The old ways still linger in Romania’s Southern Carpathian mountains, where bears and wolves wander the forests and slow-paced villages stud the hills, according to National Geographic.
Spring has reached central Romania. The little dwelling is half-hidden by pear blossom and lilac trees. A well can be seen in the garden, sunlight patches the long grass and the wolf-prowled hills beyond. The house has a neat timber balcony and a frieze of blue flowers at the eaves, but the plasterwork is crumbling. For over seven decades, this was the home of anti-communist activist Elisabeta Rizea, who died in 2003, aged 91. It now stands empty, looking out across the elder woods and hay meadows.
When a Soviet-installed government took over after the Second World War, Rizea, like many locals, gravitated to the resistance movement. She helped partisan fighters in the surrounding mountains, a role that twice saw her imprisoned. Despite being tortured, she remained true to her ideals, earning a visit to her hillside home from the long-exiled Romanian monarch, King Michael I, after communist rule was ended by an uprising in 1989. During the visit, Rizea told reporters, “They took everything from us … Still, what they could not take was our soul.”
In many ways, Rizea’s values and beliefs reflect the soul of the region. Her cottage is found in Nucsoara, a remote village that still moves to older, quieter rhythms. The capital city, Bucharest, is a three-hour drive south east, but may as well be light years away. The slopes around the village swell out in sage-green folds and its houses come with cherry trees, log piles and hand-tied grapevines. Every so often, a pothole-dodging car or horse-drawn cart winds along the road, stirring dogs from their slumber. Women in headscarves tend the onion beds, the occasional curl of woodsmoke drifts from a chimney. Barely a minute passes without the call of a cuckoo.
The softly spoken local mayor, Ion Cojocaru, smiles as he stares across the valley. “When my friends and I were boys, these hills were our playground,” he says. We’re talking outside Nucsoara’s Orthodox church, its two pale domes luminous in the afternoon light. Two years ago, after his wife died suddenly, Ion found solace in daily woodland walks. On one of these strolls, an idea struck him, and a project was born. Ion went on to select 2,544 individual beech trees — one for every metre of height of nearby Moldoveanu, Romania’s highest mountain — to be adopted by visitors, whose details and, should they wish, life stories are embedded in QR codes fixed to the trunks. The trees (mossy beauties all) are between 50 and 350 years old. Ion hopes the money raised will fund new local hiking trails.
This sense of pride in the land, and through it a way of giving travellers reasons to come calling, is encountered a lot in the Southern Carpathians. I’m here as part of a week-long stay, hopping between the historical regions of Wallachia and Transylvania. The landscapes are savagely handsome, with snow-capped summits rising above rumpled highlands. On arrival at the city of Brasov, I’m greeted by thick drizzle before setting off by road past the rain-lashed outline of Bran Castle, famous as the possible inspiration for Dracula’s castle. Within an hour, I’m swallowed up in a rustic fantasy of haylofts, butterflies and sunshine.
Yet, I’m here to do more than coo at the mountains. This part of Romania is the site of a rewilding project that it’s hoped will eventually result in Europe’s largest forest national park. Logging and overhunting have been scourges here, but things are changing. It has more large carnivores — bears, wolves and lynx — than anywhere else in the continent. Since 2009, the nonprofit organisation Foundation Conservation Carpathia (FCC) has been working to ensure the peaks, woods and wildlife become not just safe from further degradation but restored and defended.
To call the project ambitious would be an understatement. So far, the FCC has placed around 105sq miles of land under protection, with hunting banned in a further 200sq miles.
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