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Copyright Tea Together © 2008
Searching Transylvania for a stake in tradition
Our Village Virtuosos range is collected from small producers who grow, crop and make on the small farms of the world, wherever they may be. But first we had to make our own journeys of discovery. It was with this purpose we travelled east to sleuth out the right kind of makers of Transylvania.
We followed the edge of the Carpathians as they run down the spine of Transylvania into Mures country. Moments before we crossed from Hungary into Romania, we saw a village graveyard which uses wood to mark the graves. There is no visible rupture between the eighteenth century reminders and those of last week.
The Romania we saw is a land where horse and cart share the roads with juggernauts, and where men and women work their fields by hand, where every village house has its orchard, its vegetable patch and its trellis of vines to shade the veranda, and where the use of wood as a building material is often inspired. Carved doors, barns, fences, soaring roofs and steeples made of wooden shingles, elaborate and loving patterning to transform the everyday into something full of grace and spirit – and all this richness and colour often set in meadows thick with wild flowers and ringing with birdsong.
Amid this we were delighted to find Daniel Nagy and Csilla Tatar.
We followed the edge of the Carpathians as they run down the spine of Transylvania into Mures country. Moments before we crossed from Hungary into Romania, we saw a village graveyard which uses wood to mark the graves. There is no visible rupture between the eighteenth century reminders and those of last week.
The Romania we saw is a land where horse and cart share the roads with juggernauts, and where men and women work their fields by hand, where every village house has its orchard, its vegetable patch and its trellis of vines to shade the veranda, and where the use of wood as a building material is often inspired. Carved doors, barns, fences, soaring roofs and steeples made of wooden shingles, elaborate and loving patterning to transform the everyday into something full of grace and spirit – and all this richness and colour often set in meadows thick with wild flowers and ringing with birdsong.
Amid this we were delighted to find Daniel Nagy and Csilla Tatar.
