The Blaus - South America and Europe

28th of September - Sighetu Marmatiei, Maramures - Romania

The train ride from Sighisoara to the Maramures region of Romania is a beautiful ride through rolling hills, old farms with people driving horse pulled wooden carts full of hay, and hay bails dotting the hillside. Maramures is in the North, bordering the Ukraine, and is known for its old world way of living, not much has changed there in the last 200 years. Many people still wear traditional peasant clothing, and agriculture is the way of life for almost everyone living there.

We arrived after a long train ride that literally stopped every 3 minutes in the middle of nowhere to allow someone to hop on or off near a hay bail or small road that might lead to where they live. We went to a hotel that was in our guide book, and entered this enormous Soviet style hotel that had 25 foot ceilings, hallways that went as far as the eye could see, and we were pretty sure it still had holes in the wall where listening devices were once been covertly hidden to monitor any anti-Communist murmurs. The place seemed so out of place in this remote little area, but it was actually a good deal and our room was three times bigger than any place we have stayed to date.

There is a lot of history in the town of Sighetu (it is about 3 miles from the Ukrainian border), as there used to be a large Jewish community there before WWII, there is a museum where the old Communist prison for political prisoners was during the 1950s, and Sigheti is also where Eli Wiesel, the Nobel Laureate and holocaust survivor, who actually coined the term "holocaust" was born. We went to Eli's old house which is now a museum. It was incredible to see the statistics they have tracked of the diminishing Jewish population of the city and region over the past 60 years. In 1939 there were 37,000 Jews in Maramures, today there are 147. The Wiesel museum touted many of his life achievements, and showed pictures of him in Kosovo and Bosnia with Clinton and Madeline Albright. He has dedicated much of his life to making sure that more genocides to not take place in other parts of the world, and it was interesting to see how prominent he was in the Clinton administration, able to push them into support for the Bosnian Muslims and the Kosovar Albanians. He says that indifference is as bad as committing the crimes themselves.

The next day we went to the Communist museum which used to be a very brutal and secret prison for political prisoners after WWII and during the beginning of the Communist regime in Romania. It was very interesting to see the brutality of the Communists towards their own people, and how the Romanians took to the streets and fought to overthrow the government by force not all that long ago. The museum is dubbed one of the three most important museums in Europe by the EU, the other two being Auschwitz and the WWII Museum in Normandy, France. We saw that many of the prisoners were old politicians that ran the country before Communism, many over 60 years old, and most did not survive more than a year in the prison.

Just outside Sighetu is a town called Sapanta where there is an old cemetery that we really wanted to see. We wanted to rent bikes to get there, but there were no bikes to be rented in town, we even tried to bribe people at the bike shop who sold bikes, but they wouldn't have it. So, we did the next best thing, which was to hitchhike. It is actually the only way people really get around there. You just stand on a designated corner, and passing cars stop and you get in, and pay them about $1 for the ride in and out of town, it works well for everyone.

We got our ride to Sapanta, which if you aren't paying very close attention you will drive by it in a second. We wanted to see what they call the "Merry Cemetery." This place is an old cemetery built around a church where all the headstones are made of wood, and painted in bright colors. What is even more incredible than seeing all these beautifully colorful tombstones against the green hills behind them, is that each one has a personalized painting of the life of the person that is buried beneath it. Some people have paintings of their vocation on their decorative headstones, like the farmer with his cows, or the welder with a blow torch mending a fence. Others have family portraits, so you see the deceased with all their kids, or the deceased holding hands with their husband or wife. Others have silly pictures, the deceased drinking and smoking, or gambling. The strangest of these cartoon-like paintings were the ones that illustrated how they died, a person being hit by a car, or a person drowning in a river. Each one also had a little story written about the person, and we were told they are always happy and lively stories, although we could not read them ourselves. This place was really inspirational, we have never seen death treated in such an uplifting way. We spent almost three hours looking at every possible headstone, we found the whole place to be a great idea, and a great tradition that has been carried down for over a hundred years in this little village in the middle of nowhere. We wondered what we would put on our tombstones, and decided that each of us in front of a computer screen would not do.

After we spent so much time in the merry cemetery, we walked up the hills behind the town and found a nice orchard to sit in where we could look out over the valley. Life is so slow there. People walked by, or rode on the back of horse drawn carts, always saying hello and moving at a very tenable pace. We really felt like we had traveled back in time a hundred years or so in Maramures, and no more so than in Sapanta. Every home we passed had a huge pile of maze drying, some pumpkins, hay bails, a horse or two, and little kids and dogs running around the yard. It was also the second day of sunshine we had seen in almost 10 days, so the experience was extra special. Afterwards we went back to the main road and hitched a ride into town, and had our favorite ciorba soup and hot wine to warm up, and then back to the Communist Hotel to sleep in our giant room.

posted by The Blaus @ 4:08 PM