this loss is the disappearance of the tall and wonderfully stately rustic wooden gates that used to stand at the entrances to the village farmsteads. Most have been replaced with totally anonymous plastic or sometimes metal gates that have absolutely no individuality at all. Who or what is to blame? Surely not Ana the farmer, whose husband Ioan replaced their wooden house with a two-storey block home 20 years ago. He did it so the family could live in greater comfort, with an indoor bathroom and separate bedrooms for themselves and their girls, so they could add to their hard won salaries by offering bed and breakfast to travellers. When once I gently teased Ioan about it, he said they had no other choice because the fabric of the old house had been rotten. He pointed to his mother’s traditional timber farmhouse next door. Blackened with age and entwined with vines, it looked as if it had grown out of the soil ‘She won’t give it up’, he said, ‘even though she has to cook on a wood stove, go to the lavatory outside, and wash herself with water in an enamel basin because there is no running water in the house.’

After the 1989 revolution, when she was in her forties, Ana went to university. Of course she had her teaching qualifications but she had not been able to study anything else because she was raising her family, running the small holding and teaching had taken all her time. She chose theology. Her eyes lit up a few days ago when she recalled how much pleasure she had got from being a student. We were sitting in her kitchen, the wood-fired generator humming away so the whole house was hot, a wonderful refuge from the icy weather. Through the double-glazed window (it has two opening casements, in the continental style), the light was dazzling from the previous night’s snowfall, and picked out the pinks and reds of Ana’s geraniums which she has put between the panes in a bid to save them through the winter.

Ana told me how going to university had opened her mind. ‘I’m open to anything – I think that’s important, so you can form your own opinions.’ Her preferred reading is philosophy and especially new approaches to religion and spirituality. So it was a shock when Ana mentioned a preoccupation which has recently caught the public imagination: gay marriage. In Romania’s still very conventional society, there is a move to make it illegal. And Ana’s stance was firmly on the conservative side. The moment quickly passed and we moved on to other subjects. I tried to explain The Selfish Gene and Richard Dawkins’s perfectly respectful but total rejection of religious belief. I had always thought of her as fairly devout but to my surprise Ana wasn’t fazed. But she reiterated something she had been reading herself. Four years after her beloved Ioan had died, and in these days of reaction and war, it was like a piece of solid ground when you are surrounded by earrhquakes. ‘There is no such thing as the past or future, only the present’,

 

Cluj (in)fusion

Back in Romania to look for more stories about transhumance, I took a few days out to visit friends in the Maramureș. I went by bus from Cluj, choosing the humble charabang for all sorts of reasons including the cost – the three hour journey to Baia Mare came to 30 Ron, about £6. Going by bus is a good way of meeting people and is ‘hands free’ – I long since gave up wanting to drive in Romania. The trains aren’t as much fun as they used to be either although Romania’s rail network covers a lot of the country – after too many delays and mysterious shuntings I’ve grown tired of being treated like a dumb animal in transit.

Having found a seat on the bus, I scribbled a few notes, wanting to record that delicious sensation of being back in Romania and free to roam again. Above my head, the radio clattered incessntly, making it hard to concentrate.

The first few days in a foreign country are special because everything seems noteworthy, even humdrum details such as the way people hold themselves, the shapes of buildings, the sounds of traffic and the way streets smell. Even though I’ve been to Romania many times, it’s a few months since I was here last. The season has changed and so has the world. I wanted to see if Romania had changed too.

After flying in from Luton it was a delight to wander around the inner city getting my bearings and observing, without any pressure to comment or react. Free of that stress, there was so much to take the eye. There was the man selling Hungarian chimney cake from a stall on the corner of Strada Potaissa and Strada Universităţii. He was still there after dark even though it was a freezing November night. The coals from his brazier were still glowing. Presumably he was going to sleep in the neat little yellow shed on wheels that was parked up alongside.

