Juler’s post of 30 August gave very useful background on how
the EU farm policy affects the country
Romania has millions of small-holdings which are not considered commercially viable but which support the people who run them. Calling them subsistence farmers implies that they are unable to support themselves in any way, which isn't necessarily the case. A lot of 'subsistence' farms produce food for the families who work on them, and in Romania the coldly bureaucratic notion of a subsistence farm is so alien to the character of a small, working family farm that it's laughable. Romanians use the term gospodarie, which means home, hearth, the centre of the family, a spiritual haven, a place where people grow real food rather than the processed muck that global corporations want everyone to buy, they embody self-reliance and self-sufficiency, and encompass hundreds of years of tradition and history... If the world had more gospodarii, we might have less starvation.
Juler’s blog is part of a larger website which encompasses her other interests
Yesterday’s post raised some delicate issues about how
foreigners experience modern Romanians and Bulgarians. I know this leads into
some ridiculous generalisations – country folk are different from urban; young people
from old; Transylvanians from those in the plains; etc etc. But those visiting other
countries like to get a handle on these things – and will then proceed to make
up their own minds on the basis of the places and people they find themselves
with.
I was interested to find this (fairly recent) list of books in English which wold be useful for visitors to Romania
Alan Ogden’s books I have not, sadly, yet read. But several good books don’t
figure on this list -
- The Pallas Guide to Romania edited by John Villiers is more of a cultural and historical treatment
of the country as a whole than a travel guide. As with all Pallas Guides, it
has superb old black and white graphics and photos – and rates in my collection
of “beautiful books”. Cheap copies were easily found in Bucharest’s second-hand
bookshops earlier in the year.
- Historian Lucian Boia’s Romania can actually be downloaded in full from that link. It’s a very nicely written
history – the only one which is easily available (Keith Hitchins is more
detailed but covers only 1866-1947 and is older)
- Tom Gallagher has written extensively and vigorously about the country’s post-communist politics.
Details of his two books on the subject are in the link – and his Theft of aNation can be googled here
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