Radio România Internațional

Tag: crafts

  • Grandparents’ School

    Grandparents’ School


    Raised in the village of Geoagiu de
    Sus, in Alba County, in a community with respect for traditions, where people
    would gather in the evenings to sew, weave, learn traditional songs and games, Mariana
    Mereu has taken it upon herself today to promote the traditions of the place. The
    association she set up to this end has taken part in tourism fairs, exhibitions
    and conferences. The owner of an impressive ethnographic collection, Mariana
    Mereu has organised . Mariana Mereu turned
    her home into a grandparents’ school, a place where the elderly pass on their
    skills and knowledge:


    Mariana Mereu: Ever since I can remember, I have preserved and taken care of
    everything old, I haven’t thrown away anything we had at home, from the old
    loom used by my grandmother and my mother to old spinning and sewing items. I love
    doing that, it’s what I would like to do all day long, and I would like anyone
    to learn how to do these things. I worked hard and I organised workshops here
    in the village.


    Mariana Mereu was sad to find that
    it is foreigners who appreciate local traditions more than anybody else:


    Mariana Mereu: Last year a family came here from France,
    and I showed them how to work with a loom, a spindle, a distaff, and they even
    went to Maramureş to learn how to make hay. They paid people to teach them to
    use a scythe. This is what it’s come to! Few young people today know how to
    make hay, nowadays we have machines to do it. And maybe they would if they got
    paid, because after all they need to make a living.


    Mariana Mereu speaks passionately
    about growing hemp, spinning and weaving, and says she wants to teach others as
    well, to bring back to life a tradition that is becoming history. She makes
    cloths and traditional costumes out of hemp:


    Mariana Mereu: This is the 7th year I’m growing hemp. I learned how to
    work with hemp from a woman who passed away in the meantime, she had some hemp
    in her attic and this is how I started. It’s hard work, and it’s also difficult
    to get the permit to do this, just when you think everything is in order
    something else comes up. Processing hemp is quite difficult: you have to dry
    the plant tied in small bundles and then retting follows, where you keep the
    hemp under water for a week, to help separate the stem from the fibre. Then you
    take it out, wash it and dry it again, whiten it, then you move on to breaking,
    scrutching, spinning and weaving. The process is not necessarily complicated, but
    it’s time consuming and it’s hard work. However, to see something come out of
    your own hands, to turn a plant into a traditional blouse, it’s a miracle!


    Something Mariana Mereu regrets is
    that, when the girls and women try to sell the products they have learned how
    to make, these items are not properly appreciated:


    Mariana Mereu: We make wool socks with hemp fibre, but if
    you ask 10 euros for a pair, people say it’s too much. But a pair of socks is
    not made in one day! And this is something you can wear around the year, if you
    cut the wool or hemp fibre you can see it’s empty inside, like spaghetti. You don’t
    sweat or get cold wearing them, they keep warm in the winter and cool in the
    summer.


    Since she is passionate about hemp,
    Mariana Mereu has also initiated a festival called the Hemp Day, which reached
    its 4th edition last year. Locals and tourists alike found out more
    about the entire process that begins with a hemp seed and ends with traditional
    cloths and folk costumes. And Mariana Mereu hopes she will get more support for
    her efforts to promote traditions:


    Mariana Mereu: I’m still hoping the authorities will
    finally wake up and pay people to teach and to learn these crafts. I’m told
    that in other countries they do that, old people are paid to teach and the
    young are paid to learn, and this is how people are motivated to keep
    traditions alive-not to be ashamed about being peasants or about being
    Romanians, not to forget their language, their traditional costumes. As the
    saying goes, a nation’s culture should be worn proudly, like one’s Sunday best .
    I encourage everybody to at least try to pick up a spindle and see how it
    works, because if you don’t know how much work goes into making something, you’ll
    never be able to appreciate it properly.


    Mariana Mereu and the members of her
    association are putting their faith in the tourist potential of the village,
    and are working hard to make Geoagiu de Sus a stronger presence on the region’s
    list of tourist attractions. (A.M.P.)

  • Events on the International Romani Day

    Events on the International Romani Day

    The International Romani Day, celebrated on April 8th, was marked in Romania by a string of events, held over several days. The ‘Romano Kher’ National Romani Culture Center and the National Agency for the Roma prepared a marathon of cultural events, hosted by the National Peasant’s Museum in Bucharest. ‘The Roma have had their own international day only since 1971, and that is why they love to celebrate it and to have many people getting to know them.’



    According to the organizers, any ethnic group is best represented by its cultural products, and so is the case with the Roma. For three days, Roma silversmiths, woodcrafters and brass bucket manufacturers demonstrated their traditional skills. Alongside them, contemporary artists introduced the participants to current forms of Romani cultural manifestations. The list of such manifestations was long, as the government also took an active part in organizing events such as painting exhibitions, a dance show and several anti-discrimination marches.



