Transylvanian horseman

Back to work

It's back to work here after the holidays. Time has flown by, January is upon us and, with it, no shortage of work.

A large load of firewood arrived yesterday. Therein hangs a tale. The firewood is a response to our taking a neighbour's wife to hospital just before Christmas. The ambulance has a 60km (40 mile) journey to get here. Her condition appeared sufficiently bad to warrant immediate transport by car, so we took her. This was in fact the right decision, since immediately after arrival at hospital she gave birth two months prematurely.

The neighbour and his son brought his loaded cart right in between my stable and woodpile for easy unloading. If hauling large chunks of wood is ever easy. Luckily some of the pieces are dry and will burn readily.

After the holiday idleness, a great deal of yard cleaning is required. Cornel, Nelu and Oprea are busy removing several cart loads of manure that is frozen like a mass of cobblestones stuck together. Fortunately the weather was cold enough that the droppings froze quickly as lumps, rather than forming a gooey strata that freezes like concrete. They are light, like pumice, and quite clean to handle: a rare winter blessing.

Later this week, we shall have to equip two pairs of horses with studded ice shoes, since we have more logging ahead of us. The trees allocated for cutting are poised on a steep slope high up above the village, in a location accessible only to horses.

The horses continue to look forward to their afternoon feed. For reasons best known to themselves, the horses requiring corn came down via a circuitous path, culminating in a downhill dash led (not surprisingly) by that eccentric mare, Olga.

I do wonder sometimes just what certain horses are thinking. The ones that take an indirect route when the direct route is perfectly clear and familiar. Something must motivate them to do this. Olga has always behaved in this way. When we bring the herd back from pasture loose together, Olga is the one who will dart off into a yard, even if there is nothing to eat there. A gelding would not behave like this, unless he spotted food. Mares can be strange.

Christmas visitors

The Belsugari are regular visitors on Christmas Night (which is 24th December here) or the following morning. Starting in the night and continuing until around mid-day, this ad-hoc troupe of masqued dancers and musicians makes its way through the village, performing at any house where they are admitted. Belsugari are common throughout rural Romania, and are a remaining vestige of ancient tradition that quite possibly go back to the Dacians who lived here in pre-Roman times.

The all-male troupe includes a leader, musicians, men with blackened faces and tattered yet gaudy costumes representing male and female gypsies, men disguised as peasant women, men with goat masks, and a man wearing furs representing a bear. It is a peculiar, energetic, raucous spectacle that embraces and legitimises - albeit temporarily - travel across social group, gender and species.

The leader and musicians enter a house when invited, followed at intervals by the "gypsies", the "bear", and the "goats". Each have their own dance, that of the "goats" being especially vigorous and involving much stamping of feet and banging of sticks on the floor. The "bear" enters on all fours and scuffles around before dancing with the "gypsies". There are places where these rituals are more developed, with additional characters. In more elaborate troupes women sometimes appear too, one being dressed as a bride (apparently this is not a cross-dressing roll) and accompanied by a young man.

After performing, the belsugari are refreshed with cakes, coffee and plum brandy, and given a payment too. For these young men, it has been a long but rewarding night. Very likely, the Belsugari will appear for New Year too, in this traditional rural place where old ties to the soil and the forest, concerns about exotic invaders, wild animals, and fertility, remain alive only just beneath the surface.

Why railway crossings have flashing red lights

This photo shows what happened last night when a neighbour (who has the good fortune still to be alive, though bruised and shaken) drove across the railway line without heeding the flashing red lights. He was sober but tired and, we may assume, most inattentive.

At this point, trains run no faster than 50mph (80km/hr). The locomotives all have large, powerful headlights. My neighbour was very careless indeed.

In addition to having a wrecked car to replace, the railway company has sent him a bill for 30,000 euro ($50,000) for damage to the locomotive. Ouch!

Wedding carriage

Yesterday afternoon we hired out a carriage for a wedding in the village. A neighbour's daughter was marrying a New Zealander whom she had met whilst working abroad. We used our old two-horse carriage, which had been built for the Romanian Army during the 1980's when fuel was in very short supply. It has a welded steel body, and new welded steel spoked wheels that I fitted to replace the four jeep wheels with which the carriage was fitted when I bought it.

Unusually for Romania, I fitted the carriage with a hinged pole and adapted American-style harness. The pole carries a cross-tree at the front. Since the harness is breastcollar-type, I added neck straps to hold up the cross-tree, which would otherwise be fixed to the bottoms of the collars. The pole is lightweight tubular steel, and each horse is carrying only a few kilogrammes.

The motivation for this arrangement was to avoid the whipping of the pole that can occur on rough roads at speeds above a walk. In the past, this carriage had a heavy wooden fixed pole which stayed in place, however its weight began to bend the  carriage turntable. Farm carts, being slower moving, tend not to have the same problems with pole whip.

I find that this composite form of harness works well, and the horses have adapted without difficulty to having a braking strap that runs back from each end of the cross-tree, between the front legs, and back to a ring under the belly. The carriage has hydraulic disc breaks on the back wheels too, and I like to use these to perform most of the braking.

We used the two big greys, Gelu and Kaluga, because "white horses" are preferred for weddings. We've another wedding carriage trip in two weeks time. For this we will use Gelu and Kaluga, plus Pintea (another grey) ridden by Nelu or Vasile in folk costume. That should be quite a spectacle. (But not as great as the spectacle that Danielle and I will make when it is our turn to get married.)

Paul the Crazy

This morning we divided our labour. Nelu and Oprea set off with two horses to bring hay, whilst Cornel and Vasile stayed here to work, cleaning the stables and yard. After a while, Nelu and Oprea brought the first part of the hay, which they had divided into two loads. Somewhat later, from my window I spotted them returning, each leading a horse. In such circumstances it’s always worth going out and finding what has happened. Going after the second load, they had overturned their cart on the field, which can be a risk with a heavily loaded cart on a steep slope. Plus, the hay is light this year, with the result that carts load higher for a given weight of hay. They announced their intention of recovering the hay with a sledge, which has a lower centre of gravity, then paused for lunch.

By the time they had eaten, they had remembered that the ice on the road had thawed, so they led the two horses back, unloaded the cart, righted it, and reloaded the hay. It cannot have been too difficult because they were soon back. We weighed the hay, and took the cart up onto the higher field beyond the stream, where the north-facing slopes are still frozen. The horses won’t make the ground muddy there.

Afterwards, we got to talking. I told of how, when I visited the Blue Bar the night before, the private meeting room there was crowded with the local police. At least one constable was unsteady on his feet. This surprised no-one, knowing the general state of rural law enforcement, however I was told that they were meeting to hear about the exploits of two of their number. It was the case of Paul the Crazy.

Pavel Nebunul, to give him his local name, had an appropriate epithet. Villagers all knew of him, silly old man or worse depending one one’s point of view. There was much hearsay to the case. He had, or hadn’t, done some mischief to a female relative. (Since she appeared unscathed on the TV news, it can’t have been anything too bad.) He had, or hadn’t, brandished an axe at two local policemen. They had, or hadn’t, disarmed him using force. (Perhaps, if one has to disarm a mad axeman, force may be justified.) All in all, it was a bizarre local tale that will survive, retold in embellished versions, for years to come. Just see how much the tale became embroidered throughout one day.