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Friday 5 December 2008

Transylvania

Grin and bear it

This tradition of cussedness remains gloriously intact. Behind the ornately carved wooden arches that stand in front of Székely houses, what happens is more or less what always happened. Seeing that we were freezing, our host offered us a shot glass filled with a treacly black liquid which looked like Fernet Branca or the Hungarian Unicum. But it tasted like meths and was, we were told, industrial alcohol flavoured with cumin, just the thing to fortify you before witnessing the last moments of a pig.

The noise made by a stuck pig is just as you would imagine, with a fair amount of thrashing about and gore, but it left the assembled farmers, children, grandmothers and gypsies undisturbed, and terrified only the dog. The puli is an ancient Hungarian sheepdog that looks like a cocker spaniel in a Rastafarian wig, and despite his small size he’s usually fearless and ultra-territorial. But as the pig’s demise went on (usually it takes a good half hour), there was no mistaking the terror gripping the little black puli. After some whimpering, the dog retreated to the farthest part of his kennel, where he became invisible. Perhaps he thought he was for the chop too.

My next outing was to revisit the bears. At last light we walked into the foothills of the Carpathians to a clearing. The ghillie then festooned the trees and ground with apples, chocolate bars and meat before joining us in an enclosed tree-house equipped with a narrow viewing slit. Ten minutes later a Goldilocks-style family of bears sauntered up, two parents and two cubs, looking around as if it was all too good to be true. Twenty years ago, they would have been right. Nicholas Ceausescu, the communist leader of Romania, used to have the finest bear lured to just such a spot in exactly this way — then he’d fly in from Bucharest in a helicopter and shoot them.

I was there to watch, not to kill, but I’m sure I had just as much fun as Ceausescu. The bears made small whooping sounds and one of the cubs, made lightheaded by the windfall, threw an apple at his father’s back. For one moment it seemed as if a food fight would break out, before the daddy bear returned placidly to his haunch of mutton.

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