Radio România Internațional

Tag: weaving

  • Southern Romania’s tourist assets

    Southern Romania’s tourist assets

    We’re
    heading, today, to southern Romania’s Ialomita County, in the region of
    Wallachia. Here we can find one of Romania’s one-of-a-kind museums: the National
    Museum of Agriculture. Also, we’re about to find out more on the maestro Ionel
    Perlea. Born in Ialomita County, the Romanian musician conducted a great number
    of opera shows worldwide. Ionel Perlea was also the conductor of famed symphony
    orchestras around the world, especially in the United States of America. In
    villages across Ialomita County, we’re sure to discover unique traditions and customs,
    such as the horse-shoeing of eggs or the fretwork for the eaves decoration. Our
    guide today is the manager of the Ionel Perlea Cultural Centre
    and the local correspondent of Radio Romania’s News and Current Affairs Channel,
    Clementina Tudor.     Clementina told us that the whole county Ialomita
    river flows through the entire county, form the east to the west. Almost all assets
    somehow lie in the vicinity of the river that gave the name of the county. Our
    journey begins with the Slobozia municipal city.


    Clementina Tudor:

    In Slobozia, we have something unique at national level, the National
    Museum of Agriculture, which was established by the late museographer Răzvan
    Ciucă and which brings together a tremendous legacy of the Romanian people. It
    is the Romanian peasant’s cultural legacy, equally traditional and ancestral,
    irrespective of the region they were born and grew up in. Also nearby Slobozia municipal
    city, we have the resort of Amara, famous before 1989. Amara balneal spa was
    and still is a noted landmark in the Ialomita County’s tourism and we ‘re happy
    that, after such a downfall the whole country had been going through, the resort
    of Amara still lives up to its former status, nay, he resort is thriving. A
    great many tourists opt for coming over to follow a treatment scheme, but also
    to relax in the resort of Amara. Apart from the wonderful lake, apart from the natural
    mud baths, they can relax taking a stroll around a park with hundreds of nut
    trees, which was refurbished a couple of years ago, with European funding.
    Actually, investments have been made in the region, some of them public, others
    private, and in Amara we also have a SPA complex, which is also open during
    winter.


    We’re now heading towards the county’s rural area. All villages
    have retained something of the Baragan Plainfield tradition. However, in Ialomita
    County there are several villages where the peasant house’s traditional architecture
    has been preserved to this day. With details on that, here
    is the manager of the Ionel Perlea Cultural Centre and the local correspondent of
    Radio Romania’s News and Current Affairs Channel, Clementina Tudor.




    Specifically, I’m speaking about the
    Jilavele commune, in the west, where there also is an authentic peasant house,
    yet such a house can also be found in the Centre of the county, in Grindu,
    Grindasi. In any of Ialomita County’s localities we can see something of the ancestors’
    cultural heritage. Actually, we, employed by the Cultural Centre, we have
    edited al album of the florist’s in Baragan, and the florist’s in Baragan are
    those samples of fretwork that adorned our grandparents’ porched galleries.
    They can still be seen and admired. I am very happy there are still heirs who
    understood to preserve that kind of specificity and not all of them modernize
    the houses they inherited from their grandparents. In Jilavele, we have Mr. Simion,
    who horse-shoes Easter eggs in the most beautiful possible way. And, at the
    farther end of the county, in the village of Luciu, which is part of the Gura
    Ialomitei commune, we have a lady, Mrs. Ana Banu, who does intricate stitch patterns,
    but who also manufactures peasant’s coarse leather footwear, opinci, in
    Romanian. We do not have that many traditional craftsmen, but they are somehow personalized.
    Not to mentioned the fact that all women on the Ialomita villages can knit all
    sorts of things and weaving is still performed, on the traditional loom. We also
    have blacksmiths that can be seen at work. For
    instance, Mister Toma, the blacksmith in the commune of Traian, is very happy welcoming
    his guests. He works round the clock even before the Epiphany Day, a traditional
    feast held in high esteem in Ialomita and in Baragan, when clients cue up at
    his gates, who shoe their horses before Epiphany Day.


    There are a great many events taking place in Ialomita
    County, and their timeline can begin even with the Epiphany Day, says the
    manager of the Ionel Perlea Cultural Centre and the local correspondent of Radio
    Romania’s News and Current Affairs Channel, Clementina Tudor. The Epiphany Day,
    actually, is a feast held in high esteem in all the villages of Ialomita
    County. All householders take out their horses and wagons, adorn them and, with
    them, they go to church. Then they have speed or endurance carriage-driving competitions
    in the plainfield. There is no local community where such competition is not
    held. In the end, since the Epiphany Day is observed on January the sixth, when
    temperature readings are very low, everything ends with a glass of mulled plum
    brandy or mulled wine and a great party.


    Clementina Tudor:


    For 30 years, in the month of May, we
    have the Ionel Perlea Festival and Contest. We’ve now had the 32nd
    edition. It is a festival that initially began with a lieder contest and which,
    in time, gained its international scope, this year bringing together more than
    50 competitors, Romanian, but mostly foreign, and which is held with the Ionel
    Perlea Orchestra. The contest ends with a mandatory visit of all participants
    to the Ionel Perlea Memorial House in Ograda. Given
    that we’re speaking for our listeners abroad, Ionel Perlea is the one who put Ialomița
    and Romania on the world’s great lyrical map, and what I have in mind saying
    that are Europe’s great stages, and especially the Scala di Milano. Here, the conductor
    Ionel Perlea succeeded the great Arturo Toscanini, and Arturo Toscanini gave
    him his baton, deeming him as a worthy successor. Also, Ionel Perlea continued his
    world-level blazing trail from the Scala di Milano to the Metropolitan Opera in
    New York, there where, just like Arturo Toscanini, he also had an academic
    career as a professor. So we can somehow link Ionel Perlea’s personality to
    this contest, in a bid to promote Ialomita County as well.


    There are two ongoing cultural programs carried by the
    Ialomita County Council. With details on that, here is the manager of the Ionel Perlea
    Cultural Centre and the local correspondent of Radio Romania’s News and Current
    Affairs Channel, Clementina Tudor.


    The Bolomey Manor House has been
    refurbished with non-reimbursable funds and large-scale public events are
    intended to be organized on the premises, such as the Electric Castle Festival, which, in turn,
    is also staged around a manor house. The second
    project is a route along Ialomita river or along the Ialomita river banks. The route
    should be taken by boat by kayak, or by bike, or on foot, with several stopovers being organized here and there, where the tourists can have a rest and
    grab a bite. One such stopover point could by the Manasia manor house, which is
    also a tourist asset and which was refurbished with private funding. (EN)


  • 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.)