Opposite the mobile cake stall are the university’s faculty buildings, and down a quiet lane to the right as you face the city centre, the rather dour Hungarian Reformed church, and a theological college dating from the 17th century. It looks mellow and modest among the more strident university departments, for whose architects prettiness was presumably a sign of weakness. Many of the older buildings have arched stone entrances which are tall and wide enough for a horse-drawn coach, and their fortress-like wooden gates were open today, revealing sunlit inner courtyards. Cluj is a cosmopolitan place these days. Not only does it have its Hungarian, Saxon, Romanian and, dare I say it, Roma history, but it’s a melting pot of other nationalities attracted by its university’s good reputation and low fees. Foreign students have been coming here since communist times but mainly from countries sympathetic to the regime, such as China, Syria and Nigeria. Now its student population is just as likely to be British, French or Dutch and with its international film festivals, music and restaurants, it’s possible to talk of Cluj fusion while the city hasn’t entirely lost its ethereal, central European character. In fact it’s that openness to so many cultures that gives it its edge and should protect it against the bigotry and demagoguery that have brought Romania down in the past.

And because of the students, there are bookshops – yes, they still exist! I fell for Librăria din Colţ, close to La Piazzetta cafe (itself a mesmerising space created – I think but don’t trust me – from an old alleyway, now roofed in glass, that wiggled between medieval buildings which have also been incorporated into the cafe). But I digress. Lured by the bookshop’s own labyrinthine interior I climbed its hospitable wooden stairs and found more rooms lined with tiered shelves that were full of fascinating titles. Choosing one fat vol about the history of violence in the Romanian language, I followed a drift of browsing customers to a room with sofas where I sat and mopped up 20 well written pages about the provocative phraseology used in political pamphlets by Romania’s patriotic poet and essayist, Mihai Eminescu. With crisp, convincing examples, the author explained how Eminescu’s inflammatory words were fuel for demagogues like the Iron Guard’s terribly misguided leader, Codreanu. After hearing some of the recent muck-spraying by Donald Trump, reading this dispassionate analysis of another consummate manipulator was balm to the tormented brow. And all to the strains of an independent, audience-funded radio station whose name might have been Paradise. Well, this is Romania. How good it would be to study here, if you had the means and a good pair of ear plugs.

Later that evening I went to a book launch in the same place. The author was a young (20 something?) woman with cropped hair called Lavinia. Her book was a novel called Interior Zero. It wasn’t her first – she had already had poetry and short stories published. The room was packed by the time Lavinia, looking by turns haughty and very nervous, and two not quite as young male critics, were called to order by the proprietor who galloped through an introduction and flung the meeting open. The first critic told us Lavinia had a unique prose style, minimalist and at the same time realist, and that she was definitely a writer to watch. He spoke carefully and respectfully and had obviously done his homework. The second critic was more gung-ho. He said he hadn’t actually prepared anything but that it might not be inappropriate to compare Lavinia’s writing to Dostoevsky’s. Lavinia went scarlet. Then the first or second critic – I was enthralled but struggling to keep up – said it was as if she had moved from writing socialist poetry to capitalist prose. One of them asked her why she concentrated so much on themes of escape. I could sense her panic. She couldn’t really say. Both critics kept asking her where she got her inspiration from but to all their questions Lavinia’s answer was to laugh and answer that she didn’t know, her ideas just came from somewhere behind her head and poured out in front – and she mimed how it happened, very eloquently, with both hands. After that I was intrigued and would have bought all of her books except that I was saving my dosh for bus rides.

Cluj is a lovely city but graffiti artists have been out in force, spraying restored facades like randy cats. Their messages are ugly to look at and so mixed that I couldn’t interpret them – are they aggressive or humorous or both?

The bus station is like a thumbnail of another kind of Romania: a hub of nervous expectation for the modest traveller, rather down at heal and devoid of romanticism unless you think buses are beautiful. If you do, you can begin with the dreams. Pinned to some of the pillars holding the shelter up were notices of destinations way beyond my current scope, promising wider horizons. One showed the timetable for a bus to Chișinău. Three years ago in another unprepossessing autogara I had seen one to Alep – Aleppo. Syria was already a war zone. Was the bus going to swim?

There was dream potential in the people too: what sort of aspirations could you read in the faces of the guys shouldering anonymous, boulster-shaped parcels, or in the bulging suitcases bound with string?

