Romania
 

Travel report
Romanian
cultural heritage in wood

 

Commissioned by the Delegation for Industrial Society's Cultural Heritage Timmerdraget has participated in the working team for "Wooden cultures in Europe" in the limit of the campaign of the European Council "Europe a Common Heritage". The working team has had members from Sweden, France, Latvia, Poland, Romania and Turkey. Here follows a travel report from the first meeting of the working team on the twenty-fourth to twenty-eighth of June in Baihia Mare in the region Maramures in the north of Romania.


At the side of the road a woman collects newly cut grass. Above the hills are clouds that threaten with rain again. In the sun, just outside the shadow from the high beeches close to the river, some girls and boys are playing by a big puddle on the road. It is Sunday and to morrow is the first day on the summer holidays. The woman lifts the grass up on her back, walks along the road, says a few words to a neighbour and vanishes behind a small door in a big wooden gate.
     Inside the yard are the dwelling-house, the barn and a small store-house. The yards are not
more than fifteen meters wide and thirty meters deep and are close to each other along the village road. Farther along the road a young man leads a cow on a rope. The calf follows on the verge.
      The gate is of wood and the houses with the shingle roofs are of wood. The close fences alongside the road and between the yards are of wood. Everything that is built-up in the village seems to be made of oak, spruce or pine. Boards, broad planks, logs and shingles. 		 
The woman far away on the road rakes the newly cut grass on the roadside.
      The children suddenly runs across the road and in to the shade by the river. Two of the children linger on the road and look at our big tourist coach.

The horse is still important
In North Romania at the border to Ukraine people lives in something we think was a long time ago. Only a few cars, old buses in the local service, utterly few tractors and almost no shops. One still cuts most of the hay with scythe and the horse is the most important help to make the working day easier. The cows is kept on the grounds around the village, while the sheep is up in the mountains and is taken care of by the herdsmen who also are trusted in making cheese.
      In the next village we get some extra minutes in the programme and hurry down a little side-road between the village road and the river. At the river a woman stands on a wooden flume
and changes a small gate so the water streams down on the mill-wheel that slowly starts to turn. She goes into the mill-house and up some stairs and pours corns into a wooden funnel. Then she goes down again and pulls a lever. The mill-stones starts to thunder so the noise drowns the rush from the water outside. Between forefinger, middle finger and thumb she feels with the left hand the coarseness of the meal and gently, with the right hand, turns a wooden stick to adjust the degree of coarseness.  



Present time in one place is history in antother
What we often tries to "make alive" at our museums in Sweden is reality and daily life at the countryside of Southeast Europe. The word Real-time should maybe not only mean something electronic and simultaneously. It maybe also should comprise times gone by. Present time in one place could be history in another.

World heritage
In a coach rent by the Romanian ministry of culture we are guided to open-air museums and to fantastic, log-house churches with their surrounding villages. The Council of Europe has gathered experts to discuss wood as a part of a common European cultural heritage.
      The district of Maramures in the north of Romania is an excellent region for such a con-versation. Eight of the wooden churches in the ancient villages in Maramures are on the world heritage list. The open-air museums are managed enthusiastically and competent despite financial problems. They mostly show the typical homestead from different areas with its wooden gates and every museum also seems to have one of these wooden churches with the high and steep roof covered with wooden shingles.
      In Swedish eyes the open-air museums are somewhat paradoxical. In the villages along the rivers Mara, Iza and Viseu that runs from the mountains down to the Tisa River, today the border to Ukraine, everything is there. But here it is reality and real life, not exhibited substrata.
      Our ethnographic museums in Sweden is very much the result of what one thought was a threat from the rushing industrialisation and all the modern things that could destroy social relations, old labour patterns, traditions and ways of building. In the countryside of Maramures industrialisation has not yet made the museums action of rescue quite pertinent. The villages shows what the museums intended to exhibit - but in reality.

      When I after the visit in the big church in Desesti with its restored baroque paintings, which as many of the other wooden churches is situated high above the village, asks for a toilette, I am kindly shown into the vicarage. Around the corner, above the dung heap, is the nice and neat outdoor lavatory of the clergyman family.

Norrland and Maramures in the periphery of Europe
What do one find that is common and distinguished between Norrland, the northern parts of Sweden, and Maramures if the discussion should be about a common cultural heritage of wood?
    We are both periphery and fringe districts. The forest and cultivable valleys are similar natural resources. The forest has been both wood-store and pastureland. Our pine forests in Norrland became during the nineteenth century, with increasing effectiveness of the forestry methods, a product on an international market that was one of the foundations for Sweden as industry-nation.

  
The outhouse of the clergyman family.


