What I Learned About Romania on the Slow Train to Suceava
The journey is often more important than the destination
Destiny is important; but, so is the journey.
After all, we read The Odyssey and not Ithaca.
Destination
In the fall of 2021, Rebecca and I spent four months in Romania. I was teaching American Politics at the University of West in Timișoara and Rebecca was using the Romanian she had learned from two years of intensive study on Duolingo.
Topping our list of Romania destinations was Suceava in the northeast, to behold the painted churches of Bucovina, and to wander the Rarau Mountains.
In the photo below, you see the Church of the Annunciation at Moldovița Monastery. UNESCO placed seven monasteries in northeast Romania on the World Heritage site. You can read about each here.
Historically, Eastern Orthodox was Romania’s dominant religion. The seven Orthodox monasteries were built between 1487 and 1585 by Moldavian princes who were giving thanks for victories over Ottoman Turks.
What made the churches unique were the frescoes painted on the outside as well as the inside. The purpose of the paintings was to teach illiterate people how to live.
One theme in many churches was The Last Judgement. Below you can see a closeup of this scene on the western side of Voroneț Monastery.
You can see the entire fresco here. After death, each of us is judged. The righteous go left, to heaven, the sinful right, to hell.
Rebecca and I loved our day communing with the world beyond. But we needed time in this world. Our guide Florin Floral planned a hike in the Rarau Mountains, part of the Romanian Carpathians.
In the first photo, Florin has just described to Rebecca how to listen to the trees. She was smiling because she talks to the trees outside our houses all the time. Now she could do it in Romanian.
Below, we were both smiling and relaxed because our redoubtable guide had just told us we were not going to scale the Rarau peak looming behind us.
Delaying our last judgment for at least a little while.
We loved the churches and mountain hikes.
But what I most remember was the slow train to Suceava.
Journey
“We’re taking the train from Timișoara to Cluj and then the next day from Cluj to Suceava.”
My barber grimaced in the mirror and said “good luck on the slow train to Suceava.”
That’s what everyone said when we told them about our travel plans. And why we decided to fly home after our four-day sojourn.
Suceava (Soo cha v’ah) is 200 train-track miles (322 kilometers) from Cluj Napoca. Train 1832 was scheduled to depart at 9:34 am and arrive seven hours later. It included five cars of passengers. Car four, our car, was a quarter full, around 15 people.
Our tickets said we had seats 31 & 33 but these were taken by a young woman and her son. Neither wore COVID masks.
Last fall Romania was smack-dab in the middle of its fourth COVID wave. 16,000 tested positive and 500 died every day in this country of 19 million.
Most passengers had masks, some, like mine, draped below their noses. In Romanian and through her nose-covered mask, Rebecca asked a masked passenger about our ticketed seats.
He said we could sit wherever we wanted, “Nici o problema,” (no problem).
We felt the forward lurch at a Swiss-like 9:34.
Train 1832 was scheduled to stop at 19 villages along the way. Most of the stops were for one or two minutes, enough time for a few passengers to get on and off.
At the first stop, five young males, all quickly donning masks, probably farmers, stood in the corridor before departing two stops later.
I took this photo a few minutes before the now maskless men got off.
Roughly half of Romania’s people live in rural areas. 75% of Romania’s poor live outside its cities. Many poor grow their food on small farms of less than 3 acres. You can read about Romania’s thriving cities and rural poverty here.
Below you can see small fields that were being worked with horses.
At every village stop, I noticed one thing. As the train departed, a local official, in a blue suit, would stand erect outside the door of a tiny station building holding a small pole with a circle end piece, green on one side and red on the other. We saw only young men in this position with one exception. Rebecca observed one young woman, with a uniform of black tights and a black skirt.
“Maybe,” she said, “this was a good, stable job for young people in the village.”
About an hour from Cluj, we noticed the masked conductor speaking in Romanian to a young woman across the aisle from us. As he spoke, he looked at us. When he moved on, the woman explained through her mask and in English. Our car had lost its heating and we could change cars if we wanted. We were well bundled up and so we decided to stay in car #4.
Four hours into our train journey, a middle-aged, masked, scruffy-looking man gently pulled my aisle seat tray down and placed a worn, typed note on it. Rebecca quickly translated the Romanian words to “I am deaf and dumb and could use the help of one lei or 10 lei. Thank you for your kindness.”
One lei was roughly a quarter of an American dollar. He was asking for .25 cents or $2.50. I watched him walk up the aisle and sit down. The conductor followed a few minutes later.
We saw this scene many times in Romania, usually in a restaurant. People who need were given time to ask or to sell something.
I slipped a 10 lei note in his envelope. He picked it up and left the train at the next village.
My notes told me that it was somewhere around the village of Frasin, about an hour from Suceava, when I had this insight.
Romanian trains are slow because many Romanians still live in villages like the 19 we passed through from Cluj to Suceava.
Many of these places, like the towns in Iowa, where we live, are dying. They are left behind in our globalized world.
Slow trains are a humane way to minister to this reality.
Train 1832 pulled into Suceava at 4:28 pm.
Five minutes late.
Afterword
Three days after we flew back to Timișoara from Suceava, I became one of the 16,000 Romanians that day who tested positive for COVID.
Mild symptoms, two weeks of quarantine, and Rebecca was spared.
For the rest of our Romanian stay, the mask stayed above my nose.
