Mihai Vleju's ethnographic collection, „Pădurea, leagăn de civilizație al răzeșilor dorneni”

In one room of the commune's house of culture stands an old peasant room, moved there piece by piece: a whitewashed stove with a hotplate, a bench covered with woven rugs, a dresser painted blue and green, flowered wall rugs, embroidered cloths hung over the icons, and a table with painted chairs. Shirts and folk costumes hang from a rail, and by the window stand a dowry chest and a heavy wardrobe with a mirror and drawers.

In the room next door are the tools: big saws for cutting logs, axes, planes, a carpenter's vice, weaving reeds, wooden pails, small barrels and tubs lined up along the wall, cart wheels, harness, horseshoes and a shelf of lanterns.

The collection is called „Pădurea, leagăn de civilizație al răzeșilor dorneni” — the forest, cradle of the civilisation of the Dorna freeholders — and was put together by Mihai Vleju, a sculptor who taught in the commune for more than 50 years. The name says exactly what you see: here the forest is not scenery but a trade. The house, the vessels, the cart and the clothes all came out of it, and the objects are arranged in the order a household used them, not in the order of a museum.

Who the răzeși were

The răzeși were free peasants, owners of their own land rather than tenants on someone else's estate. At Dorna that mattered: in 1800 a princely charter granted the valley's estate to a ruler's son, and the people here spent decades in court buying it back. The collection is made of the belongings of that world, which kept its own accounts and made its own tools.

What you see

The reconstructed room shows how a freeholder family lived: few objects, each with its purpose, and the textiles made at home, from hand towel to the rug on the wall. The tool room shows how the living was earned: timber cut, carried by cart, stored in pails and tubs, and the winter's weaving done on wooden reeds.

Mihai Vleju is also one of the authors of the monograph of Dorna-Arini. The collection and the book are two ways of writing the same thing.

How to see it

The collection is open on request. It has no posted opening times and, as far as is publicly known, no entrance fee; you arrange it beforehand with the commune's town hall, which is also in Cozănești, and you are shown round. If you turn up off the DN17B without calling ahead, you may find the door shut.

Where it is

In Cozănești, the commune's main village, 6 kilometres from Vatra Dornei, in the house of culture. It is a few minutes from the national road, and the commune's other routes start from here: downstream to the gorges, across the water to Giumalău.