Kobiety w haftowanych strojach ludowych na święcie, przed drewnianą chatą

Przewodnik

Polish Bukovina

Five villages, one salt mine and two hundred years few people know about. A guide written on the spot.

You drive up the valley, between meadows still cut with a scythe, and suddenly a white and red flag hangs on a fence. Then another, on the next house. In the shop, two women argue amiably about the price of cheese, and not in Romanian.

In Pleșa nearly everyone speaks Polish. In Solonețu Nou, nine in ten. Not because anyone decreed it, but because the language never had a reason to stop: it is spoken in the kitchen, in church and at funerals, which are the three places where a language actually lives.

It began prosaically. In 1792, miners from Bochnia came to cut salt at Cacica, because they knew salt better than anyone. Forty years later came Highlanders from the Czadca region, after land and forest. Salt and timber, not some grand idea, brought here a community that is still here.

Then came everything that might have erased that memory: the end of the empire, a new border, two wars, a village burned in a single night, the repatriation trains. And yet the language stayed, and the houses still go up with the same gates.

The finest thing is how all this looks from close up. The Polish villages sit between the Romanian ones, the orchards blossom in the same week, and at the patronal feast they sing in two languages without anyone finding it strange.

This guide walks those places unhurriedly, one by one: what happened here, who lives here today, what to eat, when it is worth coming and how it all fits into a day.

Dwie polskie flagi na drewnianym słupie, na tle sosnowego lasu

Two hundred years later

These flags hang in a Bukovina village, a thousand kilometres from Warsaw, on a house whose owners have never lived in Poland.

Four places on the map

Each is a little over an hour from our gate. The rest of the guide is for reading; these four are for visiting.

The chapters of the guide

Two hundred years in Bukovina From the miners of Bochnia to the 2021 census: a short history, without legends. Five villages, one map Where they are exactly, how many people live in them and what sets them apart. The Polish Houses The institution that came through two wars and one communism. What they eat here A highland kitchen that has lived two hundred years beside a Romanian one. Customs and feasts A year of observances that holds this community together better than any statistic. When to come Three dates a year worth setting the calendar by. The cultural route Five stops, in the order that makes sense on the map rather than in a table of contents. What exactly there is to see A list of places, each of which takes less than an hour. One day, honestly A plan that can actually be done, not one that looks good on paper.

Your base

Sleep in the middle of the map.

Câmpulung Moldovenesc is an hour from the Polish villages and an hour from the painted monasteries. The whole house, seven beds, parking in the yard.

799 lei a night on Booking 599 lei / night See availability