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The Peasant’s Table: Polenta, Pork, and Wattle-and-Daub—The Anthropology of a World

Historical Similarities Hits: 178 29 minutes read

Article 7 of 10 — ‘The Technological Twilight of the Romanian Lands’

Previous articles: Articles 1–6.

I. A Village on the Bârlad, an October Evening in 1782

Vasile Ailenei returned from the fields with his legs caked in mud up to his knees and the smell of smouldering stubble clinging to his clothes like an extra shirt. Beyond the village—Vetriș, a hamlet of forty-three households (fumuri) on the left bank of the Bârlad, some five kilometres from the market town of Vaslui—the sun had already dipped behind Costangalia Hill. It was six o’clock in the evening. At the sheepfold in Podgoria, the dogs barked at something unseen. At the wooden church by the crossroads leading to Muntenii de Sus, the bell tolled for Vespers.

In the farmyard—a house of wattle and daub with a porch facing east, a thatched roof of rye straw, a small vestibule towards the street—Ileana was already preparing dinner. The fire in the hearth had been lit at five o’clock with kindling of osier; over the embers she had placed an earthenware pot in which, with heavy bubbles, the polenta simmered. The millet had run out a week ago (it had been a poor autumn harvest on the Bârlad, and they hadn’t managed to buy more), so that morning, at the water mill of Ștefan Poștașul, she had ground eight kilograms of maize—a crop that the village of Vetriș had only begun to adopt in the last five or six years.

The children—three who had survived; two others buried between 1778 and 1780, one from dysentery, the other drowned in the Bârlad during the spring thaw—were huddled around the hearth. The eldest, Neculai, ten years old, played with an iron nail he had found near the blacksmith’s, twirling it between his fingers as a Levantine jeweller might have done with a golden needle. The middle one, Costache, seven, dozed. The youngest, Sultana, four, hummed softly something she had heard from an old woman at the village well.

Vasile Ailenei—thirty-eight years old, an age at which Konstantinos Mourousis’s Constantinople was only just entering maturity, but at which a Moldavian peasant was already old relative to his village’s life expectancy—washed his hands at the trough in the back yard. The water was cold. The smell of smoke was everywhere. Under the porch, the old dog Grivei wagged his tail slowly, without barking, as he did every evening at this time.

‘Did you bring firewood?’ Ileana called from the kitchen, without turning around.

‘Half a cartload. The rest tomorrow. It’s too heavy alone.’

‘Ilie from Toader’s said he’s coming tomorrow with his oxen. You give him a oca of wine.’

‘I will.’

This was an ordinary evening in an ordinary village in Moldavia in the year 1782. Neither richer nor poorer than average. Neither luckier nor more afflicted. A village among another 3,500–4,000 similar ones that made up, south and north of the Prut, Moldavia. A village in a civilisation that historians have long ignored, because it produced no written documents, raised no monuments, bore no dynastic names.

And this article is dedicated to that village. After six articles on geopolitics, technology, and diplomacy, we descend to the level of the table. What they ate. What they wore. How they lived. How they died. What they hoped. This is the most anthropological article in the series. It is, I fear, the longest in terms of the number of words it can sustain, because daily life cannot be summarised in the short paragraphs of political analysis.

A warning to the reader. We will be neither nostalgic nor contemptuous. We will try to see how it was—as far as we can see it through the eyes of collective memory, the few documents, and the ethnographic research that has survived. And at the end, as in the other articles, we will return to what this means for us, who still live, in modern but recognisable forms, in these same villages.

II. What They Ate: From Millet to Polenta

We begin with food. Because food is where civilisation is tested most honestly.

Millet—the ancient grain. Until the decades of 1770–1790, the staple food of the Moldo-Wallachian peasant was millet (Panicum miliaceum), a small, yellow grain cultivated on our territory for millennia. It was boiled into a kind of porridge—a sort of millet polenta, less consistent than the maize polenta we know today, with a sweeter, less caloric taste. It was eaten with sour milk, cheese, onions, pickles.

Millet had two major defects. The first: the yield per hectare was modest—500–700 kilograms, compared to the 1,500–2,000 that maize would later bring. The second: it did not store well over winter (it spoiled in the grain, even when kept dry). It therefore required more careful management and a larger reserve for bad years.