What drives the imaginations of the casual young people zipped up in tight puff jackets (the girls made up, manicured and coiffed to perfection), or the braided Roma maiden touting something in a slim blue cardboard box (is it scent or a pregnancy test?), or the Maramureș countrywomen in their village gear of full, knee-length skirts and thick black tights, matching headscarves and fake fur waistcoats, or the middle-aged women in black slacks and sharp jackets, the comfortable older men in flat caps, or even the poor old chap who was sitting in the waiting room, bundled up against the cold and talking to himself? He had a blind stick and when he got up and began blundering around the room trying to find the exit, a motherly woman in a red woollen hat left her luggage to guide him out.

Momentarily ashamed because I hadn’t ‘got it’ about his blindness straight away and thought he was demented, I too got up and left.

And half an hour later, we’re off to Baia Mare in the Fany omnicharger (country bus). With the radio, it’s a case of like it or lump it, so I decide to get used to the chattering, letting it morph into an artficial heartbeat, while snuggling into my seat and letting my mind dilate under the mackerel sky.

In a gnat’s hop (so much for romance) we have left the city and its shouting roadside clutter behind, and there are incidental bulrushes, wasteland-grazing cows (are they small or far away?), an elaborate wooden wayside crucifix that looks lost despite its nifty roof and beyond them all, keeping pace with us, the chalky, winter-petrified hills.

And now (11.52) we are further along the road and the thrill of this quick passage north kicks in. Curious details catch my eye. There is the dark blue shirt hanging from a tall pole outside a humble farmstead. Half hidden by a clump of willows, it seems to have grown from the trees. Is it an expression of a mad, artistic will or a sign that someone has died?

 

Next time on Sheep Walk: meeting a human rights activist who helps the Roma, talking to one of Maramureș’s most intelligent promoters, and conversations about philosophy, and how Romania is different, with my friend and retired small-holder Ioana.

Cluj (in)fusion

Maddened by the clatter of ads and predictable (?) opinions from the non-stop radio I am tapping this like an sos before being zombified on an orange Fany bus to Baia.

Cluj has been gently uplifting, full of curious details and intellectually inviting. Like the man selling Hungarian chimney cake from a stall on the corner of Strada Potaissa and Strada Universitatii. He was still there after dark in this freezing November, keeping himself warm with his brazier. Presumably he spent the nights in the neat yellow shed on wheels that was parked up alongside. And opposite him, there are the mellow college buildings, discreetly old (some 17th century?) in their crumbly blond stone, and offering courses in medicine and philology, European languages, theology, business studies and much besides (the university is clustered in several places around the city but this is its heart). Each stone entrance is wide enough for a horse-drawn coach, and most of the fortress-like wooden gates are open, revealing (today) sunlit inner courtyards that must have once provided real protection, physical as well as moral.

Then there are the bookshops – yes, they still exist! – and I fell for Libraria din Colts, close to the seductive Piazzetta cafe with its glass roof and medieval balconies. Lured upstairs by the bookshop’s welcoming atmosphere I found tiered shelves full of fascinating titles, and choosing one about the history of violence in the Romanian language, followed a drift of browsing customers to a room with sofas where I sat and mopped up 20 well written pages. They were all about the provocative phraseology in Romania’s patriotic poet and essayist, Mihai Eminescu, and how his inflammatory expressions were fuel for demagogues like the Iron Guard’s terribly misguided leader, Codreanu. After the recent political mud-chucking by Donald Trump, reading this dispassionate analysis of another consummate manipulator was balm to the tormented brow. How good it would be to study here, if you had the means.

Cluj is a lovely city but graffiti artists have been out in force, spraying pretty facades like randy cats. Their messages are ugly to look at and so mixed that I couldn’t interpret them – are they aggressive or humorous or both?

The bus station is like a thumbnail of another kind of Romania: a hub of nervous expectation for the modest traveller, rather down at heal and devoid of romanticism unless you think buses are beautiful. If you do, you can begin with the dreams. Pinned to lampposts, there were (to me) notices of new destinations, promising wider horizons.

Today I saw one announcing the timetable for a bus to Chisinau. Three years ago in another unprepossessing autogara I had seen one to Alep – Aleppo. Was the bus going to swim?

There was dream potential in the people too: what sort of aspirations could you read in the faces of the guys shouldering anonymous, boulster-shaped parcels, or in the bulging suitcases bound with string?

