Romania: a Journey Through the Ages

We had stopped the car once again on account of livestock in the road, this time for sheep that were in no hurry to make their crossing.

One oversized ram turned out to be the shepherd dressed in a sheepskin cloak that covered him from head to shin. He and his son had been leading the flock for months on a circular annual journey that took them through much of Romania in search of greener pastures. Dogs, sheep, and humans foraged all day, then slept nights in the alpine pastures of the Carpathians by an open fire.

His son took time to lead us across the pasture to what turned out to be the ruins of some centuries-old castle, concealed in the morning mist like those in the Transylvania of Bram Stoker and Hollywood.

From the jumbled remains of the gatehouse, we were afforded a rare vista of pre-modern Europe: peasants working the fields with hand tools and horse-drawn plows; a child tending two much larger goats; a tumble-down village of wooden barns and houses huddled around a churchyard.

Then I noticed our guide had started playing a hand-held electronic game. "I like shepherding," he told me in an archaic Hungarian dialect. "But I also like Donkey Kong."

Isolated by geography and politics, Transylvania shelters some of the last remaining pockets of rural European folk cultures.

Romania's bustling capital, Bucharest, charges headlong into the 21st century in a chaotic blur of concrete dust, but among the hills of this northwestern province, one travels back and forth through the centuries, and very slowly on the winding roads.

Here is the Europe of your fairy tales, full of extremes of beauty and ugliness, kindness and brutality, color and grayness. The peasants still wear portions of handmade traditional costumes although cheap imported nylon running pants, promotional T-shirts, and baseball caps are arriving.

No tourist throngs invade the mountain trails, castle ruins, walled medieval cities, and onion-domed Romanian Orthodox Churches that dot the landscape.

It won't remain like this for long. Romania is struggling westward against the legacy of Nicolae Ceausescu's grim dictatorship: grinding poverty and economic malaise. The long-suffering people will gain much, but as elsewhere, much of their heritage will be lost along the way.

A multicultural region

But for now, the resourceful traveler can catch a glimpse of Europe's past mixed in with the crumbling monuments of Ceausescu's horrid utopia (1965-1989) and the new icons of the market economy.

It's also a multicultural region, despite Ceausescu's efforts to force ethnic minorities to assimilate. Romanians are in the majority in the province, but the region's 1.7 million ethnic Hungarians form a majority in several counties and towns. The German community fled in 1990, but Gypsies, Slovaks, Ruthenians, Csangos, and other groups remain.

As elsewhere in the Balkans, the region's multicultural character has been the source of much unrest in recent centuries.

Romanians regard this as the cradle of their nation, born from the intermarriage of Bronze Age Thracians and their Roman occupiers in the early part of this millennium. Rome withdrew from this, their province of Dacia, in the face of the barbarian invasions. Nearly every horse-raiding tribe passed through here over the next few centuries until the Hungarians seized the region as part of their new Empire in the 10th century.

Hungarians ruled on and off until World War II, sometimes under Austrian overrule, other times beholden to the Ottoman sultans. Romania emerged as an independent sovereign state in the last century and was awarded Transylvania after the defeat of Germany and Austria-Hungary. It changed hands back and forth again during World War II, each time accompanied with much bloodshed.

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