Maize—the American invader. Brought by the Portuguese from Mexico to Europe at the beginning of the 16th century, maize gradually conquered the Mediterranean basin. In 1600, it was a botanical curiosity in the gardens of Italian and French boyars. By 1700, it was cultivated in parts of the Ottoman Balkans. By 1750, it was spreading systematically in Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece. It reached us, on a commercial scale, in the 1720s–1740s, but with uneven dynamics.

A little-known fact. The first Romanian ‘polenta’ was not, as one might think, made of millet—it was made of maize. The word mămăligă (mămăligă in Romanian, mamaliga in Bulgarian and other Balkan languages) first appears in Moldo-Wallachian documents at the end of the 17th century, used for the thick maize porridge, not for millet (millet porridge was called pastă or cocă). So mămăligăis maize, by definition. And when we say that Moldavians and Wallachians transitioned ‘from millet to polenta,’ we are essentially saying that they transitioned to maize.

Why maize won. Three reasons. Yield (double or triple that of millet). Storage resistance (a dried maize cob, kept whole, lasts a year or more). The fact that it was not subject to the traditional tithe—because it was a ‘new’ crop, not listed in the old tax registers. A peasant who replaced his millet field with a maize field paid, in theory, less to the treasury, at least until the Phanariote administration understood what was happening and extended the tithe to maize (in the decades 1780–1800).

Nutritional consequences. Here is where medical historiography has emphasised a point: maize, as an exclusive diet, produces pellagra—a deficiency disease in vitamin B3 (niacin) and tryptophan. Symptoms: skin eruptions (dermatitis), chronic diarrhoea, dementia in advanced stages, death in the final stages. Pellagra was unknown to Romanians before the spread of maize. It appears in medical reports starting in the 1810s–1820s, first in Wallachian villages, then in Moldavia. It would become a major public health problem in the 19th century. It would only be eradicated after 1950, when it was understood that boiling maize with lime (the nixtamalisation process, traditionally used in Mexico but unknown in Europe) releases the niacin in the grain and prevents pellagra.

Here, then, is a particular case of ambiguous ‘progress.’ Maize increased agricultural yield, enabled demographic growth (the population of Moldavia increased from 800,000 in 1780 to 1,400,000 in 1830—a leap largely enabled by maize). But it left, for entire generations, a considerable part of the population chronically pellagrins.

The rest of the meal. Besides polenta (or, in villages that kept millet, porridge), the Moldo-Wallachian peasant also had: cheese from cows and sheep (fermented in a burduf—a bag made of sheep’s stomach—or in wooden tubs, or fresh); sour milk (a regional microbial culture, close to Balkan yoghurt); eggs (especially in spring); onions and garlic (all year round); cabbage (fermented in barrels, the main source of vitamin C in winter); beans, peas, lentils (legumes for fasting); apples, plums (fresh in season, dried in winter); fish (where there was water—on the Bârlad, Siret, Danube; salted fish was traded over long distances).

Meat—rarer than one might think. A typical Moldavian household slaughtered one pig at Christmas (Ignat, 20 December), perhaps one lamb at Easter, and old cattle when they could no longer work (but they were more often sold than eaten). The average meat consumption in 1780 was estimated at 15–20 kilograms per person per year—ten times less than in contemporary Europe, less than that of the English or French peasant of the same era, but comparable to the Balkan peasant average (Bulgarian, Serbian, Greek).

The pig as a mark of identity. Here, an observation that connects this article back to Article 2 (the kilo) and Article 6 (Constantinople). Ottoman cuisine—heir to the Anatolian pastoral tradition, plus Koranic regulations on what is clean and unclean—privileged sheep and lamb as the main sources of meat. Constantinople, with its population of 700,000–1,000,000 souls, was a carnivorous metropolis that ate almost exclusively sheep and lamb. The supply for this metropolis was, as we showed in Article 2, an important part of the ‘hidden tribute’ paid by the Principalities: Moldavian sheep travelled in large herds along the Silistra-Şumnu-Adrianople road to the slaughterhouses of Phanar and Galata. The pastoral economy of Moldavia was oriented, to a large extent, towards the south—towards the Ottoman consumer.

