Peasants: the beautiful and the awful

Peasant culture? Well, yes, as Kerry describes below, the region of Maramures offered some fascinating glimpses of how life was lived in the northern Balkans for hundred of years: each house has its own well for water (with, yes, the old winch and pulley and bucket system), its own stable, its own congregation of busy yard beasts. And everyone seems to be making something out of wood: elaborately beautiful wooden gateways mark the entrance to most family dwellings. Some of these places look entirely gorgeous, demonstrative in their illustrations of agrarian pride--they are tidy, carefully groomed, myriad-flowered visions of simple living inhabited by cheerful, robust looking folks. Often, I felt like I'd stepped into the world of Brueghel. In contrast, I also saw some of the most profound, heart-breaking scenes: houses built out of scraps, built next to rivers of garbage and sewage and chemical run-off (even our two year old son remarked "oh, yuck" when we walked him down to the "river" bank), inhabited by people who look as utterly defeated as their surroundings. In short, there was no question of romaticizing this area. The quaint and the kitsch are juxtaposed everywhere with the pitiful and the awful. It's not as if I arrived in Romania with some idealized version of peasant life tucked inside my American consciousness. Having spent time on my grandfather's dairy farm in Wisconsin as a kid I know first hand that a farmer's life is as much hell as it is agrarian heaven. But I felt moments of actual shock driving through the Romanian countryside, which led me to certain questions: What was it like here under Ceauşescu? Was it exactly the same, minus the satellite dishes and conspicuous cars? Was there any bread? Was there any corn for the mamaliga? Was I really seeing the IMPROVED version of rural conditions, the result of two decades of capitalism? Such questions were all the more poignant when, always unexpectedly, against this backdrop of peasant poverty and/or prosperity would rise one of the brand new, often quite garish concrete and re-bar houses, opulent compared to the surrounding huts, as if bizarrely relocated from some version of the Romanian suburbs.

Go to Maramures, I say! You would have to be dead not to be moved by a place as enticing, fascinating, and off-putting as this.

Christopher

[P.S. Double click on any of the photographs to expand them to full screen]