Casa Frumoasā: The House Beautiful in Rural Romania (review)

Casa Frumoasā provides a glimpse at what might have been, a glance down a road not taken. Between 1970 and 1981, in the years immediately preceding the publication of The Vanishing Hitchhiker (Norton, 1981) and the launching of his career as a leading scholar of urban legend, Jan Harold Brunvand devoted most of his research time to the study of Romanian folklore. He published articles on a wide range of topics. I was introduced to his work through two 1973 pieces, one on political jokes and the other devoted to the famous Sãpînța “Merry Cemetery” wood carvings of Stan Ion Pãtraº. But Brunvand was primarily interested in Romanian house decoration. In the 1970s alone he produced five articles on various aspects of the topic. A study of Romanian folk costume published in Bucharest included his name (and that of the University of Utah, his academic home) in a list of American “university centers where valuable material has been collected about Romanian folk culture generally” (Paul Petrescu and Elena Secoºan, Romanian Folk Costume, Meridiane Publishing House, 1985, pp.10–1). Now, thirty years after the fieldwork at its heart, Casa Frumoasā collects in a single volume Brunvand’s researches into Romanian house decoration.

The text of this book is very brief—only sixty-seven pages, including a preface by Paul Petrescu, two introductions, and an afterword. Nearly two thirds of the volume is made up of photographs, most, but not all, by Brunvand. A handful come from the files of the Institutul de Istoria Artei (Romanian Art History Institute) in Bucharest; others are drawings (elevations, floor plans, decorative designs) from other publications; several were taken by Paul Petrescu, Brunvand’s Romanian colleague and mentor. A good number feature reconstructed buildings in outdoor museums, but there are several interesting shots of dwellings under construction. These photographs exhibit a very broad geographical distribution; Brunvand ranged over almost the whole of Romania, from Dobrogea (Dobrudja) in the southeast to Moldavia and Transylvania in the north and Oltenia and the Banat in the south and west. Unfortunately, the photographs are in no instance tied to any accompanying text.

Brunvand’s commentary builds upon and makes available in English the observations and analyses developed in the works of Romanian fieldworkers, most especially Petrescu and Paul Henri Stahl. His attention is directed entirely to exterior decoration, and his interest focuses especially on the contrast between “classic” and “modern” practice. Where the former “demanded a reliance upon harmonious proportions, simple lines, a limited color range, unity of all elements, and a predominantly geometric style of decoration,” more recent styles of ornamentation are “more colorful, eclectic to the extreme, receptive to the use of many new materials and patterns, and strongly inclined towards complete coverage of the façade with patterns and colors” (p. 39). Appreciation of the continuities uniting these two practices is a particularly strong point of Brunvand’s approach, the area where he makes his own unique contribution. Petrescu’s preface describes a strong interest in “the dynamics of tradition and innovation and of the relationships between rural and urban lore” (p. 3) as characteristic of American folklorists, and he explicitly contrasts Brunvand’s “non-sentimental” attitude with his own: “I still prefer, for example, the old carved wood décor to the modern sawn fretwork, or the painted murals and metal decorative elements” (p. 4).

Although it is much muted in Brunvand’s presentation, another point of great interest is the suggestion that “the flourishing practice of traditional house decoration” in Romania was “an elaboration of the personal environment in response to the somewhat limited avenues for self expression, and the inevitable standardization of lifestyles, in a modern socialist state” (pp. 51–2). “Somewhat limited” understates the case enormously; Brunvand (like Petrescu and Stan Ion Pãtraº) worked in Nicolae Ceauºescu’s Romania, where in fact every facet of life was...