The Art of the Romanian Haystack
kuriositas.com
kuriositas.com
If you push the needle in too far then you would be unlikely to find it again without taking the whole thing apart.
Hence the English phrase like looking for a needle in a haystack to mean searching for something that is impossible to find. It’s just that in the original phrase the needle is a four foot long iron rod rather than a two inch steel pin.
That's not that (particularily) English, you know? As many other expressions that crossed cultures at some point, which (in some cases like this it would) most likely have taken place even before ethnogenesis of what's currently considered English, "the needle in the haystack" has a much broader spread.
Acul din vagonul cu fân.
Literal translation: The needle in the hay wagon.
Acul din carul cu fân
Literal translation: The needle in the hay cart
“To look for a needle in a bottle of hay”, after the french botte for ‘bundle’.
On the odd use of bottle: [Puck, to Titania] I could munch your good dry oats, methinks I have a great desire to a bottle of hay: good hay, sweet hay, hath no fellow.
Interestingly, haywire is derived from a frenzied behaviour likened to the chaotic uncoiling of a feel of hay baling wire.
In German it's pretty much just the literal translation of the English phrase and its variations: "(Wie) die Nadel im Heuhaufen suchen" - (like) looking for the needle in the haystack, etc.
"Como buscar/hallar una aguja en un pajar" (like looking for/finding a needle in a haystack) means taking/achieving a nearly impossible task.
https://www.expressio.fr/expressions/chercher-une-aiguille-d...
(also provides equivalent expressions in several other languages).
cercare un ago in un pagliaio
literally
looking for a needle in a haystack
or sometimes:
trovare l'ago in un pagliaio
literally
finding the needle in the haystack
the meaning is slightly different, the first is more about describing something vane, the latter is more about describing something very, very difficult or nearly impossible but that by luck or some other reason actually happened.
For the record, I believe there is very little typically Romanian in that way of making haystacks, many, many years ago (before the machines came) haystacks in Italy were made with the same techniques, maybe they actually date back to theRomans.
Although we are more famous for the kozolec invention which is supposed to be fully unique.
Another thing she would store for the winter were whole corn plant stems, arranged in a teepee-like structure around a tree trunk. The empty space between the trunk and the corn made a favorite hiding place for both us the children, as well as her chickens.
Nowadays, whenever I hear the whetstone touching a scythe in some remote region, my eyes well up.
http://www.polskiekrajobrazy.pl/images/stories/big/1567puszc...
But nowadays people mostly use this: https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2017/01/02/20/25/haystack-1947...
That's what we call them in Romanian too: "stog" (singular): https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/stog#Romanian .
> Haystacks like this are found nowhere else on earth.
There is no need to sensationalize. This is not unique to Romania. Just search for pictures with "haystacks in eastern europe". First hit is from Glojene, Bulgaria; next from Valbone Valley National Park, Albania.
The funny coincidence is that I am from Romania and I just helped my grandfather with raising the hay on the haystack yesterday evening but we started a new stack so we are not at the top yet.
Wooden frames with cross-braces so that air can somewhat circulate within the construction and help it dry, keep the first level somewhat off the ground because that's where most of the moisture is, comb the result to align surface level straws vertically, so that any rain runs off.
I helped make plenty of these accursed things during childhood/early teens summers in Latvian countryside. Mind-numbingly boring for a kid, with added benefit of sunburn and insect bites. The only major difference was that no one would climb on top of them, we'd build them only as high as the pitchforks would reach from the ground.
Now I'm curious, is there any place in world that does (did?) their hay stacking in a radically different fashion?
Wikimedia seems to have a list of haystack images by country at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Haystacks_by_cou... and what do you know, Swiss actually do it differently! Building around a central pole, rather than a more elaborate frame https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Haystacks_in_Swi...
Probably. Guess I'm not old enough to have ever witnessed manual baling then! That's a TIL for me :)
More importantly, a bale won't stay dry inside if it's rained on. So you need to store them in barns.
Hesjing means to create long temporary fence-like structures and then lifting the gross onto it.
If done correctly so the water can easily run off it can then survive a rainfall or two unlike what happens if you dry it flat.
This was actually important ant least in costal climates back before motorized fans made drying it indoors an alternative.
