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.)