Romania Oct. 3-6

errata

we learned today that there are Muslim communities in eastern Romania.
   

Wed Oct 3.

Long day of driving from Braslov to  Gula Humorului.

Variable mountain scenery, from pastoral to rugged.

We go through the Hungarian part of Romania.  Catholic.  New language:

We visit a church , which is the site of a miraculous statue.

OMG:

Lunch is fresh trout and Moldovian red & white house wines.

Dramatic gorge:

On the North side of mountains, we return to the Orthodox/Romanian sections.

We arer staying 2 nights at Buna Humorolui, a small town near the famous painted monasteries.  Our  huge, exceptionally ugly,  Best Western dominates the scene.

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October 4.  Painted Monasteries.

In Bukovina, NE Romania.  This is a very poor area.  Many households keep chickens in the yard.  Horses are still used for transport.  The red tassles ward off the evil eye:

Some corn is apparently grown and harvested by hand.  Outside of town, water is drawn by well.   The wells are capped by a little structure, e.g.:

Still, there is a lot of new home construction scattered about.   The countryside (flowing meadows and fields and gently woodsy mountains) is far from deserted.

Today we had the treat of visiting four painted monasteries.  

These monasteries were forts with serious walls around them.

These monasteries are painted inside and out.  With one exception, only the south side of the exteriors survives.  They are from the 15th and 16th centuries.

The nature of iconography of then Orthodox Church is that it is basically the same on all churches.  

Looking at the south wall, on the right or east or the apsidal side is registers of saints.

 In some manner are interspersed cherubs.  

In the middle is a Jesse tree, the family tree of Jesus.

To the left is a hymn to Mary

and, perhaps,a picture of the siege of Constantinople.

The entry on the west side has a last judgment.  The Orthodox Church has not been influenced by Dante.  Under a representation of God the father, Jesus, and the dove of the Holy Spirit, there is shown the contest of an angel and a devil for the soul.  Those going to hell are consigned to the fiery river that emanates from the foot of Jesus.  At the foot of the river is the Leviathan from Revelation.

 

One of the churches had a north wall surviving.  It shows Jacob's ladder, with people going up. 

 Angels are helping those going up and devils are pushing them down.

Inside, (alas, no photos allowed) the pronaos, the first room, is dedicated to Holy Mary and is as far as women were allowed (except for communion).   There the walls are decorated with the calendar of saints' days.  The dome has a picture of Mary.

There may or may not be a second room where the donors to the church are buried and  there is a secret room perhaps to hide, perhaps for treasure.

The main room is the naos. (Naos is the same word as nave.) There are found pictures of the Passion and life of Christ.  The lower registers show the military saints and the donor (and, usually, his family).  The dome has Christ Pancrator.

We visited Veronet, painted in the 1540s.  It was donated by King Stephen.   The portrait is believed to be contemporaneous and an accurate depiction.  

The next monastery was Moldovita  (1537??) .It was interesting in that it include philosophers, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle among the saints.

We then went to Sucevita  This is from the late 16th century.  The walls are intact and very much a fort.

The pronaos is not dedicated to Mary.  She is in the burial chamber.

Also depicted are scenes from Exodus.

The naos is dedicated to the resurrection.  

A note on color.  It the scene is of this world, the sky background is blue.  If it is of heaven, it is white.

The last monastery was Humor.  It had no domes as it's donor was not royal.  The dedicatory panel in the naos showed the prince offered  the church, as it was on his watch, but in the burial chamber was another offering picture of the actual donor, a high official.

Also there is also the dinner where Abraham and Sarah entertain the angels.  We are told this is when Sarai is tools she will conceive.  Is ith then?

Voronet, the oldest, was built and decorated in the 15th Century.  The last judgement scene destines these Turks for hell:

These Christians are heading up:

We were told this panel depicts Jonah:

Jewish cemetary.  During the 19th Century, the Hapsburg Empire settled a lot of different groups here, including German and Jews.  Before WWII, there were about 1000 families each of Germans and Jews and 3000 Romanian families.  There is a large Jewlish cemetary with some tombstones erected quite recently.  There are no longer any Jews here and there is a concern about ongoing maintenance.

Lunch -- Local soup sour cream, vinagar, potatoes, chicken.  Peach with currant preserves.  Salad.

Dinner -- Moldovian meatballs,  mushroom

*****
Sunday, Oct. 5.  Another long bus ride.

We leave Gura Humorului for Cluj.  This is the part of Romania with a large  population of ethnic Hungarians, referred to as Hungarians..  Our tour leader and  his assistant are of this group;  the bus driver isfrom  Hungary.

