The lure of the gypsies

William Blacker ‘set off to explore the newly “liberated” countries of Central Europe immediately after Christmas 1989’. From Berlin he went to Prague, where he wondered, ‘Should I continue eastwards, even as far as Romania? In the end it was old architecture which persuaded me. I had heard of the famous painted monasteries of northern Moldavia.’ Entranced by ‘the Eastern Europe of wooden peasant cottages on the edge of forests inhabited by wolves and bears, of snow and sledges and sheepskin coats, and of country people in embroidered smocks and headscarves,’ he returned the following year and walked among the Saxon villages. But it was not until 1996, fed up with life in London, that he decided to ‘go there for at least a year, to see the whole cycle of the seasons, and to observe every detail of the old way of life.’

In the village of Breb, Blacker was directed to the house of Mihai and Maria, an elderly couple who, having no children of their own, ‘might have room for me to stay’. He stayed for several years, on and off. While his gentle, self-deprecating tone reveals that he never presumes himself to be anything but a foreigner in their midst, his love for the people and the environment is so evident that one can see why he was accepted. Wishing to join the villagers scything the meadow, he goes to market, where someone helps him choose a scythe blade. Back in the village, a man measures him, ‘noting especially the distance between the ground and the tip of my chin’, and then makes a handle for him from ‘curved pieces of plum wood … selected and cut from the tree the year before.’ There are marvellous descriptions of going courting with ‘the lads’, which Mihai urges him to do, of going to church and to the fair on a hillside with the snow-capped Carpathians in the distance.