Tag: Peasants

The comfort of the peasant houses in Wallachia

Valentin Mandache

There is a stark difference between the comfort of the peasant houses in Wallachia, southern Romania, in the 19th c and the early 20th c, according to their level of wealth, which was tied to their social status as serfs, indentured or free, land owning peasants. That division was reflected in the location of these social sub-classes: the lowlands, the large arable, grain crop regions was the place of the serf and indentured villages, while the highlands, the Subcarpathian hills, was the area of traditionally free peasant communities. This video discusses the marked difference in the comfort of the houses inhabited by those peasant communities of Wallachia, before the breaking up of the large landowning estates, and modernisation of the country.

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My aim, through this series of blog articles, is to inspire appreciation of the historic houses of Romania and Southeast Europe, a virtually undiscovered, but fascinating chapter of world’s architectural history and heritage.

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If you have a historic house project in Romania or other country in Southeast Europe, I would be delighted to advise you in aspects pertaining to its architectural history and ways to preserve as much as possible from its period fabric and aesthetics in the course of restoration or renovation works, or to counsel you with specialist consultancy work related to that project. To discuss your particular plan please see my contact details in the Contact page of this website.

Origins of the money that financed the “Little Paris” architecture of Romania

Valentin Mandache

Peasant woman gathering the corn crop in 1900s, Moldavia region. (early c20th postcard, Valentin Mandache collection)

In the period spanning between the last quarter of c19th, until the start of the Great War, Romania became one the main grain exporters of Europe. That was possible because of the extensive land farming in the vast Lower Danube plains of Wallachia and the fields of Moldavia, and the opening for international commercial traffic of the Danube and the Black Sea waterways. An important proportion of the revenues from those exports was used in financing the construction of a large number of private houses and public edifices. The customary architectural style employed in this nationwide building programme was what I call the “Little Paris” style, very popular with the general public, a part of that period’s Westernisation drive after centuries of Ottoman domination. The style is a picturesque amalgamation of provincially interpreted French c19th historicist architectural orders with a multitude of local Ottoman Balkan decorative elements. Bucharest experienced its first building boom in that period and even acquired the nickname of the “Little Paris of the Balkans”. There were also taking place interesting Art Nouveau and national romantic (Neo-Romanian) architecture experiments on that more prosperous economic background. The peasants of Romania, at that time representing over 80% of the country’s population, and their hard work in the fields were the force at the origins of that extraordinary transformative process. The old postcard above, dating from sometime toward the end of the 1900s, shows a peasant woman from Moldavia gathering the corn crop using a traditional sickle, an ancestral tool not much changed in the region since millennia ago. The photograph presents her confident and happy, an indication that she was farming her family’s plot, received most probably as part of the state’s far sighted land redistribution measures implemented after the terrible peasant revolt against absentee landlords and their agents that took place in 1907, the last medieval type Jacquerie of Europe.

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I endeavor through this daily series of daily articles to inspire appreciation of the historic houses of Romania, a virtually undiscovered, but fascinating chapter of European architectural heritage.

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If you plan acquiring a historic property in Romania or start a renovation project, I would be delighted to advice you in sourcing the property, specialist research, planning permissions, restoration project management, etc. To discuss your particular plan please see my contact details in the Contact page of this weblog.