What, on the other hand, did the Romanian peasant keep for his own table? Pork. And here, culture becomes explanatory. The pig, unclean in Islam, was an animal that could not be demanded as kilo. It did not appear in Ottoman requisition registers. It did not reach Constantinople even as a tithe in kind. In the strict administrative sense, it was ‘invisible’ to imperial taxation. And in the cultural sense, it became a mark of counter-affirmation of Christian identity under Muslim suzerainty. Bulgarians, Serbs, Greeks, Romanians—all Balkan Christians under the Porte—developed, in the 16th–18th centuries, more intense pig-rearing cultures than had existed before. Not by decree. By practical logic (the pig eats scraps, acorns from oak forests, kitchen waste, requires little land—perfect for a household that cannot afford extensive pastures) superimposed on symbolic logic (what the master cannot eat becomes the food of the subject).

This is why, in 1780, the sheep was the animal that left—towards Constantinople, in the form of kilo or sold to Ottoman merchants. And the pig was the animal that stayed—for the Ignat feast, for the Christmas sausages, for the lard from the poloboc (a wooden tub) in the pantry. And the slaughter of the pig on 20 December was not just a gastronomic event. It was a ritual of identity reaffirmation. In an empire that took your lamb for the sultan, it left you the pig for Christmas. And Christmas, through the pig, became more deeply Christian than it would have been through liturgy alone. The anthropology of the table sometimes contains more politics than the chronicle.

Wine. Here, Moldavia and Wallachia had a good reputation. The vineyards of Cotnari, Odobești, Nicorești, Drăgășani, and Ștefănești were old and productive. Wine was the daily drink of the peasant (consumed in large quantities—perhaps a litre a day during hard labour) and was traded in large quantities on the markets of Constantinople, Poland, and, through Armenian merchants, as far as Russia. It was not, of course, wine of the quality of Bordeaux—it was table wine, cloudy, kept in barrels, drunk from wooden bowls. But it was wine of an old culture.

III. What They Wore: Hemp, Flax, Wool, and Habit

A typical Moldavian household in 1780 produced, for the most part, its own textiles. Women had, in the porch of the house, a vertical wooden loom, a spindle for spinning, a distaff and fork for twisting. Men, in winter, processed the hemp and flax: beating with a mallet, scutching, hackling.

Raw materials. Hemp (Cannabis sativa, but the textile variety, not the psychoactive one—it is important to clarify this, as some readers might be surprised) was cultivated in almost all Moldo-Wallachian villages, on a small plot near the house. It produced a hard, rough fibre, suitable for sackcloth, thick towels, daily shirts. Flax (Linum usitatissimum) was finer, used for Sunday shirts, white cloth, sheets. Wool came from sheep—six kilograms of wool per sheep per year, divided into two shearings (spring and autumn).

The shirt. The basic piece of peasant clothing, for men and women, was the long shirt of hemp or flax, reaching to the knees for men, to the ankles for women. Sewn at home, with hemp thread. Embroidered on the chest and sleeves with regional patterns—geometric in northern Moldavia, more floral in southern Wallachia. A well-made shirt could last five or six years, if sewn carefully and washed with ash lye instead of soap (ash lye was the universal pre-industrial detergent).

Men’s trousers / women’s catrință. For men: ițari—tight wool trousers, white, reaching to the ankle, worn with opinci (traditional shoes) and obiele (leg wraps). For women: catrință—a rectangular piece of fabric with a black background and vertical red or yellow stripes, wrapped around the hips over the shirt, held with a wool belt. In winter: a sheep leather coat, with the fur inside, the leather side decorated with embroidery.

The opinci. Shoes made of cattle or pig leather, with a pointed toe, tied with braided linden or hemp straps around the ankle and, sometimes, up to the knee. Made at home, from a single piece of leather. They lasted two or three months, then had to be replaced. A peasant usually had two or three pairs of opinci at home in various stages of wear.

Winter. Over everything, the long sheep leather coat, the fur hat (astrahan for the wealthy, ordinary sheep for the rest). Leather boots did not exist for the ordinary peasant—they were for boyars, officers, merchants.

Comparison with the West. An English peasant of the same era also wore, to a large extent, homemade textiles—hemp and wool, less flax (England imported flax from the Baltic). He wore linen shirts and wool trousers. The piece that made the difference with the Romanian peasant was, perhaps, the boots: in English villages, well-off peasants had leather boots, bought from craftsmen. It was not just a question of wealth—it was a question of industrial infrastructure. In England, there were mechanised tanneries producing finished leather on a large scale. In our lands, tanning was done manually, in small workshops, and shoemakers were few and expensive.