A growth of prosperity and a modernisation with few counterparts in history. In Maramures the mixed forests remained a local and regional resource.
   As a local resource the wood very strongly characterises the both areas today. The settle-ments on the Maramures countryside excludes almost any other material than wood, with logs in the construction and wooden shingles on the roofs. In Norrland are more than half of all the buildings on the country-side still log-houses and wood is still our most common building materials.
    North Romania is in our eyes closely populated. The whole country has for a very long time 		 
A farmyard at the open-air museum in Bucharest.
been dominated by big land-owners and in modern time by the collectivisation during the communist period 1947-89.

Difference in log-house building
In Norrland as a whole, land has not been anything in short supply and Sweden has had a strong class of farmers. The farms in Maramures are small and lie very close to each other and can be compared with the most closely built-up villages in the county of Dalecarlia in Sweden.
      In Maramures there are two-three, occasionally more, buildings in the yard that is totally fenced in towards neighbours and the village street. In the farmyard Tomtan i Klövsjö village in the county of Jämtland, which is relatively small and can be compared with the farmyards in Maramures, there is ten-twelve buildings that completely encloses the yard. The yard is closed and has gates just like in Maramures, but it is far away to the nearest neighbour. Tomtan is situated there, pretty typical for   The village street between the buildings and the river in the village Ieud, Maramures.
Norrland on a hillock in a bigger slope down towards a water-course.
     The buildings in both of these forest- and mountain lands, these fringe territories in Europe, is of wood. Log-houses and wooden roofs. The farmyard Tomtan has roofs covered with board and a few roofs are covered with wooden shingles. Roof covered with wooden shingles are the most common in Maramures.The long, straight stems of pine forest has given opportunity to the log-house building technique with notches in the corners. At a small  
The farmyard Tomtan in Klövsjö, in the southern part of Jämtland, became a local history yard in 1963. Many farmyards looked like this in the nothern parts of Sweden during the nineteenth century. About ten of the farmyards totally 20-25 buildings enclose a square courtyard.
distance the technique feels familiar
if you are from Sweden, here are both the the techniques from the north and the south of Sweden.
      The big difference one can notice at a closer range. In the houses in Maramures the logs are not so closely fitted together as in our log-houses. Our buildings we have wanted to construct completely tight, by "wood meeting wood", with the slit underneath the logs. This is probably the most significant Scandinavian contribution to the art of log-building. East and south of us this has not been that important, one has solved the problem through stuffing material between the logs and often the  
The back of "pair cottage" at the open-air museum in Baiha Mare, Maramures.
inside of the wall is plastered.
      The roofs in the North Romanian villages are, as mentioned, covered with wooden shingles and that was also the most common material on our roofs during a century starting about 1850. The biggest difference is the traditional roof-construction that seems to be common all over Romania. With its steep slope it's a big difference from what we are used to see, above all on log-houses. The high and steep, shingle-covered roofs in the villages with the houses closely   The front of the same house. The gables of the houses are not built with logs all the way up to the roof ridge. The roofs are carried by a roof truss construction.
together, gives them such a distinctive
character and they dominate so powerfully that it can be hard to see similarities in our own building tradition.

An insane dictator
We return to Baiha Mare which is a mining- and industrial centre and the main city in the Maramures county. Earlier a very dirty city where industries has been shut off during the 1990s because of the pollution that was way beyond the acceptable. In the outskirts we pass the new, local market where people sit at the side of the road behind some things on an unfolded newspaper or an oilcloth. A young father offers a flywheel, an old battery and four spark plugs.
     Here is also, like in the outskirts of Bucharest, the unfinished residential blocks. Empty concrete constructions that was meant to be apartment buildings. And occupied houses that looks completed but water and drain is not into the houses and the outdoor milieu is like during the construction period.
      Among the dictator Ceausescus many insane projects the "The Systematisation-programme" is probably the most horrible. After a food-supply crisis in the beginning of the 1980s the acreage should drastically be increased. The remedy the dictator thought was that until the year 2000 eliminate half of the 13 000 villages in the country and rebuild the rest to more modern and city-like communities. At the revolution   Ceausescu's palace in Bucharest is one of the biggest buildings in the world.
1989 these acts of cruelty was stopped
and then about 500 villages, mostly in the south and around the capitol, had been destroyed. Some of them, with empty concrete skeletons, lines the road between Bucharest and the airport.
      Insanity sometimes has an infernal logic. During the same period Ceausescu started the campaign "The song of Romania" where the peasants important role in history was pointed out. In traditional costumes and to traditional melodies songs were sung that praised the Romanian people and in the same "traditional costume" the new, modern and industrialised Romania was praised at the same time.

