We arrived in the village of Rucăr in the heart of Transilvania after winding through the Carpathian mountains in our rented Dacia for hours. Shades of my childhood Appalachia were everywhere. Mile upon mile of twisting 2-lane blacktop, narrow stream-cut valleys in between steep, ancient slopes covered in familar-but-not deciduous forest, roadside stands selling watermelons and honey.
When we arrived at the rooms we are renting for the month, our host (also the village priest) met us outside the gate and before we even had time to unload our bags, he invited us to a party a couple of miles up a dirt road on a hilltop overlooking the Făgăraș Mountains. That’s not an invitation you say no to, so despite our long drive through the fog of jet lag we gamely tailed our host’s car up the winding path to the hulking skeleton of a pensione still under construction flanked by a massive bonfire under the stars.
The Father fed us bowls of mutton stew made from his own sheep and, of course, a generous pour of the local hooch. Rachiu, he said. They call it țuică on the other side of the mountains.
I’m ashamed to say that my Romanian is limited to things like hello, thank you, and beer please! so I was not able to chat up very many of the partygoers. But the crowd was lively and soon we found some friendly English-speakers from a suburb outside the nearest big city of Brașov. I explained what I was doing there, and was met with the now familiar look of bemusement, like I’d said I was conducting research on how they do their laundry. Making hooch is such a normal part of life that it’s curious why anyone would find it particularly interesting. One of my questions, I said, was why folks are still making their own rachiu when it’s easy to pick up a bottle of liquor at the nearest corner store. Well, they said, it’s free. And its fun! I suppose you don’t need any more of a reason than that.
But of course, there’s more to it, and that’s what I’m here to uncover. Despite my embarrassing inability to communicate, it was clear that the little plastic orange cups were making the men convivial (I didn’t see them in the hands of any women—more on that later), and, like in Appalachia, if there’s a party in the woods, someone is going to bring the moonshine.
Which brings me back to the echoes of Appalachia that I heard driving up and down those mountain roads. Both places look to the eyes of an outsider like an anachronism—places where people still do things in the old ways, as one of my new interlocutors put it. He said, if you have a piece of land, you don’t buy meat, or eggs, or cheese, or fruit, or vegetables, or liquor. It made me think of Barbara Kingsolver’s newest novel wherein Demon Copperhead parses the difference between country poor and city poor. In the city, he says, money and food are one and the same. In the country, not so.
Up home we are land economy people, and city is money economy. … In your cities, money is the whole basis. Have it, or don’t have it, it’s still the one and only way to get what all you need: food, clothes, house, music, fun times. … Up home, it’s different. I mean, yes you want money and a job, but there’s a hundred other things you do for getting by, especially older people and farmers with the crops, tomato gardens and such. Hunting and fishing, plus all the woman things, making quilts and clothes. Whether big or small, you’ve always got the place you’re living on. I’ve known people to raise a beef in the yard behind their rented trailer. … Having some ground to stand on, that’s the whole basis. It’s the bags of summer squash and shelly beans everybody gives you from their gardens, and on from there.
In the village of Rucăr, there is food everywhere. Grapes dripping off of the arbors in every yard, chickens squawking behind every garden wall, patches of corn and tomatoes in every alleyway, sheep, goats, and cattle clogging traffic in the streets. Growing up in Tennessee, we had a grape arbor. We put up corn and tomatoes in the summer. We even had sheep for a time. In our ever-urbanizing world, despite centuries-old predictions of its demise from the likes of Karl Marx, the land economy is still surviving in Carpathia as it is in Appalachia.
That is not to say that its future is guaranteed. The Father told us that most of the houses in Rucăr are owned by folks who live in the nearby town of Făgăraș and only come here for weekends and holidays. Another person told us that in villages like this one, you’re as likely to see the bounty of backyard fruit trees rotting on the ground as you are to see it carted to the local distillery. But when I go home I still see patches of corn and herds of cattle too small to be siphoned into the great international agribusiness machine of Cargill and Tyson. And here, we are getting set to go help the Father harvest plums for the 2023 vintage of Rucăr rachiu. Between home and here, people are still living by their own means, and liquor is an important piece of that economy.
I’m certainly not the first one to see these connections across the Atlantic Ocean. The reason I ended up in Romania in the first place was thanks to the Appalachian-Carpathian International Mountain Conference that I was lucky enough to attend for the first time in 2019. An eclectic and interdisciplinary group of scholars led by Theresa Burriss of Emory and Henry College, this group explores how the art, literature, politics, ecology, and society of these 2 places that are worlds apart resonate across that great distance. We learn from each other and find community in our surprisingly shared histories.
The seed for this project was planted during that 2019 conference when we visited the Petrila coal mine outside the town of Petroșani (once one of the largest underground mines in Europe). In a few weeks I will return to the Jiu Valley and tell that story here. For now, I’ll go back to getting over my jet lag with a little help from the house cure-all, pictured below. More soon…
Great post Emelie!
Another great post! What an amazing and fitting start to the adventure!