Textiles are a category where the difference between the Principalities and the West was, in 1780, smaller than in metallurgy or printing. Both were, essentially, economies of textile self-consumption. The difference would only appear after 1800, when English mechanical spinning mills would begin to export cheap fabrics that would compete, at fairs, with homemade production.

IV. The House: Wattle-and-Daub, Thatched Roofs, Porch, Hearth, and Oven

The Moldo-Wallachian peasant house in 1782 was, with local variations, a surprisingly stable structure throughout the Danubian space.

Materials. Walls—wattle-and-daub (crude bricks of yellow earth mixed with chopped straw and water, dried in the sun), or paiantă (a structure of woven withies, filled with clay). Rarely, stone—in mountainous areas where surface stone was available. Foundation—stone without mortar, half a metre in height. Roof—rye or wheat straw, rarely spruce shingles (in forested areas), almost never tiles (which were expensive and required a heavier supporting structure).

Layout. Three typical rooms, arranged in a line or in a ‘T’ shape:

  • The tindă—the entrance room, used as storage for tools, food, the woman’s weaving loom, sometimes for the older children to sleep.

  • The odaia (living room)—the main room, with a hearth oven (a structure of stone and earth that served for cooking, heating, and sleeping above it), with a wooden bed with straw bedding, with a small table, with a chest for clothes.

  • The camera de la deal (clean room, when it existed)—the clean room, with icons, with festive objects, used only on major occasions—baptisms, weddings, holidays.

Plus the prispa—a covered outer porch, with a stone step, where they ate in summer, worked in daylight, received neighbours. The prispa was, essentially, the summer living room.

Dimensions. A typical house—6 metres by 8 metres, with a ceiling at 2.20 metres (very low, to retain heat), small windows (30 by 30 centimetres, with a single glass pane at best, otherwise with translucent animal skin or oil-soaked paper).

Hygiene. Water source—the village well, sometimes 100–200 metres away. Latrine—20–30 metres from the house, at the back of the yard, a pit with a wooden screen. Bath—there was no separate structure. Washing was done in the village, in summer, in the river; in winter, in a wooden tub, with water heated on the hearth, on a Saturday (traditionally, Saturday was bath day). Laundry—washed in the river in summer, in a tub in winter, with ash lye instead of soap.

Lighting. The opaiț—a small clay vessel with oil and a wick, which gave a weak, flickering light. Tallow candles (reserved for rich meals). In boyar houses—beeswax candles, more expensive, cleaner. A peasant could afford, on ordinary evenings, only one light source. A few hours after sunset, the house was in darkness, people slept.

Daily rhythm. Waking at four or five in the morning (by the roosters; there were no clocks in the village). Work from sunrise to sunset, with a lunch break at one or two o’clock. Dinner at sunset. Bedtime at nine or ten o’clock. In total, about nine to ten hours of sleep, but with interruptions (young children, cattle rustling in the stable, dogs barking at wolves).

Difference from the West. An English peasant of the same era had, in a typical house, a brick chimney (not a clay one like ours), a stove with an iron grate (not an open hearth), laundry washed with soap (not ash lye), often a clock on the wall, a bed with a feather or horsehair mattress (not straw). All these were not luxuries—they were English rural standards. The difference with the Moldavian village was, time and again, structural: England had brick, iron, soap, textile, and simple machinery industries. We did not.

V. The Rites: Birth, Baptism, Wedding, Death

A household was, in the final analysis, a cycle of rites. Through rites, the years and generations were measured.

Birth. The woman gave birth at home, assisted by a village midwife—a woman with empirical experience, without formal medical training, but with decades of attended births behind her. There were no doctors. There were no maternity hospitals. The maternal mortality rate was estimated at 2–4% per birth—ten to twenty times higher than in contemporary Europe. Main causes: puerperal fever (post-partum infection), untreated haemorrhage, dystocia (complicated birth).

Infant mortality rate—300–350 deaths per 1,000 live births in the first year of life. That is, almost one in three children did not reach the age of one. Causes: infant dysentery, neonatal tetanus (especially through cutting the umbilical cord with non-sterile instruments), pneumonia, diphtheria.

