Maramureș - Traditional Villages of Northern Romania

General

This area covers all types of tourism: if you prefer to go hiking, or practice some extreme sport, or experience cultural and religious tourism, here you have it all. The beautiful mountain sights and the deep valleys will leave you breathless. But culture and history are the two things that define this territory. There are many historical places to visit, museums and memorial houses.

Maramures is the land of simplicity. You can still see in the villages, people working the field and not only, with their own hands, without using specialized tools or machines, which are unknown to them. Traditions are kept here like nowhere else, and people are wearing hand made traditional costumes during important holidays. The one thing that characterizes the people from Maramures, is there hospitality and kindness. Even if you are a stranger to them, they will welcome you in their home, and treat you like a guest should be treated. You will have the chance to experience rural life like it once was: drink fresh milk right from the source, an omelet made out of freshly layed eggs with vegetables that have just been picked from their own garden. But the first thing that you will be given, is a taste of the local drink: homemade plum brandy, which is famous all over the country. It is a very common thing in these villages for horse carts to share the roads with plenty of cars. It seems most everyone has a satellite dish and cell phone. New homes are being constructed, as locals find work in Western Europe, and return to invest what they earn in new homes or guesthouses.

The villages in Maramures should not be allowed to be touched by the modern, they should remain intact and people should try to make this happen. Where else can you see on every Sunday women going to church dressed with their traditional costumes, like it's a holiday?

This is life in Maramures, a hidden corner of Northern Transylvania known for its abundance of rural villages filled with medieval-style wooden churches and log houses decorated with hand-carved gates.