Tradition
Many times, when you want to know the customs of a certain country or a region, you visit a village museum. Romania represents, through all its villages, a true and representative museum in the open air. Here, the time itself seems to have been stopped and this is why some people consider a trip to Romania to be one in their own past, in their own childhood. Most times, we hear to the western tourists remarks like: “It’ the same as it was in my grandfathers’ house. We thought that we would never see such beauty again!”. It may sound paradoxical that Romania it is proud of its villages, which really are less advanced than the ones in the Western Europe, but we all know that, for the civilized world, “living in the country” became some kind of a dream.
If you are in a sightseeing car and travel throughout Romania together with the tourists who came from a country like Holland, for example, you are astonished to see that the occidental tourists get so delighted by seeing hens and gees going freely on the road, that cows can come back from the pasture land by themselves and that every one of them knows the gate it must come through. If it happens for the sightseeing car not to be able to go any farther because a flock of sheeps driven by a few shepherds blocked the road, they will be truly excited.
If you go to Maramureş, you will see at almost every gate, even in summer, women who are still spinning the wool from their bundle.
A christening, a wedding in the country or some customs that help us remind our believed long- gone parents, grandparents or relatives, all of these make you think of some long forgotten worlds and times.
In the Apuseni Mountains, in July, it is still organized the famous “Girls Fair” from the “Gaina Mountain”; for the holiday of Saint Dumitru, in October, the shepherds celebrate the returning of sheeps from the mountains, symbolizing the good fulfillment of a life cycle.
Christmas and Easter customs are highly appreciated by every person who is a foreigner from these places and Romanian food cooked for these occasions, make you realize that there is something special in what we call “the Romanian cookery”. The Romanians think that, if you give something “as alms” to a passer-by, then the soul of the person who had gone “in a better world” and for whom you prey to God will receive it as a prove of love and he/she will be happy. There are still many practices connected to the remedy plants, to the exorcisms and spells, superstitions without which the Romanian villagers couldn’t survive. Here, the unmarried girls are still thinking that they can dream the man that it is predestined to them only with a thread of (sweet) basil put under their pillow, in the magic night of Epiphany. Would it be just simple ingenuity? It surely isn’t; we only see here the purity and candor of the soul of the man from the country, the seal of our childhood spirit. |
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