The Moldavian woman of 1780 gave birth, on average, to seven or eight children in her lifetime. Between three and five reached marriageable age—say, fifteen years. The rest died. By the age of twenty-five, every mother in the village had already buried two or three children.

Baptism. Three days after birth, if the child survived. It was done at the village church or, if the priest was far away, at home. Godparents were chosen from a friendly family—a bond that was transmitted generationally (godparenthood was one of the most serious forms of spiritual kinship). The child received a name—usually that of a saint from nearby days, or that of the paternal grandfather.

Wedding. Traditionally held between September and December (after the harvest) or immediately after Easter. The ritual lasted two or three days: on the first day, the ‘wetting of the bride’ at the bride’s house; on the second, the wedding at the church followed by the great feast; on the third, the ‘reverse journey’—visits to close relatives.

What was eaten at a peasant wedding? Cabbage rolls in fermented cabbage leaves, tripe soup, roasted pork (if the family could afford it), once or twice chicken, polenta with cheese, meat pies, pastries with honey. Wine—lots of wine. Music—village musicians with cobza (a lute-like instrument) and scripcă (a simple fiddle—the violin would be introduced later into Moldavian folk music).

Death. Here, the ritual was the richest and most important. The deceased was washed by a village woman (men did not touch the dead), dressed in festive clothes, placed on a table in the clean room. A three-day wake—during which neighbours prayed, relatives came, alms of food and clothes were given to the poor. On the third day, burial in the village cemetery. Then, the ritual continued: memorial services at nine days, forty days, three months, six months, one year, three years, seven years.

Seven years of commemoration for a dead person. An elaborate anthropological system that maintained the living bond between generations and essentially organised the social time of the village.

VI. Illness and Death: The Plague of 1770 and Daily Life

We have already mentioned, in Article 2, the plague of 1770 that devastated Bucharest. Here, in Article 7, we extend our view to the plague as an anthropological phenomenon—not just demographic.

The Plague of 1770. Brought from Egypt via Constantinople, it spread throughout the Ottoman space during the years of the war with Russia (1768–74). In Bucharest, it is estimated that 20–30% of the population died in the summer wave of 1770. In Iași, between 15% and 20%. In villages, the percentages were lower—because rural isolation served as partial protection—but some villages in the counties of Buzău, Ilfov, and Ialomița lost half their population.

What does this mean on the scale of daily life? A village of 200 souls loses, in three or four months, 80–100 people. Families are broken. Entire villages close for several weeks (voluntary isolation—no one enters, no one leaves, food runs out quickly). The priest buries ten dead a day, then twenty, then gives up performing the full ritual and limits himself to a few short prayers at the edge of the grave. At the end, when the wave recedes, the village is silent, the wattle-and-daub is cracked, the fields untended.

Other endemic diseases. Smallpox—systematically killed children under five until the introduction of Jennerian vaccination (in the Principalities, the first vaccination campaign would be in the 1810s–1820s). Typhus—spread through contaminated water. Malaria—endemic in the marshy areas of Bărăgan and Balti. Tuberculosis—main cause of death among young adults. Syphilis—spread in villages near postal roads.

Life expectancy in 1780 in the Moldo-Wallachian village? Approximately 30–32 years at birth. But this is a deceptive figure—because massive infant mortality drags it down. Those who survived past five years had, statistically, a chance to reach 45–50. Those who survived past 40, to 60. Grandparents existed. They were not the majority—but they existed.

A reflection. This coexistence with death, which would shock us today, was the daily reality of every generation before ours. A peasant of forty, in 1780, had already buried: one or two siblings (dead in childhood), two or three of his own children, sometimes a first wife (dead in childbirth), one or both parents, several close neighbours. In the village, it was not an exceptional loss. It was normal.

How did the village endure? Through ritual. Through memorials. Through festivals. Through the collective memory of names passed from the dead to the newborn. Through the pomelnice (memorial lists) read at every liturgy at church—the list of the dead who must not be forgotten. An anthropological system that made death bearable through ritualised repetition.

VII. The Holidays: Feasts, Ignat, Christmas, Easter

And between death and death, the feast.

The Moldo-Wallachian peasant calendar in 1780 was a dense structure of special days. Approximately 90–100 days a year were ‘holidays’ in a religious or ceremonial sense. That is, one day in four. A rhythm of work and rest that, for a modern observer, might seem excessive—but which was, in its own way, a form of pre-industrial public health (rest was ritually imposed, not left to the individual’s discretion).