(Brings me back, woke up from the huge fan many days in the summer holiday. I also remember learning to start it, there was a delta/y switcher on it but I have now forgotten which configuration was for spinning it up and which was for steady state.)
"unique to romania" = BS
"the spark over a very dry haystack." = BS
"Suspicious fathers would often pitchfork the stacks to ensure their daughters’ modesty (amongst other things) remained intact." = BS
Anyone who handled an actual romanian pitchfork [1] knows that thing can be deadly if used carelessly.
[1] https://gomagcdn.ro/domains/amenajariacvatice.ro/files/produ...
Transporting the hay was also fun:
https://thumbor.my.ua/desqCbj7deqvPmgCJMcZj5AeJgc=/1200x630/...
now imagine that amount and even more loaded on that https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:T-16_tractors#/m... - the haystack would be up to the sky and the driver - my uncle - wouldn't see the road ahead :)
https://www.flickr.com/photos/basilb/with/5758744231/
While there look at the art of cheese making, like in this photo:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/basilb/5758744231/
Lots of "arts" are fading away quick in Romania. Young generation is more interested in TikTok and other social media platforms than haystacks or cheese.
Looking at those pictures brings back happy childhood memories.
Scything for instance is very labor intensive and it used to be payed like 3X hoeing, but we usually did it only once a year (you can cut the grass multiple time to produce a different kind of grass) as opposed to hoeing the corn, and I would prefer scything/hay gathering any time over hoeing :) .
Everybody I know that did scything has very fond memories of it, while no one that did hoeing the corn remembers it fondly.
I guess scything/hay gathering has a leisure aspect to it and you feel more connected to nature.
Also you feel incredible at the end of the day, because after the first 30 minutes of scything, you feel like you're going to die (all the glycogen exhausted from your muscles), you feel like you've hit a wall, but then you break that wall, slow your pace, eat your frustration and enter a flow-like state with your mind completely empty and then BAM the sun has set and you've made it through the day.
I miss that old communal, village lifestyle. Being financially unsustainable basically killed it, driving young people out after better work. Could probably do it again now that WFH is more accepted, and/or boutique farms and tourist income may provide some support.
Once you've wasted your anaerobic resources, you have to do it skillfully, but I would not call it effortless, not for me, it was just something that with enough willpower and teeth grinding I could do for hours upon hours.
Edit, some more cool pictures describing other options like "såte" and the Sami "såte" equivalent, text in Norwegian though: https://slaattekurs.no/Kapittel7.html
So, they make haystacks to feed the livestock in the winter. Yup, that is a near universal need for any farming with animals, that is, a near universal foundation of the economy of the world.
Sooo, also in the US, we have to harvest and store hay for the winter. So, now I remember: As a child, late one summer our family took a vacation and visited the area where Dad grew up, in the small town of West Valley, NY, a little south of Buffalo, NY. Dad's family didn't farm: His father owned the West Valley general store, and his step father owned the West Valley feed and grain mill. But one of Dad's childhood friends ran a dairy farm, and I got to visit, right, just as they were "making hay while the sun shined".
So, I rode in the wagon back to the barn: Now the situation is different from Romania and a lot more from Europe can see with a simple Google search. The barn was, yes, for the animals. But the barn had a second floor, the hay loft -- right, another solution to the same problem as the Romanian haystacks.
The hayloft was a large flat area, a whole second floor. At one end of the barn, there was an opening in the side wall. And there was a pulley centered in the opening, maybe 8' above the floor of the hayloft, and maybe 4' outside of the end wall of the barn.
Now want to move the hay to the hayloft, a way to store the hay for the winter and an alternative to the Romanian haystacks. So, grab maybe 200 pounds of the hay with some curved steel fingers like a hand grabbing a lot of spinach, run a rope from the top of the fingers to the pulley and from the pulley to a heavy horse, have the horse walk slowly and pull on the rope, and, thus, move the hay up to the opening on the side of the barn. Then pull the hay into the hayloft of the barn. For more, there can be a trolley system that will move the hay well into the barn and let it fall onto the floor of the hayloft.
So, right, "make hay while the sun shines" so that avoid the hay being wet and rotting -- same problem the Romanian haystacks solved.
