At almost 88, wearing homemade clothes and woolly socks, Ileana still looks defiant. She and her husband are typical of those who live at high altitude in the walls of the Bârsa Valley. They built their own house; they grow their own food; and they keep a stock of six cows and eight sheep. The local doctor hikes by once a month, and the nearest bus stop is two hours’ walk away. Then there are the bears.
I almost choke. “Bears? Even here?”
“Da, da!” insists Ileana. The bears come for apples and ants, she says.
“And your livestock?”
That too, she shrugs. Last month, bears killed six lambs in the next village, and two donkeys. You can’t turn your back for a minute.
On the other hand, the scene all around us is improbably pretty: great swoops of green, fringed with hornbeam and ash; barns built from enormous joints of oak; and meadows seething with campanulas and burdock. It looks like an antique version of the Cotswolds, except turned on its end. Up here, even the horses look lopsided.
Bears haven’t been the only disturbance in the region. Almost everyone has tramped through this valley at some stage: Tatars, Goths, Huns and Slavs. And it’s easy to see why. Romania, about the size of the UK, is roughly bisected by the Carpathians, a wall of limestone that stretches for 1,000km. Midway, the mountains change direction and a break appears. For centuries this funnelled invaders in and out, and the first (and sometimes last) thing the new arrivals saw was the Bârsa Valley.
What remains hidden away in Transylvania’s natural redoubts? My wife and I pack our walking boots and set out for a week among the mountains. We begin on the valley floor at the town of Zărneşti. It was established by the Romans after defeating the Dacians (a struggle depicted on Trajan’s Column in Rome). Although they left only Christianity and a new language, the Romans were happy here, and renamed the region Dacia Felix. I can understand their contentment. At an altitude of 750m, the valley is grassy and cool, rimmed with a magnificent brocade of Carpathian purple.
Our guide, Radvan, was born in the valley and knows its secrets. Over the course of our week we cover an area the size of an English county and no two places are the same. One day we’re clambering through pine forests and up to the cathedral-like pinnacles of the Ciucas range; the next, we’re walking the wind-scoured plateau of the Bucegi, peering down on the valley from above the clouds. At night we return to our farmhouse in Zărneşti. Elena, our host, appears with smiles and țuica (firewater), followed by feasts of soup and stew.
The Carpathians exist as two distinct worlds: one orderly and grand, the other shy and bucolic. The division is the result of two great invasions of the 1220s. First came the Saxons, sent to establish an imperial frontier. They settled only the valley floor and it has hardly changed since: farms gathered into towns, the land ploughed in strips, churches with battlements, vast fortresses dangling off the valley’s walls. They also renamed it Burzenland, a name that has stuck.
The other intruders, whose descendants still live in the mountains, were the Vlachs. They avoided the troubled tablelands, preferring remote farms. When we stumble on their hamlets, we enjoy them. Some are hubs of horses and carts; others – like Ileana’s – are only tenuously connected to the outside world.
Guarding sheep has been an esteemed profession here since the Ottoman era of the 17th century, when a vast Turkish army had to be fed. It’s also a hard and lonely life. We often see the shepherds up in the păsune, or high pastures, with their whips and their dogs. Wolves, they tell us, are their biggest problem – Romania has more than 3,000, one of the highest populations in Europe. This is the reason they have to sleep up here, every night, among their sheep. Their shelters are dotted all over the mountain like little polythene coffins. I ask one old herder how long this bucolic existence will last. “My son’s already in Italy,” he shrugs, “making good money. He sells pizzas all night.”
On the days we aren’t walking, we clamber through old Saxon fortresses lower down. I love these places. Best of all is Viscri, an hour’s drive from the Bârsa Valley, which beautifully encapsulates the Saxon age. A long avenue of farms wriggles up the hill through fruit trees and geese to the fortified church. In times of siege, the whole village would have hidden in here, perhaps for months. At times it feels as if little has changed. For 15 lei (£2.70) the local blacksmith sweeps the beer bottles off his anvil and makes us a horseshoe. His wife helps, hammering away in her long coloured skirts.
We spend our last few days in Braşov, formerly Kronstadt. With its guildhouses, Benetton stores, offers of “Masaj erotic” and swaggering baroque architecture, it doesn’t seem to belong in this story. But it is Burzenland at its most extreme. This is where Vlad did his impaling in 1460. Today, it is exquisite: like a miniature version of Prague but slightly crumbled and with a feeling of being undiscovered.
Before leaving, we go looking for bears. This involves a ranger, a gun and a drive through the woods. We don’t need to go far. There are now about 6,300 bears in Romania and they often crop up in Braşov, sometimes pillaging its suburbs. Once we are in our hiding place, four youngsters appear, attracted not by us but by our 10kg of corn. I try to take pictures but, at the sound of the first shutter, they vanish. The bears remind me of Burzenland: utterly remarkable but, for many, hidden from sight.
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De THE FINANCIAL TIMES, 20/09/2014
Photographs: John Gimlette
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