What drives the imaginations of the casual young people zipped up in tight puff jackets (the girls made up, manicured and coiffed to perfection), or the braided Roma maiden touting something in a slim blue cardboard box (is it scent or a pregnancy test?), or the Maramures countrywomen in their village gear of full, knee-length skirts and thick black tights, matching headscarves and fake fur waistcoats, or the middle-aged women in black slacks and sharp jackets, the comfortable older men in flat caps, or even the poor old chap who was sitting in the waiting room, bundled up against the cold and talking to himself? He had a blind stick and when he got up and began blundering around trying to find the exit, a motherly woman in a red woollen hat left her luggage to guide him out. Momentarily ashamed because I hadn’t ‘got’ his blindness straight away and thought he was demented, I too got up and left.

And half an hour later, we’re off to Baia Mare in the Fany omnicharger (country bus). With the radio, it’s a case of like it or lump it, so I decide to get used to the chattering, letting it morph into an artficial heartbeat, while snuggling into my seat and letting my mind drift under the mackerel sky.

In a gnat’s hop (so much for romance) we have left the city and its shouting roadside clutter behind, and there are incidental bulrushes, wasteland-grazing cows (are they small or far away?), an elaborate wooden wayside crucifix that looks lost despite its nifty roof and beyond them all, keeping pace with us, the chalky, winter-petrified hills.

And now (11.52) we are further along the road and the thrill of this quick passage north kicks in. Curious details catch my eye. There is the dark blue shirt hanging from a tall pole outside a humble farmstead. Half hidden by a clump of willows, it seems to have grown from the trees. Is it an expression of mad, artistic will or a sign that someone has died? 

 

Shaman me

A little clunky as a title but it’s meant to cover several subjects. They include the (to me) fascinating topic of shamanic shepherds, which I’m about to touch on in a talk for the Haverfordwest Probus Club, and the political whirlwinds that seem to be affecting just about everyone right now. In some ways, those whirlwinds are whooshing us together almost as much as they are blowing things apart. Of course I mean Syria, and Yemen, and the on-going war in the Donbas, and the beastly Brexit and the phenomenon of Jeremy Corbyn – because although I love Romania and am curious about many other places in the world, I still consider Britain as my home. And the dreadful pun is my way of saying sorry for not posting anything at all since March.

After that last post, I returned to Romania for the first time in two years. My book, whose working title is Carpathian Sheep Walk, was in the doldrums and I thought it would be good to look at something else. So I went to a medical conference organised by a remarkable hospital in Zalau, north-west Transylvania. If you know anything about Romania’s health care system you’ll have heard the recent scandals over watered down disinfectant, slapdash doctors, low morale, high nosocomial (Cdif and its friends) infection rates, and endless stories of woe. A chance meeting back in 1996 showed me a completely different side of this issue and that there are people working behind the scenes to make it better. True, they received a lot of help from a British charity called Medical Support for Romania, but nothing would have moved if the staff of the Salaj county hospital in Zalau hadn’t accepted the challenge.

At the conference, then in its seventh edition, a record number of 300 delegates turned up. Unlike me, none of them were fazed by its official title of Sterilizare, which meant it was all about infection control and not to do with sterilising people. I’d met some of the hospital staff before but now I came into contact with a posse of British NHS medics and nurses who had given up their holidays to speak, share information and support the Romanians. Two of the British delegates were nurses who had served with the armed forces, one in Iraq, and the other in Sierra Leone, where she was treating Ebola victims. There was a Romanian nurse who has settled in north Wales, and several surgeons. They were a great bunch, funny, dynamic and very, very nice. We had a conducted tour, and saw the hospital’s procedures for sterilising surgical instruments, washing hands and laundry – unglamorous but vital – and as the dedicated Romanian nurses and doctors wore themselves out with conscientiousness, I thought of the hospitals I know of in Wales were those simple cleansing processes are often brushed aside. Everyone is under a lot of pressure, both in the NHS and in the Romanian health service, but it was heartening to see intelligent people from both sides being so willing to help each other.

Eye-opening and uplifting, the conference also showed that Zalau isn’t the only Romanian hospital whose staff are changing things for the good. I met three or four nurses from different parts of the country who have set themselves very high standards. In the welter of articles and news items that show only revulsion for Romania’s health services, it’s hard to find any space for a good one. The very fact that they exist shows there is hope.