We stop Bistrita for lunch and walk around.  This was a German town.  It was thriving in the 15th Century and it retains an Austrian feeling:

From the church bell tower:

There is a 16th Century Lutheran church.

The town was celebrating Octoberfest. 

Lunch was insipid chicken.  We wish they had taken us here:

This is a cozonac maker.  A delicious snack:

We proceed to the Bánffy Castle, near the village of Bontida, a Hungarian estate that has been held by the same family since the 13th Century.  The current buildings went up in the 18th Century.  The Nazis used it as a hospital and torched it on the way out.  The walls are very thick and the structures survived the fire.  But the ruins were used as a quarry during the communist period.  In the 1990s it was listed as one of the world's most endangered sites.

After the owner was able to recover possession, he leased it to the Transylvania Foundation for 49 years.  The Foundation put roofs on the buildings and otherwise stabilized the structure.  It is used today as a restoration school.  About 50 students live there and learn restoration skills each summer.  Students from 32 countries have attended.

Bland dinner at hotel. OK bruscette, chicken paprikash and polenta, cream brule.
 We are told that we use hotel restaurants because our colleagues are afraid to use local restaurants.  BS. 

*****
Monday, Oct. 6

  First stop, the salt mine outside of Turda, a nearby town.  There is evidence of the Romans mining salt here.  The mine we visited dates back to the 18th Century.  Most of the asctivity was in the 19th Century.  The mine closed in 1932 for business reasons.  It was reopened as a tourist attraction in the 1990s with major improvements circa 2009.

Outside, there were flat areas where the salt had leached to the surface.  The purple salt plant grew there.

The salt was deposited in striations reflecting cycles of rain and drying:

This area was the last to be mined:

The rest of the day reflected our leader's interest in building restoration and his Unitarian church activities in the village of Rimetea (or, in Hungarian, Torocko).

We had an excellent lunch (tarragon chicken soup, pork in hunter's sauce, walnut pastry) at a local pension.

We were treated to a local wine tasting.   We had these with the food:

We then walked around the village and had the restorations explained:

This fire equipment was still in use, we were told:

Unlike the other areas of Romania was had visited, the valley was quite dry.  The forest was cut down to produce charcoal for an iron industry and this probably contributed to the micro climate.  Great for the wine.

We had dinner (cheeses, meats, salad) at a dormitory, run by a church foundation, for girl students attending high school from out of town.  Our dinner companion was Sixtene, a 21-year old design student in her final year.  She was responsible for after-hours access to the small building and, in return, got room and board.

Rumania Oct 1-2.

Linguistic note:  Romania dropped the Cyrillic alphabet in favor of Latin characters in the early part of the 20th Century.  Also, the Romanian language is based on Latin.  It is much easier to understand signs here than it was in Bulgaria.

our current favorite is “splatorie” which appears to mean “wash”, as in laundry and carwash.

Commercial note:  We saw a couple of autos with US State license plates.  We have no clue what they are doing here.

Geographic note:

Romania is composed of three parts: Wallachia, Transylvania, and Moldovia.

***

Wed. Oct 1.    

We go North and enter the Carpathian Mountains.

We stop at the Castle Peles.  This was where the new monarchs set up in the 19th Century.  Smallish by European palace standards, but as opulent as any.

Lunch near the Castle.  Overcooked fish.

We proceed to Braslov.  Our hotel is the Ambiante.  Very new, with lots of stainless steel, glass, and LEDs.  

Dinner at hotel was OK.  Good chicken soup.  Mixed meat stew.  Good local cabernet.

Long, excellent, evening lecture on the history of Romania by our guide, Arpi.

****

Thurs., October 2.

Braslov has about 330,000 people now.  The communist takeover occurred in 1946 or 1947 (depending upon the degree of formality).  Collectivization of the farms and industrialization followed in the 50s and moved a lot of people into the towns.  People were housed in apartment buildings with poorly insulated, small apartments.  Most of these have been refitted with a layer of styrofoam insulation and new windows.  And they have been painted.

Braslov has a unique history.  It used to be called Kronstadt.  German migrants were given financial incentives to settle here, beginning in the 12 Century.  They adopted this seal showing their intention to stay.

Over the years they created a walled city that had a distinctly German appearance.  

There is a big, gothic church, completed in the early 1500s.  It is the easternmost large gothic structure.  It is known as the Black Church because, in 1669?  it was torched.  The walls stood and the Church was restored, but the scorch marks remained for a long time.

In the 1540s, Johannes  Honterus came and converted the congregation to Lutheranism. He also started the printing business in Romania.

Under Ceausescu (r. 1964 - 1989), one was not free to leave Romania.  Ethnic Germans were sold to Germany.  The price was based on the cost of health care and education.  The Germans mostly left.  A few hundred remain in Breslov and keep the church active.

