A Country a Month — Romania, Week 2

Last Sunday we stayed in Bucharest, a city that keeps everything and throws nothing away. This week we leave the capital and drive north, past the point where the boulevards give out and the hills begin, into two regions that remember differently than the cities do. One remembers in wood. The other remembers in the head, which turns out to be the more portable place to keep a thing.

There is a gate on the right at the bottom of the descent into Bârsana, in Maramureș, the country's northernmost county, pressed up against the Ukrainian border in the upper-left corner of the map. The gate is four metres of oak, planted in the verge of the road like a tree that has decided not to move. The lintel carries the rope motif. The posts carry the rosette, the tree of life, the sun and the moon, and a cross set just under the eaves where the rain runs off rather than into the carving.

It was made in 1958 by a man named Toader, who took three and a half months to cut it. The lintel was repaired once, in 1984, by Toader's son, who matched the rope from memory because the original drawings had been lost in a flood. The patch is invisible. You have to be told it is there.

Behind the gate is a two-room house, a porch, a vegetable garden, a wood pile, a dog on a chain whose function is to bark and whose practice is to sleep. The gate is worth more than the house. In Maramureș this is not a category error. The gate is the family. The house is only where the family sleeps.

Most visitors miss this, because they have come for the churches.

The wooden churches are the international shorthand for the region: eight of them on the UNESCO list since 1999, with roughly a hundred more in the surrounding hills that would qualify by any measure other than the paperwork. They are built in hand-hewn oak on stone foundations, with split shingles and a single tall spire of the local spear type. The mortise-and-tenon joinery uses no nails. The spire at Șurdești rises about fifty-four metres, which made it, for a time, the tallest wooden building in the world.

They exist in that form because of a prohibition. After 1690, under Habsburg rule, the Orthodox confession was barred from building in stone in the eastern districts. The Orthodox villages, which had no intention of converting, simply built in wood instead, pushing peasant carpentry past fifty metres on a structure that began as a barn. The prohibition produced a tradition its authors would never have predicted, and the tradition outlived the prohibition by two and a half centuries.

What I love most is that these are still parish churches. Arrive at Ieud-Deal at ten on a Sunday and you find the parishioners arriving at the same time. The priest is at the door, not receiving the faithful in the abstract but receiving Toader and Vasile and Maria, whom he has known since their children's baptisms. The buildings smell of beeswax and old wood and faintly of incense. The wood absorbs sound rather than reflecting it, so the choir compensates by singing closer together.

The other site everyone knows is the Merry Cemetery at Săpânța, around 175,000 visitors a year, begun in 1935 by a woodcarver named Stan Ioan Pătraș. He painted his first blue tombstone that summer: a naive portrait of the dead man on the front, and on the back a rhymed quatrain describing his life and his death in the dry rural register Pătraș had inherited from the village's wedding shouts and funeral laments. It worked. He painted another. By the time he died in 1977 he had painted around eight hundred, and his apprentice has carried the workshop ever since. The cemetery now holds about a thousand painted crosses, and it is still the working cemetery of the village. A new cross is added roughly twice a month.

The blue has its own name now, albastru de Săpânța, Săpânța blue, sold by regional paint suppliers under that label. The quatrains are what foreign visitors stop at. One, for a man who died young of drink, addresses the drink directly: a curse, a warning to whoever passes. Another, for a difficult mother-in-law, notes wryly that three more days and she would have lain there alive, and asks the passerby please not to wake her. Read ten in a row and you form an accurate impression: the village's view of itself is wry. The wryness is structural. It is the village's instrument for naming what is hard.

East of the wood is Bucovina, and Bucovina remembers differently.

Ask a Bucovinean where he is from and he will not say "Romania." He will say "Bucovina," the way a Texan says "Texas," with a small interior straightening that says the place is not quite the same as the country it sits in, even when the country it sits in is the one he loves. Then, if you show the smallest interest, he will tell you the village, the road that takes you there, which monastery you pass, and which spring is good to drink from in the second kilometre after the bridge. The recitation is the carrier. The pride is in the order.

The geography is genuinely complicated. Bucovina was a Habsburg crown land from 1775 to 1918, administered in German, schooled in five languages, its capital Czernowitz holding an opera house, a German theatre, Jewish and Polish and Ruthenian cultural societies, and a print culture running in German, Romanian, Yiddish, Ukrainian, and Polish. Then the catastrophe: Stalin's 1940 ultimatum cut the province in two along the Siret valley. The northern half is now in Ukraine. The southern half is Suceava county, in Romania. The border post at Siret is, in 2026, a working crossing between an EU member state and a non-EU state at war.

This is the chapter of the book where I cannot keep my own family out of it, and I have stopped trying.

My great-grandfather, Calistrat Șotropa, was born in 1884 in a village in the southern foothills, took his doctorate in philology at the German-language university in Cernăuți, and stayed to teach. He wrote a Romanian-German dictionary for civil servants and co-authored a grammar, a copy of which is in my library. The family has always called him Prof. Dr. The title was the family's way of saying that the work was serious. The work was.

And the work is what carried, because Bucovina pride, in the form my family knew it, was never nationalist. It was educational. It rested on the quiet conviction that one had been schooled in a serious system: that one read German or French as a matter of course, knew the standard edition of Goethe and of Eminescu, could play the slow movement of a Schubert sonata adequately if not brilliantly, and answered one's letters within a week. It looked to a curriculum, a library shelf, a concert programme, and a set of habits. So it survived the disappearance of both the Habsburg court and the Romanian kingdom, because it had never depended on either. It survived communism, in some families, by becoming entirely interior. The shelf and the programme could be carried in the head and rebuilt at home.

It was carried, in the 1980s, in a third-floor apartment near the Cișmigiu gardens in Bucharest, by my great-aunt Aurora, an actress who returned to drama school at forty-nine because, she told me once at her kitchen table, she had decided she had not yet exhausted what there was to learn. The geography of Bucovina ended in 1940. The way of thinking it produced did not end, because it had never lived only in the geography.

That is the thing the cities forget and the north remembers. Some inheritances are kept in oak, four metres tall, repaired from memory after a flood. Others are kept in a head, in a curriculum, in the order you recite the villages along a road. Both are forms of refusing to let a thing go.

— Eleodor

"To Romania, with Love" collects these returns, one chapter at a time. You can follow the whole journey, and find out when the book is out, at ToRomaniawithLove.com. If this week's letter brought a place or a person to mind, forward it to them. That is how a country travels.

Next Sunday: we come back south and into the present, to two companies that nobody outside Romania expected, a DIY empire and a robotics anomaly. "The Floreasca Anomaly."