I wrote a short piece about Zalau’s pioneering work for BBC radio. It was broadcast at the end of August. (In case that one doesn’t work, here’s another link.)

From Zalau I went to Baia Mare. There I got in touch with Diana Damsa, a young activist who has been working with Roma from a ghetto that’s grown up since the 1989 Revolution. Diana is a member of Initiatives of Change and she teaches adults and children practical skills they can use legitimately to earn money. It’s had a remarkable effect: one evening we sat down to watch a film with seven well-spoken Roma teenagers who were either at school or university. Diana and I visited another ghetto in Baia Mare. This was a couple of very run down five-storey housing blocks which had featured in the tv documentary, The Romanians are Coming. One of the town’s councillors had insisted on having a wall built to hide the ‘unsightly’ homes from passers by, as if masking them would make them go away. Diana’s reaction to the wall was scathing. But unlike many of her fellow countrymen and women who were scandalised by its negativity, she told me The Romanians are Coming gave an honest picture of what happens to Romanian migrant workers in the UK, and said that it followed their thought processes without prejudice. I watched the three-part film when I got home and agreed with her, feeling very sorry for the Romanians and disgusted by the xenophobic British by-standers whom the director had dredged up from somewhere unmentionable like UKIP or the BNP.

After Baia, I went by train from Cluj to Suceava, to visit charities that help the homeless in the town of Dorohoi. Most of my time was spent with Asociatia Neemia, but Neemia has professional and social ties with several other charities in the town and I had a chance to talk to their aid workers too. Many of Neemia’s ‘clients’ grew up in state-run children’s homes, the kinds of institutions that horrified so many of us who saw tv reports from the early 1990s. A lot of those children were diseased, disabled or emotionally disturbed and the orphanages threw them out when they reached the age of 18. With nowhere to go and nothing to do, many ended up sleeping rough, begging and getting into trouble. The charities I visited in Dorohoi are run by a variety of non-conformist churches, notably the Baptists. All religious organisations were suppressed under the Communists but the non-conformists have burgeoned since Ceausescu’s regime fell, and I found them admirable in every way – unassuming, practical, good-hearted and patient. But even as they find temporary homes, build houses, provide cash for food, clothes and bikes, they can’t help everyone and what they do is only a fraction of what’s needed. There is a stream of visitors asking for help every day. Even so, I never saw Neemia turn anyone away.

It was humbling to listen to the stories told by some of the youngsters that Neemia and its fellow charities are helping. Their cheerfulness and courage shone through. They were the very antithesis of the blamed image of the poor which our self-righteous, right-wing government is ramming down our throats. It was so manifest that I wanted to shout. Of course not all of the people who received support were angels: some thought it was OK to go on having children when it was the last thing they were equipped for, and some were downright ungrateful, but the vast majority only needed the most basic thing – human kindness – to thrive. Interviewing one young man who had a learning difficulty, I found my attention wandering a little but it snapped back into gear when he said, ‘What I particularly like about this charity is that the people here give me respect.’

I was in Dorohoi for nine days. Having got home I felt so moved by the experience that I made a film, Looking for Angels. It only needs a little more editing before I can publish it. Watch this – or some youtube – space!

Next week, I’m off to Romania again. This time it’s to catch up with some of my shepherding friends. Before leaving, I’m giving an illustrated talk about Romanian shepherds and their transhumant traditions. The title is Old Pathways in New Europe: How Romanian Shepherds are Keeping Track. It touches on some of the episodes in Carpathian Sheep Walk, among them a tale about shamanic shepherds in the Caucasus. While preparing the slide show, I got in touch with Marcu Jura, one of the shepherds I’ve known about for years but never met. Marcu studied philosophy in Sibiu and abandoned a well-paid city job to return to the hills. As well as tending his sheep, he writes pithy articles for Republica, an online newspaper. I asked if the problematic laws against grazing and sheep dogs had changed since Lucy Ash’s broadcast for Crossing Continents (see an earlier post). The answer was no. But Marcu and his wife, Serin, belong to a new generation of sheep farmers whose knowledge of current affairs, including environmental concerns, is surely a good thing. I’m hoping to learn a lot from them – and if I do, to pass it on to you here!