The “new” synagogue was erected in 1901.

Most of the Jews that survived the Holocaust emigrated to Israel under a sales program similar to the deal for Germans.  The synagogue still conducts services and there is a kosher restaurant.  

Note about Romanian religion:  The great majority of Romanians belong to the Romanian Orthodox Church.  It is very powerful, but it is not formally a state religion. Romania has only had its own patriarch since 1872.

In the Middle Ages, Saxons, a German speaking group were brought to populate the part of Transylvania around Brasov.  In time their sons were sent to Western Europe to study. Among them was Johannes Honter.  Luther posted his 99 theses in 1517.  Honter learned of them. He converted to Lutheranism and brought the Saxons to that faith by 1540.

Hungarians settled in part of Transylvania. They remain Roman Catholics.  They continue to speak Hungarian.

In the mid 16th century, Unitarianism was founded in Transylvania (and simultaneously Poland/Lithuania).  A small percentage of the population of Transylavnia retains that religion.

Our favorite is the Greek Catholic.  Under the Habsburgs, in 1700, the Metropolitan brought several. Dioceses to the Roman Catholic Church.  Our guide says that this brought up the Hapsburg stats on increasing the number of Catholics. He suggests that the congregants knew nothing about it.  They continue to use the old orthodox liturgy in the Romanian language.

There are few Jews in Romania.  There were many successful populations.  Many were lost in the Holocaust.  It is a matter of pride to our guide that most of the Jews in southern Transylvania suirvived.  They left later.  Ceausescu had a fund raising deal.  He was paid by Israel for every Jew he allowed to migrate.  They were not forced out, merely given the opportunity to leave where none wanted to be.  He had already done a similar deal with the Germans.

There are no Muslim communities.

We had lunch at a downtown restaurant.  Lousy beer.  Sour chicken soup, mixed meat stew.

The afternoon was taken up with a visit to the “Dracula Castle” at Bron.   It is a former customs house, now set up as a museum.  

Romania Sept 29&30

Monday Sept 29

Early rising. Plane to Bucharest.

Dinner:  Romanian veg soup, chicken cordon bleu ( good), tomato salad, chocolate cake

****

Tues Sep 30.

Bucharest (pronounced here Byukarest) has about 2 million people and seems a lot more prosperous than Sofia.  There are lots of belle epoch buildings.  The city sports a Parisian wannabe atmosphere with an Arc de Triomphe and Champs Elysee.  In contrast with the rest of the area, there are virtually no Moslems here.

We drove around by bus this morning, spending time at the Parliament Building.  Begun by the last communist dictator, Nicolai Ceausescu, it was completed in the early 90s. 20,000 workers; all Romanian Materials; 2d biggests administratve building in the world by floor space (after the Penatgon) and 2d biggest building by volume (after a rocket assembly bild at Cape Canaveral.

They razed 4 square miles of the city and put in a monumental allee.

It is not air conditioned because Ceausescu feared poison in the ducts and it is almost unheatable because of the huge amount of marble. It promises to be a conservation nightmare.

The Romanian Orthodox Church seems very powerful here.  We visited its  HQ.

We could not go in because of the celebration of the 7th anniversary of the present Patriarch.  There were people outside that could not get into the relatively small church and the service was broadcast outside.   He is only the 5th patriarch because Romania did not get an independent patriarch until 1925.  Interestingly, his qualification was that he has many orthodox religious media.

Lunch was at a beerhall.  There was a string quartet of young female musicians wearing green evening gowns here.  

We ate vegetable cream soup, mititei (a mixed ground meat skewered  grilled sausage) with potatoes covered with grated cheese.  We are told that no fair or bbq is complete without mititei.  Dessert was apple strudel and ice cream.

This is a 15th Century downtown church:

 

Painted interior:

This 18th Century church shows Ottoman influence:

Manhole cover.

The outdoor museum is a collection  of farm and country buildngs, brought together for conservation, starting in the 1880s.  Romania carpentry is very versatile.

Braided fences:

According to the sign, this effigy was meant to scare off evil spirits.  But it looks more like it wants to be hugged.

Timber church.

The poorest peasants lived near the Danube, in the Northern part of Romania.  These dwellings are called half-buried houses, which they are.   The use materials sparingly on these.

Finally, this intriguing statue of Trajan in front of the National Art Museum.  Combines the Wolf of Rome and the wolf banner carried by the Dacians into battle.  Romanians regard themselves as the descendants of the Dacians and Romans.,

DInner showed the French influence in the starter of chicken and celery root mayonnaise. The main was a classic Walachian (part of Romania) dish of a stew of mixed meats with polenta.  For dessert a cheese doughnut with yogurt.  yummy!