The great feasts:

  • Christmas (25 December): six weeks of fasting beforehand, then the slaughter of the pig on Ignat (20 December), carols, great feasts, cabbage rolls, sausages, cozonac (sweet bread).

  • New Year (1 January):plugușor (a ritual ploughing), sorcova (a decorated branch), blessings for the coming year.

  • Epiphany (6 January): the blessing of the waters, holy water carried by the priest through all the houses of the village.

  • Easter (variable, March–April): seven weeks of Great Lent, then Holy Week, then the Resurrection, then Easter meals with lamb, pască (Easter cheesecake), red eggs.

  • Pentecost (variable, May–June): the Descent of the Holy Spirit, with the custom of the călușari (ritual dancers) in Wallachia.

  • Midsummer (24 June): the summer solstice, with the custom of gathering healing plants.

  • Dormition of the Theotokos (15 August): great pilgrimages to the major monasteries (Neamț, Voroneț, Curtea de Argeș).

  • St. Demetrius (26 October): the end of the agricultural year, when accounts were settled with shepherds, ploughmen, the boyar.

  • St. Nicholas (6 December): the first winter feast, when carols began.

Each feast had its own structure. Its own foods. Its own songs. Its own games. Its own prohibitions. It was a civilisation of rhythms.

An example—Ignat. 20 December. The day the pigs were slaughtered. In the villages, it was a small collective feast. Neighbours helped each other with the slaughter. The ‘pig’s alms’ (pomana porcului) was held—a meal with immediately fried pieces, wine, warm bread, onions, garlic dip. The children received the pig’s bladder blown up like a ball, with which they played for weeks. The women prepared, the next day, sausages (smoked above the hearth), caltaboși (a type of blood sausage), lard for the whole winter.

A pig of 180 kilograms, slaughtered on Ignat, fed a middle-class family for five or six months. In strict caloric terms, it was the most important economic event of the year for the household.

What the calendar says. An anthropological observer would say that this dense ceremonial structure was, essentially, the ‘compensation’ for the absence of modern infrastructure. Without organised leisure (concerts, theatres, cafés), the religious-community feast fulfilled the functions that today are shared by multiple institutions. At the same time, it was: recreation, inter-family socialisation, moral education, agricultural rhythm, medical ritual (fasting, feasting—a kind of collective dietetics), inter-generational integration.

When modernity arrived, in the 19th–20th centuries, these structures would erode. And their erosion would not be immediately replaced with something of equal quality. Many of the social pathologies of the modern Romanian village—depression, alcoholism, the isolation of the elderly—may be connected to this unfilled gap between the old ceremonial structure and what came after.

VIII. The Boyar and the Peasant: The Concrete Relationship

One last theme before closing the article. What did the relationship between boyar and peasant look like at the village level?

We will not have an ideological discussion (oppressors vs. oppressed)—we will leave that for Article 8. Here we speak of the concrete, daily relationship.

The structure. In the vast majority of Moldo-Wallachian villages, the boyar lived at the conac—a larger house than the peasant ones, but rarely a palace. At the conac lived, permanently, the boyar, his family (when he was at the estate and not in Bucharest or Iași), a few servants, a vechil (steward) who managed the farm. The rest of the village was peasant—before 1746 in Wallachia and 1749 in Moldavia (the reforms of Constantin Mavrocordat), peasants obligated to clacă (corvée labour) and tithe afterwards (but in a less severe relationship than Russian serfdom).

The peasant’s obligations to the boyar:

  • Clacă: 12 days of work per year in 1780 (increased to 24 under Alexandru Ipsilanti by the regulations of 1780, then up to 40 in the following decades). The work was: ploughing, sowing, reaping, transporting, sometimes construction at the conac.

  • Dijmă: a tenth of the peasant’s harvest (wheat, millet, maize, wine, honey) went to the boyar.

  • Prestații: occasional obligations—horses for the conac, transport, hospitality when the boyar passed through with his retinue.

The boyar’s obligations to the peasant:

  • Physical protection (when possible—which was limited, but existed).

  • Leased land (usufruct, not ownership).

  • Loans in bad years (with interest, but still loans).

  • Judgement in local conflicts (the boyar was, in theory, the judge of first instance).

