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Far from home The Czechs of Romania's Banat Mountains It is well known that many thousands of Czechs live in the United States, Canada, Australia and many other countries besides. But until the 1990s, few people knew that there is also a Czech minority much closer to home: in the Banat Mountains of Romania. Since the end of communism, many of the Romanian Czechs have returned "home" to their original villages around Plzen (Pilsen) and Domazlice, but about 3000 still remain in Romania, following a way of life that disappeared perhaps a century ago in their homeland. I got the chance to go to Romania with some friends from Czech Radio who were driving there to make some recordings and, perhaps more importantly, take part in the annual posviceni (harvest time) celebrations. There are six Czech villages in total, all of them near the Danube in the south-western corner of Romania. We had time to visit just one, so we chose Rovensko: a farming village of some 200 people high on a hilltop, in the thickly forested Banat Mountains. Not only is Rovensko's location spectacular, but it has also preserved its traditions and the Czech language better than the other villages. The Romanian Czechs are interesting for many reasons. For one, their language has changed little since they arrived 170 years ago, and so it preserves many archaic expressions as well as their original dialects from the Plzen and Domazlice regions. And because of their isolation and the simplicity of their lives, they give us a glimpse of what life must have been like for our great-great grandparents. Now you might well ask: what are those Czechs doing down there? Whatever made them choose a hard life in Romania's mountains? By the beginning of the 19th century, the Austro-Hungarian Empire had expanded far to the south, pushing the Turks out of what is now Romania. But there were worries about the security of the empire's border with Serbia, just across the River Danube. And so in 1828 the emperor invited Czechs (who were seen as hard-working and dependable) to settle near the border and establish towns and villages, in order to strengthen the empire's frontiers. In return, the settlers were promised land and houses, some payment, and exemption from military service (which lasted six years in those days, if you were lucky!). Of course, when they arrived there were no fields or houses: only forest and mountains. But they could not return. We left the Czech Republic one Friday evening, and reached the Romanian border by sunrise. The closer we came to the mountains, the more interesting the journey became: cars slowly disappeared, replaced by horse-drawn carts, and the potholed main roads of the plains became narrow dirt roads that wound crazily through the mountains. Hours from any city we saw a giant coal-fired power station, built on a hilltop and surrounded by forest and hills. We learnt that it had been built on the orders of Elena Ceacescu, but when it was almost finished they realized that there was no coal anywhere nearby, nor was there any way to transport it through the mountains. It has never produced electricity, and now it is silently rusting away. Suddenly the road ended and we found ourselves on a hilltop, in the middle of a small village half hidden in the mist. We got out and looked around. The surprise of being surrounded by the strangeness of Romania and then suddenly seeing Czech signs around the village square like Skola (School) and Kulturni dum - Vitame Vas (House of Culture - Welcome) is hard to describe. A little girl skipped past and called out a cheerful "Dobry den!" to us (Czech for "hello"). Even the people who had been to Rovensko before seemed to be in shock. Our hosts were the Prazak family, who were also the only people in the village with a telephone. They greeted us with a bottle of home-made slivovice (plum brandy: a ritual that we experienced many times a day), and sat us down in their kitchen (an improvised room in their courtyard) and fed us. Their hospitality knows almost no limits. Grandma Prazak produced huge amounts of pork, liver, home-made bread, honey, coffee made with milk fresh from the cow, and, of course, more slivovice. "Jen si dejte!" (Have some more!) was the phrase I heard most often in Rovensko. When we finally persuaded them that we couldn't possibly eat any more, they took us to our accommodation: an empty house with earth floors, a wood-fired stove in each room, and huge numbers of mice. Each morning when I opened my bags a mouse jumped out, leaving a bag full of chewed cheese and breadcrumbs. For some reason the mice weren't interested in anyone else's food, even though the others left their food out on the tables. Like all the houses in Rovensko, there was no running water. Every morning some lucky person would have to walk far down the hill to the well, and climb back up to the house carrying two buckets of water on a pole. The young men collect the water on horseback, and show off by charging up the hill with a huge bucket in each hand and not spilling a drop. The modern world hasn't completely passed Rovensko by, however. In 1994 the village got electricity (before that a generator driven by a tractor engine provided a few hours of electricity in the evening), and almost every house has a TV. Apparently, one house even has a bath. Though their lives are very hard - they have to work long and hard every day in their fields, and even in early autumn it was bitterly cold - they could not be described as poor. In fact, they hardly seem to need money, because they grow or make almost everything themselves: meat, milk, cheese, bread, fruit, slivovice (every house has a still), even tea and coffee. All they have to buy is sugar, salt, oil and clothing, which they get in a small shop which also serves as a pub and the village's social centre. As I've already mentioned, our visit coincided with the village's three-day- long harvest celebrations. Two things greatly impressed me about the Czechs of Rovensko. One was their hospitality. Every day we had to refuse a dozen invitations to villagers' houses for breakfast, lunch, dinner, coffee and cake (their cakes were fantastically elaborate, though they were baked in simple wood-fired ovens), or just for a bit of slivovice to warm ourselves up. Sometimes it seemed that every day was just one long meal. The other thing that really impressed me was the way they equalled their ability to work hard with an ability to party. Every morning of the celebrations everyone went to church (where the priest even checked that all the young people were there, by a roll call at the beginning of the service); in the afternoon there was often a second mass; and after that, at around 5 pm, the real celebrations would begin. All the old grannies (dressed in their best headscarves and brightly coloured skirts) sat on one side of the village hall, and the old men (in suits and funny hats) sat on the other. And between them, everyone from the ages of 5 to 65 danced to every single song, however badly played by the Serbian band. At 9 pm there was a break so that they could go home for dinner, and then the fun continued. The 15-year-old daughter of our hosts, Marianka, came home each morning at 7 am; and each night when we went to bed exhausted at around midnight, five-year-old children were still dancing. To see something of the Romanian countryside (and to escape the almost excessive hospitality), we finished our trip with a hike to a series of watermills about three hours walk from Rovensko. Not far from Gernik, the largest of the Czech villages in the Banat, the villagers have built five water-driven flour mills on a waterfall. The scenery was fabulous, and the mills were fascinating examples of pre-industrial technology, but the Romanian settlements we passed through made the greatest impression on us. If we thought the Czechs of Rovensko were still living in the 19th century, then these Romanian villages seemed to come out of the Middle Ages. And each of these villages had a pack of dogs (to guard their animals against wolves): ostensibly pets, but they couldn't have been much more domesticated than the wolves. Each time we approached a village these dogs would come charging out and surround us, barking and howling, fangs bared and saliva running from their horrible mouths. We soon learnt to walk in a tight group with long sticks in our hands to hit any of the dogs that came in too close or tried to bite. The Czech villages of the Banat are a fascinating glimpse of what life must have been like for the forefathers of the Czechs, when they were still farmers working the fields of Bohemia by hand. But it will not last much longer. Understandably, many of the young people of Rovensko are choosing to repatriate to the Czech Republic, where life is much easier and more comfortable. The older generation even encourages them to go, so that their lives will not be as hard as their parents'. While we were there we witnessed one young couple and their child leave for good, and we saw the sadness of their parents and grandparents who will stay. Already most of the people in Rovensko are elderly, and marriages are rare. I cannot blame them for wanting to go,
but somehow I am still sorry that a way of life is finally disappearing
forever, long after it disappeared in the Czech homeland. Originally published in
4U, the magazine of Anglo-Czech
High School, Ceske Budejovice, Czech Republic. |
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About the author Copyright Peter de Graaf 2002 Back to top |
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