    The events covered a broad range of means of cultural expression, such as traditional crafts, music, theatre, traditional costumes, gastronomy, photo exhibitions and a book stand. The deputy representing the National Minorities group, Daniel Vasile, gave a speech in the plenary session of the Chamber of Deputies, stressing the fact that April 8th must be a symbol of peaceful cohabitation, of tolerance and inter-ethnic dialogue.



    Daniel Vasile: “In the history of the Roma, April 8th is a moment of celebration. However, the real reason for celebration is this people’s power to survive. This is an important opportunity for us all to condemn any form of racism and discrimination against the Roma. I would like to end by telling you who the Roma are a dignified people, a people of survivors.”



    “April 8th will be truly a day of celebration when the economic, social and cultural emancipation of the Roma will bear fruit” said the Romanian head of state, Klaus Iohannis, in a message he conveyed on the occasion. He also condemned racist manifestations and the marginalization of the Roma population. The Romanian Prime Minister Viorica Dancila also conveyed a message reading that Romania, as an EU member, and as the country currently holding the presidency of the Council of the EU, will keep on promoting and protecting the rights and freedoms of all Romanian citizens, irrespective of their ethnicity.


  • Old Crafts, New Crafts

    Old Crafts, New Crafts

    The priorities of the Romanian education seem to be equipping schools with computers, providing better Internet access for students and other aspects related to how quickly students should relate to today’s realities. Nevertheless, a school that still observes the tradition of the old village schools, located in Piscu village, Ilfov county, encourages children and even adults to rediscover various crafts and to get accustomed with the local cultural heritage. Adriana Scripcariu is the coordinator of the Agatonia School and of the Gaspar-Baltasar-Melchior Association. Next she will tell us more about Agatonia School from Piscu village:



    “Agatonia school is a special school, in the sense that it is first of all a primary school, where the normal activities for such a school are carried out, and secondly a special-interest school, where we encourage activities related to the cultural heritage of the area. We are trying to introduce information about the cultural heritage during the regular classes. In the practical skills classes we teach pupils about the old crafts mentioned in the history of the village and also the weaving craft. Over the past years we have issued 2 books, actually textbooks about the local cultural heritage. We believe that each county should have such a book. As I was telling you, we have 2 such books, for the Ilfov and Brasov counties. The books are cross-disciplinary, in the sense that they include chapters on folk literature, on crafts, on various holidays, or religious holidays that are observed along the year. These books are supposed to help children to find out more about the cultural values of their region. Those who come to study in Piscu will learn more about the cultural heritage of the area and will be initiated in various traditional crafts. The school is attended by various groups of children and even groups of adults from various areas of Romania”.



    The purpose of the school is to help the young generations learning there to appreciate the precious cultural heritage left by their forerunners and to carry on these traditions through their work. Adriana Scripariu and her husband, sculptor Virgil Scripariu, did not have any idea at first about what the school they set up would be like:



    “I couldn’t say that we had a very precise plan, we built this project gradually, starting from the fact that we settled in a village that had these strong traditions. I am an art historian and my husband is a sculptor. Together we have discovered the cultural heritage of this village and we wanted to share this information with our children and the children of the village. Seeing how attractive this subject can be if it is presented properly to children, we have opened the school for groups of children from other villages. They came and spent a few hours in our school, where, I hope, they learnt about traditional crafts.”



    While in the morning the school operates just like any normal school for the children in the village, in the afternoon the Agatonia School opens its doors to a large number of children, of various ages, for whom extracurricular and interdisciplinary activities are organized, on various themes related to culture, Romanian heritage and general knowledge in a broad sense. The morning classes and the extracurricular activities are free of charge for the participating children from the rural community in Piscu, a village lacking in a diversified educational offer. Also, the Agatonia School opens regularly, upon demand, for other groups of children and adults who are interested in taking part in the activities proposed, in workshops initiating them in traditional craftsmanship techniques or making them familiar with the local cultural heritage. These groups are supporting, through their contribution, the school’s daily activity. This is the self-financing method proposed by the association. Adriana Scripcaru tells us more about the school’s visitors:



    “The school has had all sorts of visitors, from kindergarten kids to adults representing important institutions who came here in search of teambuilding activities. The pottery workshop is one of our most common activities, as this village has a longstanding pottery tradition. The adults who participate in these workshops rediscover all sorts of ceramic objects and tapestries that bring back childhood memories for many of them. We also have sculpture-related activities. We hold relief sculpture workshops, where participants learn how to make relief sculpted objects, as well as portrait workshops, with participants learning under a sculptor’s guidance how clay portraits are made, after a live model. These are things that people rarely have the chance to do. That is why they come to us. We can organize several workshops within the same visit and combine, for instance, relief sculpture with pottery and tapestry, clay portrait sculpture with pottery or ceramics painting with lino engraving. We can combine these workshops in many ways, depending on our guests’ preferences.”



    In the near future all those who come to Piscu will have the chance to personalize the ceramics tableware they make. In a more extensive project, the Agatonia School plans to promote the idea that cultural heritage must become a subject matter in school, as a means to promote civic awareness and engagement.