Daily reality. In villages where the boyar was present and careful—and such boyars existed, in the minority but real—the relationship worked. In villages where the boyar was absent (he was in Bucharest), it was managed by a vechil who could be cruel or honest depending on the case. In villages leased to Greek or Jewish merchants—a frequent practice in the last decades of the 18th century—the relationship degraded, because the lessee had a five-year contract and extracted the maximum in the available time.

A little-known fact. Moldo-Wallachian boyars did not, for the most part, form a class of large landowners in the English or Prussian sense. A ‘middle boyar’ had an estate of 1,000–3,000 hectares, often divided into three or four small villages. He lived on an income of 3,000–8,000 piasters per year. It was not a great fortune. It was enough for a house in Bucharest, a house at the estate, a few servants, a few horses, a few luxuries (a carriage from Vienna, a few silks from Constantinople). It was not enough for large, industrial investments.

The truly great boyars—Ghica, Cantacuzino, Sturza, Rosetti-Roznovanu—were few, had estates of tens of thousands of hectares, incomes of over 100,000 piasters. These lived at a European level. The rest of the boyar class was closer, in material standards, to the English rural gentry than to the aristocracy.

IX. What Maize Changed (and What It Did Not)

This article ends with a meditation on what the ‘maize revolution’ meant in the long history of Romanian rural life.

We have already said: maize increased agricultural yield two- or threefold. It enabled demographic growth. The population of the Principalities, which was about 2 million in 1780, reached 4 million by 1830—a doubling in fifty years, one of the fastest demographic growths in Europe of the same era.

Medium-term consequences:

Good: more people survived. Children who would have died of hunger three generations ago now lived. Villages that would have disappeared now grew. Market towns that would have remained small now filled up. A demographic dynamism that would make possible the compressed modernisation after 1859—because Cuza, Carol, the Polytechnic School would have been useless in a demographically stagnant country.

Bad: pellagra (which we discussed). Deterioration of diet quality—more calories, but a more monotonous, protein-poor diet (maize replaces beans, which are richer in protein). Concentration of the peasant on a single crop—with the risk of famine when maize failed (the years 1866, 1907 would see famines of significant proportions). Simplification of the agricultural landscape—monocultures instead of complex pre-maize rotations.

What maize did not change. The institutional structure. The relationship with the boyar. The fiscal system. The religious ritual. The wattle-and-daub house. The opinci. Ileana’s weaving loom. Life expectancy at birth (which remained, with variations, the same until the 1890s, when systematic smallpox vaccination would increase it significantly).

Maize changed the content of the table. It did not change the context of the table. And the context—the wattle-and-daub village, the wooden church, the dirt road, the boyar at the conac, the tribute to Constantinople—remained essentially the same until the Cuza-Carol era.

This is the most important observation of the article. The modernisation of the village does not come through changing the cereal. It comes through changing the infrastructure. And the infrastructure of the Moldo-Wallachian village would only begin to change after 1860—the compulsory primary school of Spiru Haret in 1898, modernised roads in the decade 1900–1910, electricity in large villages after 1930, in small ones after 1960.

The great-great-grandparents of our great-grandparents thus lived in the same village as the ancestors of 1650. Only with maize instead of millet. Only with two living children instead of one. Only with the impression that something was beginning, somewhere far away, but it was not yet clear what.

X. Conclusion: The Table That Still Defines Us

Vasile Ailenei sat at his pine table, on an October evening in 1782, with a wooden bowl of polenta in front of him and a pot of sour milk in the middle. Ileana, with a wooden spoon, had given him a better piece. He understood the gesture and thanked her without speaking—as people did then, with a blink, with a movement of the chin. The children ate from a small platter near the hearth, with a common bowl. The dog Grivei waited at the door for the scraps.

This was a meal. A household. An evening. There was no trace in it of Konstantinos Mourousis’s Constantinople, of Akinfy Demidov’s Nevyansk, of Richard Arkwright’s Cottonopolis. They were other worlds. Very far away. Unimaginably far away.

And Vasile Ailenei was not, because of this, less worthy than Mourousis, than Demidov, than Arkwright. He lived a complete life. He worked systematically. He loved in his own way. He prayed in the wooden church. He buried the dead. He kept the feasts. He did not produce Greco-Latin manuscripts, but he contributed to a culture of ritual repetition which, at its own scale, was as complex as that of the Phanar.