Modernity in waiting
The story about the growth of our modern society is how vi by raw material and capital, reforms, education, inventions and popular movement continuously made new progress. It is this that that has made the modern Sweden, a modernity and a success that many people have felt participate in and everyone has been able to take a part.
      The situation is not the same in Romania. The "old order" in the villages can in some reason be said to be successful. A nourishment and a form of life that have been seen to be so long-range persistent that it actually works today, in spite of the feudal lord's, the communism's and the dictator's oppression and robbery.
      The industry of Romania has been based upon mining and from the last of the nineteenth century upon oil industry. Industry is today strongly out-of-date and the agriculture has not been rationalized, but carries on largely with old-fashioned methods. It makes Romania to one of the poorest countries in Europe today.
     A big part of the people in Romania lives in the industry society's "unfinished" suburban environments.When you see the modernist but worn out railway station in Bahia Mare, the new market of the town and centre or the residential area in the outskirts, is it not difficult to see that someone has had a vision, someone has thougt and planned, one has wanted to create something new. But in too many ways one can feel and see that it did not work.
     A broken modernization -
  


Not far from Ceausescu's palace are these housing environments that where considered as temporarily housing for a country side population which is moving in, but will now be existing as ghetto-similar environments.
a modernity put in waiting?-
is a bit difficult for us in Sweden to imagine. And it is worse than just interruption and waiting. The modernization in Romania is a failure with element of pure outrange. The people in Romania, both in the towns and at the countryside lives daily in the aftermath of a project that has broken down. They can everywhere see environments that are the physical remains after different programmes. Many of the young people that have got hold of education lack faith in the future and choose to move abroad when opportunity is given.

Cultural heritage in wood is set aside
At the evening discussions in Maramures we are talking - Romanian officials, bureaucrats from The Council of Europe and experts - about a possible common cultural heritage of wood. Its obvious the wooden cultural heritage is not so much paid attention to and is more exception in both Central- and Western Europe. Partly the explanation is that it belongs to the folk tradition and not to the power and extravagance. At the 		 
A decorated wooden door at the open-air museum in the town Sigeth right against the Ukrainian border. In front of the door one can see a bench for shingle production.

same time the attention is dependent
on the fact that stone and brick after all has been the most common building materials in big parts of Europe. Wood has been an article in short supply in many places. Wood is in that context something remarkable.
     Equally obvious it is that wood is something naturally and part of every day life in a completely other way here in Sweden. Despite many of the strong symbols for the post war modernity was built in brick and concrete - schools, local government houses, the apartment houses in towns and villages, the hydroelectric power stations - is wooden houses still the natural choice for most of the people that builds a new house or a week-end cabin. Our so called "sick-houses" has given that we appreciate the material wood both outside and inside our houses, we like to walk on wooden floors. Wood is something positive but yet nothing special.
      That our older building environment, where we almost everywhere are met by wooden houses and log-houses, is something remarkable in a European perspective we seldom give any thought.

Cultural heritage and ideology
The last morning I look out trough the train window. On the big plain with the narrow, cultivated strips outside Bucharest an old woman leads her cow between two big oil pumps. Both of the pumps are old and rusty, one stands idle. The cow has to graze the small strips of grass between the fields. I am thinking of "The song of Romania". It must have been a very false tune.
     The villages that not a long time ago was threatened by the Ceausescu extermination must 		 
A view from the open-air museum towards the town Sigeth by the river Tisa. The river represents here the border between Romania and Ukraine.
be a cultural heritage with an immense tension. At the same time they represents something still working in a chaotic time and something recently threatened to be rooted out by a hated regime. An antiquated world and at the same time something durable and maybe the only and good continuity in a more than half a century long modernisation-catastrophe. The woman's cow is still giving milk but one of two pumps is not working.
      Selected parts of the cultural heritage have many times in history programmatically been used as a part in a national project, in the formation of a national identity. The farmerculture in Dalecarlia (county in Sweden) became a part of the national currents at the former turn of the century. It became a symbol for the experience of the genuinely Swedish and a safe contrast to the increasing amount of industry chimneys and completely new ways of life. The cultural heritage as a blue-and yellow (the colours of the Swedish flag) blanket of consolation.
    Little by little we were reminded of the degenerated offshoots of the nationalism. Spared of its warlike catastrophes we were able to continue a successful community building where log-houses, old agricultural methods and overcrowded industrial worker environments now represented "the old order", the out of date that should be modernized. Today it is obvious that parts of this shall be conserved and taken care of that we are able to think, feel and touch our history. And that the story about our society   The mountains in Maramures raise up to 13-1400 metres altitude above sea level. At the hill-sides are the chalets of the villages.
not shall have too great gaps.
      How are we going to use the cultural heritage in the period of Real-time, Globalisation and an unsure future? Shall we only strengthen the regional identity and market characteristics and profile, or is there also something interesting in other regions equal natural conditions and working methods, in similar and differing experiences?

Yesterday and future
Ieud is the village with most children in Romania. It is a funeral at the church up on the hill on the other side of the river. We cross the clear water on a narrow and rusty bridge to look at the church, where the big tower was rebuilt by the village people after the church was struck by lightning 1976.
     Over on the other side I see two children that have followed their mother down to the river to wash some clothes. How does she talk to her children about yesterday and tomorrow? And what do we say to our children?

Göran Andersson 		 
The village Ieud. The old carved wooden gates into the yards are something of Maramures's hallmark.