Another step in handling hay can be to make hay bails. Some hay bails are cylinders maybe 6' in diameter and 5' high. Maybe a more common hay bail is rectangular -- there is a really good video of making such hay bails in
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2wviNS48kc
At one point the video shows that the hay bails are held together with wire. That would be the universal repair material, along with chewing gum, called bailing wire.
Now I more fully understand what I saw in that West Valley vacation when I was a child!
To continue, following the URL of the OP here, can see a lot of Romanian farm houses. They don't look like they have Internet, TV, telephone, or electric power.
Not so long ago in the US: When my future wife invited me to her home, they had a working farm. In one respect, they were modern in that both parents had college educations. But they had no cable TV, and their telephone was only on a party line. The area had only recently gotten electric power. Since then that area has become fully modern.
It does appear that in technology (A) in some ways within a few decades US farming areas were only a few decades ahead of Romanian farming areas but (B) in the last few decades the US farming areas have moved ahead much faster than the Romanian ones.
Then, it is not clear that the US farming area people are happier than the Romanian ones!
Maybe those areas of Europe are catching up, in the technology that is worth having, with England, the US, etc. I wish them well and hope so.
The photos of traditional wooden cabins are more for tourists, or in very remote areas.
Edit: come to think of it, wooden cabins aren't so traditional outside the mountains.
https://gatzi.sunphoto.ro/case_traditionale_romanesti
This looks more like the traditional poor peasant's houses (photos from 1933) and they're made of mud bricks (not sure what the english term actually is) with some wood reinforcement in the walls.
I just followed the URL given in this thread and commented on what I saw in LOTS, dozens, of pictures and compared with some of what I know about how the US has solved the problem of gathering and safely storing summer hay for winter animal feed.
In the URLs I followed, nearly all the houses I saw were what in the US are called log cabins and had old logs and no paint.
I didn't see any "mud bricks".
From what I saw, there was no sign of electric power. Thus there would be no "land line" telephones either; from that I concluded no "telephones" -- I didn't think of the old satellite phones, cell phones, or the new versions of phone and internet via constellations of satellites.
Maybe everything I saw was just for tourists. Okay. I saw a LOT of pictures; maybe they all were for show.
In that case, John Deere should open some branch offices (if they haven't already) and sell some of their terrific, highly computer controlled, automated farm equipment, in particular for converting hay fields into bails of hay. Or for planting, growing, and harvesting wheat, corn, or soy beans.
But John Deere can change the culture of a farming community: Their equipment can be highly productive but also highly expensive. The pair can mean that a father and his two sons can run a farm of 5000+ acres. E.g., my father in law's farm was just 88 acres. He raised a family on that (40,000 chickens per batch) and got all three of his children through college. And as electric power came along, he led in the effort and became the head of the local electric utility and lobbied in Washington, DC for the relevant legislation (REMC -- rural electric membership cooperative). He did well: One of his daughters was Valedictorian in high school and Phi Beta Kappa, Summa Cum Laude, Woodrow Wilson Fellow, NSF Fellow in college, and high end research university Ph.D. One of his grand daughters was Valedictorian in high school, Phi Beta Kappa in college, got her law degree at Harvard, started as a lawyer at the high end New York City law firm Cravath-Swaine, got an MD, and now is practicing medicine.
But the 88 acres doesn't work very well now; what he did was tough; it would tougher now. Due to progress in productivity such as from John-Deere, there has been massive consolidation of those little farms into farms of a few thousand acres operated by remarkably few people, for growing wheat, corn, soy beans, or grazing cattle for milk or meat.
So, maybe Romania is doing the same, the hay stacks put together by hand with wooden tools are just for the tourists, and John Deere is getting a lot of business. Good for Romania.
You should consider looking again, I count electric power lines in no fewer than 6 of those pictures.
And in #16 there's https://www.flickr.com/photos/horiavarlan/4884236029/in/phot... and those sure do look like power lines to me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucVnbKqvZOw
The end of this video shows feeding the silage to a herd of cows.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkLC61rFIxA
No use of barns or hay lofts!
Store the silage in silos or on the ground covered with plastic.
Scale is nicely large: In total for the one farm, to store on the ground, cover an area maybe the size of a football field, 100 yards by 40 yards, maybe 10 feet deep.
All of that is in productivity per person way above what I saw as a child or young adult in visits to US farms.
Not sure, if something so inefficient is worth the praise.
The plains have proper mechanized agriculture for the most part.