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In 2012, I travelled to Transylvania to document what is effectively the last remaining bucolic landscape of Europe. England, for example, has lost most of its hay meadows because of large-scale agriculture, but in Romania this kind of small-scale sustainable way of farming persists. It survived the Ceaușescu regime. It survived the EU. Today, however, it is a vanishing way of life as young people increasingly choose to migrate to western Europe in search of work and faster money.
I spent three weeks in Maramureş in the northern Carpathian mountains, exploring life in six tiny hamlets, each with no more than 500 inhabitants. It was August, the height of the haymaking season. Families worked in the fields from dawn to dusk. These women were from a village called Breb. I saw their haystacks from the road as my translator and I drove past. I shouted “stop!” and ran out of the car towards them. They smiled at me, but we didn’t talk, they just carried on with what they were doing. It was late in the day, and they were getting ready to go home. The women wear trousers to make hay because the wind blows their skirts up. Here, they were putting their headscarves and their traditional skirts back on. Then they gathered their baskets, in which they’d brought their lunch, and walked back to the village. I followed. The light was very soft, and the shadows long.
These farmers pretty much work until they die. Their farms are too small to get EU subsidies and too big to get government subsidies, so they’re stuck in this in-between place, with no option but to keep working on their land. Cutting hay and stacking it is physically demanding, I tried doing it myself and failed miserably. And yet I saw some really elderly people – in their late 60s and 70s – working in the fields. They were so graceful. They are the last peasants, the last of their kind.
People in the village recognise each others’ haystacks by shape (tall and thin, short and fat, conical, pyramidal or rounded) and by how they’re placed (stacked tightly or at regular intervals). So much thought goes into how they’re built and placed. It’s an art and a science. A good haystack – one that is dry inside – can feed their animals through the winter for up to five years.
Until I went to Maramureş, I had never seen people spend so much time cooking such good food for their pigs. They fatten them up and butcher them for Christmas. One of the grandmothers there told me, “We live in this harmonious cycle, we feed our animals and our animals are feeding us.” Besides pigs, there were dairy cows, some goats, and lots of sheep.
I met one shepherd who was lamenting the fact that he didn’t have a wife and a family. I asked him why not. And he said, “Well, you know, I was always busy, grazing sheep. My relationships didn’t work out.” But then he thought for a moment and looked back at me and said, “But you know, if today people ask me ‘Who would you choose, women or sheep?’, I’d still choose sheep!”
In rural Romania, back in the day, you could pay for a house in haystacks. And still today, the whole culture revolves around haymaking. There is such respect for the tall-grass meadows: you’re not supposed to walk across one. And despite the fact that many young people are now leaving, the young women all know how to embroider, and every man knows how to build a house from scratch. They still dress up for church on Sundays, they put on their traditional clothes, they have their [religious] holidays.
I got to observe very intimate moments – a woman crying over her husband’s coffin, a newborn child being christened, a wedding celebration. We’d be in tiny ancient churches that seat only 20 people, where each step you take makes the whole place creak, but people didn’t pay attention to me. They accepted me.
During my first visit in August, I saw pictures of Orthodox funerals and said how much I would like to witness something like that. Not that I wished for someone to die, but because it was all so much a part of this culture I was trying to understand. And my translator, in this thick Romanian accent, said, “Don’t worry. Come back in the fall. Everybody dies in the fall.” So I went back and sure enough, I went to about six funerals.
One day, in a moment that became for me a metaphor for this whole peaceful existence, I was walking down the street and I met a woman called Maria. (There were a lot of Marias.)
Through the translator, I said, “Hello Maria, how are you? What are you doing today?”
“Nothing,” she replied. “Just waiting for winter.”
• Rena Effendi is shortlisted for the 2019 Prix Pictet, announced on 13 November. Prix Pictet 2019: Hope is at the V&A, London, 14 November – 8 December.
Rena Effendi’s CV
Born: Baku, Azerbaijan, 1977.
Training: Linguistics, Azerbaijan State University of Languages.
Influences: Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Sarah Moon, Mary Ellen Mark, Stanley Kubrick, Jim Jarmusch, Gabriel García Márquez, Arundhati Roy, Mikhail Bulgakov.
High point: “In 2012, when I became the laureate of the Prince Claus Fund award for culture and development and began working for National Geographic magazine.”
Low point: “In 2016 when I was robbed of all my savings and earnings of the past 20 years in a corrupt banking scheme in Azerbaijan.”
Top tip: “Study and draw inspiration from other art forms, go beyond photography. Be honest, be patient.”
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