Via TransilvanicaCustoms and feasts
A year of observances that holds this community together better than any statistic.
A year of observances that holds this community together better than any statistic.
The Poles of Bukovina are Roman Catholics in a country where nine in ten people are Orthodox. That set the whole year: mass, patronal feast, procession. The greatest day is 15 August, the Assumption, when pilgrimages come to Cacica from all over Romania and from Poland.
The Harvest Festival in Solonețu Nou is its worldly counterpart: the harvest wreath, the display and the concert. Since 2006 every Polish village in Romania gathers for it, along with guests from Ukraine and Poland.
The Czadca Highlanders speak a dialect that sounds old in Poland, because it left there at the beginning of the 19th century and grew up on its own. For a Polish ear this is the most moving thing in the whole journey: a language that stayed put while the rest moved on.
The night nobody here has cancelled
In the evening the village comes out onto the road with fire in its hands. Not for tourists: because that is how it is done here.
Seven in ten people of Polish nationality give Polish as their mother tongue. The author of the study speaks of linguistic revitalisation, not of decline.
Catholicism, in a country where nine in ten inhabitants are Orthodox, was for two hundred years the chief mark of identity.
The figures: Tiberiu-Constantin Ambrosie, „Considerații asupra evoluției istorice și demografice a etnicilor polonezi din partea sudică a Bucovinei”, Yearbook of the National Museum of Bukovina, and the censuses cited there.
Czytaj dalej
Your base
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.