Traditional Festival Masks, Traditional Dress, and Age-Old Customs Mark Romanian Festivals With all due respect to ruins, monuments and cathedrals, nothing highlights a trip or provides better photo opportunities than a traditional festival. And few people in today’s world maintain and cherish their age-old customs as do the villagers of Romania. Hardly a week goes by without a religious or secular festival somewhere in this eastern European country. Some of the best, however, take place between Christmas and New Year’s

For the grandest winter spectacle, people head to Romania’s northwestern corner by December 27 when the Winter Festival takes place in the town of Sighetu Marmatiei Masks hang from lamp posts and people (overwhelmingly local) pack the streets. More masks—part demon, part animal, part indescribable— hide the faces of young men who run through the streets as oversized cowbells hanging from their waists clang loudly. Far from idle Halloween fun, masks, here, are an old tradition, symbolizing fertility, the passing and renewal of time and the good and bad aspects of human nature

Accompanied by music and carols, some 40 to 50 groups, representing virtually every village in Maramures, pass along the main street. All are in traditional dress, meaning, for girls and women, stiff white blouses with fancy work and puffy sleeves, white or flowered skirts partially covered by striped woven front and back panels, headscarves, embroidered black woolen vests, thick knee-high socks, a stiff ballet- type shoe called opinci which laces cross fashion over the socks, and white or black wool jackets. Large homemade bags, usually of a black and white checked design, hang by long twisted wool from shoulders. Some walkers reach into these bags to toss rice or grain toward the viewers which represents both prosperity and ridding oneself of bad fortune. Boys and men don similar jackets or a white, long-haired cloak, wide white pants, loose shirts, tooled leather belts, boots and tall hats of curly black or gray wool.

When a group reaches the reviewing stand, they earn a few minutes in the spotlight for a carol, a folk dance or a tune on old instruments such as the trambita, an extremely long horn, or the buhai, a small barrel through which horsehairs are pulled. Signaling the end, a horse-drawn sleigh filled with white-jacketed youths, musicians and of course, Santa Claus passes by the crowd. Throughout the afternoon, folk musicians, singers and dancers perform from a stage set up by city hall.

Another festival staple is the dance of the bears (the two-legged costumed variety). Accompanied by their Gypsy trainer and a youth beating a tambourine-type instrument, the animals crawl through the crowd. Reaching the center, they perform a dance until eventually, the bears fall dead on the ground. After their hearts are taken by the trainer, they return to life, theoretically, a more gentle one. Even today, more bears exist in Romania’s Carpathian Mountains than any other place in Europe and this ancient rite suggests the power of man to tame nature.

All Romanian traditional festivals are wonderful