Hillbilly travels: Maramures, Romania

Thur 14th – Sat 16th Aug

I've heard such wonderful and terrible things about Romania. Most of the reviews have been terrible, including some fellow campervaners in Bulgaria who gladly threw their Romania road map at us yelling, “Keep it! We're never going back there again!”

We must have taken a different route because after the Black Sea, Transylvania and now Maramures, I still love Romania.

Pottery outside Maramures Village

Anyone who has travelled to Romania and missed Maramures... well you must plan to come back soon. Visting this small region is like stepping back into Medieval times where locals still live off the land in small wooden villages. Surrounded by mountains with very few roads, this small region has been literally cut off from the rest of the world. The women still wear traditional costume and nearly every home you pass is made of beautiful dark wood with large decoratively carved gates. As we trundled down the end of the mountain pass, it was immediately obvious that we had reached our destination, and Bevan and I swapped seats so he could snap photos outside the window while I drove towards the main town.

Haystacks in Maramures

The main tourist attraction in Maramures isn't a particular site, but instead just driving through the area. We stopped at the Maramures Village Museum which was basically a huge replica of the surrounding villages completely empty of tourists. We wandered through a deserted village as if we'd stepped into the Wild West ghost town of Eastern Europe and Bevan went a little crazy with the camera. It was incredible.

Wooden church in Maramures Village

But not only is Maramures home to the last Medieval lifestyle in Europe, it's also home to one of my University's most famous professors, Elie Wiesel. Professor Wiesel is a bit of a national hero in these parts, and his home in Sighet has been transformed into a Jewish Heritage Museum. In 1986 he won the Nobel Peace Prize, and he's best known for coining the term “Holocaust”, although he wishes he had never used the word as it overly simplifies the atrocities that occurred during this time.

During World War II, Professor Wiesel and his family were captured by the Nazis and shipped off to Auschwitz, where he lost his mother, father and sister. He and two sisters survived until the Russians liberated the death camp in 1945 but he refused to return to Romania after so much heartache. Instead he moved to Paris where he became a famous journalist covering injustices of human rights until his friends finally encouraged him to write about his experiences. Professor Wiesel became one of the first people to write such a vivid first-hand description of what had happened at Auschwitz. His book Night is an incredibly moving story that details his capture in Romania through to the liberation from the concentration camps. I read it in University , and again on this trip. I will never forget it.

Wiesel at Buchenwald Concentration Camp, second row and seventh from the left.

It was an honour to visit his home, and they've done an incredible job of explaining the dark history of what happened to the Jewish community in this region.

Elie Wiesel's home in Sighet

Our day ended on a slightly less sobering note, as our camp site was located just 2km up the road from the famous “Merry Cemetery”. The name says it all, and I only wish the rest of us could take such a positive outlook towards remembering our loved ones. Instead of dark, morose gravestones, this cemetery has bright blue wooden crosses with carved pictures of an important, funny or memorable moment in the deceased's life. It's all in Romanian so we didn't understand much but the pictures and giggles from the locals pretty much said it all.