The town was great fun to roam around. The following are pictures of Jan’s favorite part: the vents in the steep roofs look like eyes. She tried to find the reason on Google but didn’t get anywhere. She asked about it and was told they are just vents.
The next few pictures are of the wonderful buildings. Notice the first one—the dark roofs are medieval, the reddish roofs are renovated on medieval buildings, and in the distance, the regular city with high rises. The next picture is looking down at a “block” of houses. We know that as in many countries, the style is to build up to the street and have what we would consider their yard within the wall. You can see here how little room there is and how houses were just built every which way.
The last couple of shots of the city are of the wall and tower that protected the city way back when. We didn’t find dates but these buildings and wall are hundreds of years old.
We spent our second day at what is called an open-air cultural museum. It’s the largest in Europe. They went around Romania and dismantled fine examples of houses, workshops and farm buildings typical of people who worked in the common trades of old. Then they reassembled them in the park. It was wonderful to see the styles beginning with log cabins with rock or dirt floors and thatched roofs to what looked like pretty modern houses and workshops. But even the 20th century ones differed between the different states. Most churches were built out of stone. However, there is a region known for their wooden churches to allow them to be dismantled quickly. As we were wandering around, we saw several dressed up people all going the same direction. It turns out one of the wooden churches brought to the park was being used for an Eastern Orthodox service. We were invited in and stayed long enough to understand that the service was in Romanian, mostly sung by the priest with little participation from the congregation, who knelt or bowed occasionally. It was very interesting for us.
The first picture is of an older home with a typically tall pitched roof. The next is a similar building, but insulated with mud or concrete and paint. Next is also something we found typical, at least to this park. Almost all of the work was assisted by hydraulic power. The workshops were either built right next to the river or actually on the river, to make use of the flowing water power. The last picture is of what we assume is one of the first Ferris wheels. The literature called it a swing.
We spent the day in the park and were finishing up our last 45 minutes when this old guy who only spoke Romanian picked us up and started explaining the exhibits. Since we gathered most from just looking, we were uncomfortable and couldn’t figure out how to dump him without being offensive. He was VERY persistent so we followed him to a couple more exhibits. It turns out that he works at the park and really knew his stuff, which he amazingly was able to explain to us. He showed us three or four different types of sunflower oil presses: animal powered, human powered (kind of like a stairmaster) and several that had levers so that the seeds could just be pressed really hard. He also explained how 32 horses walked in a circle, 2 by 2 and ground grain. He insisted he take our picture inside one of the houses and it turned out, not only did he know how to tell us about the oil presses; he also knew how to take good pictures. Below are the pictures of the end of our fun day.
Great post. You two look cold.
ReplyDeleteA couple thoughts I have on some of your unknowns. Most walled cities, particularly of the configuration you describe, were walled for defensive purposes in the Medieval period. Most standing 12th and 13th century burgs with walls intact are that way because they were built late enough in the middle ages that building technology was decent for the long haul, and no one has had a reason to tear the walls down. Older villages frequently have remnants of walls in ruins because they simply weren't built as well.
As far as the roof vents go, one thought is this. There are a number of places in Europe where buildings that were built with timber framing for the roofs used birds as a method of pest control. By making openings large enough to invite birds to seek protection, they developed a symbiosis since the birds would nest in these spaces and eat the bugs that might otherwise attack the structure.
That probably has nothing to do with the eyelid shape of the vents you photographed, but it may explain why they are as large and open as they are. There is a famous library in Portugal where this method was employed to preserve books that would otherwise have been ravaged by paper eating bugs.