A personal reflection, if I may. The great-great-grandparents of my great-grandparents—and, with great probability, yours, dear reader—lived in houses like this. They ate at this table. They buried children at this rhythm. They kept these feasts. Not in 1780—many of them in 1900, even in 1930. Some, in isolated villages, even in 1950. Romanian rural modernity is a phenomenon of three generations, perhaps four. Before that, the structure of 1780 continued, with adaptations.

And in us, in the contemporary urban reader—even if we live in apartments, even if we eat in restaurants, even if we communicate through screens—there survives a trace of that table. The feast at the parents’ house. The cabbage rolls at the wedding. The polenta at the sheepfold. The memorial service for a parent. The rough hands of the grandfather who perhaps worked a metal—not in a furnace, but in the village smithy, or at the cooperative workshop, or on a machine he repaired at home. Men who knew how to make something out of nothing all winter long. Perhaps, who knows, even a mechanic father who came home in the evening from work with soot-stained palms, with a secret something on his tired face that resembled, in a shadow, Vasile Ailenei.

Conclusion in Three Questions.

First: What did they eat, what did they wear, how did they live—the people who preceded us? We have answered at length: a modest diet, but complete in calories; homemade textiles; wattle-and-daub villages; intense ceremonial rhythms; coexistence with death; unceasing work. It was not paradise. It was not hell. It was life.

Second: What did they do for us, directly or indirectly, that still persists? They kept the village. They kept the language. They kept the church. They kept the rhythms. They made possible, through their demographic survival (especially after maize), the population that modern Romania would need to build something. They are under our feet as soil. They are in our vocabulary. They are in the family feasts.

Third—for the contemporary reader. What exactly from their table have we lost, and what have we gained? We have gained: life expectancy (from 30 to 78 years), reduced infant mortality (from 300 to 5 per 1,000), diet variety, school education, sanitary infrastructure, mobility. We have lost: ceremonial density, agricultural rhythm, village community cohesion, the collective memory of the dead. A trade-off that, on the balance of history, is advantageous in material terms. But which leaves us with the question—how do we compensate for what we have lost?

A question to which this article does not answer. A question that is, perhaps, the central theme of Romanian modernity—from Iorga to Blaga to Steinhardt to our generations.

Vasile Ailenei sat at his pine table, on an October evening in 1782. Grivei waited at the door. The polenta was warm. The children were preparing for sleep.

A complete life. In its place. Irreproducible. But not, I believe, unworthy.

Selected Bibliography

  • Neagu Djuvara, Între Orient și Occident (Between Orient and Occident): archive.org.

  • Constantin C. Giurescu, Istoria românilor (History of the Romanians), volumes on the 17th–18th centuries.

  • Paul Cernovodeanu and Paul Binder, Cavalerii Apocalipsului. Calamitățile naturale din trecutul României (până la 1800) (Knights of the Apocalypse: Natural Disasters in Romania’s Past (until 1800)), Bucharest, 1993.

  • Sorin Mitu, Transilvania mea: istorii, mentalități, identități (My Transylvania: Histories, Mentalities, Identities), Polirom, 2013—for comparison with the Transylvanian village.

  • Wikipedia RO, Ciuma din 1770 (The Plague of 1770): ro.wikipedia.org.

  • Wikipedia RO, Pelagră (Pellagra): ro.wikipedia.org.

  • Wikipedia RO, Porumbul în România (Maize in Romania—agricultural history): ro.wikipedia.org.

  • Bogdan Murgescu, România și Europa. Acumularea decalajelor economice (1500–2010) (Romania and Europe: The Accumulation of Economic Gaps, 1500–2010), Polirom, 2010, chapter on agriculture: archive.org.

  • Ovid Densusianu, Viața păstorească în poezia noastră populară (Pastoral Life in Our Folk Poetry), multiple editions—for cultural context.

  • Nicolae Iorga, Istoria românilor prin călători (History of the Romanians Through Travellers), multiple editions—for contemporary descriptions of the Moldo-Wallachian village.

*The next article in the series: ‘The Boyars: Between Old Nobility, Phanariotism, and the First Europeanised Generations’—from Cantacuzino Stolnicul to Ienăchiță Văcărescu to Grigore Alexandrescu. A sociology of the elites, with their libraries, travels, correspondence, luxury, and, ultimately, transformation. Coming in two weeks.*