Shepherding at Mărginimea Sibiului: Past

According to sociologist T. Herşeni (Reference Herşeni1941), agriculture and shepherding are the oldest forms of social life and Romanian civilization, with shepherds preserving the old traditions and folk culture.

The first mention of the Mărginimea Sibiului shepherds is made in the Andrian Diploma (1224) which gives the Saxons the right to use, together with the Romanians, the mountains and forests (Voicu-Vedea Reference Voicu-Vedea1998: 127). According to Conea and Badea (Reference Conea and Badea2004: 55), the old-time practice of pastoral activities made Mărginimea Sibiului ‘certainly one of our Carpathian sectors where the local Daco-Roman population stayed in place and continued to develop in connection with the mountains even after the Roman rule left, beyond the Danube’. What contributed to it was primarily the exceptionally favourable background of the ‘submountainous lowland’ which ends northwards with the Sibiu Mountains, their altitudes by far lower southwards, leaving in place a wild hilly relief propitious to grazing. Dragomir (Reference Dragomir1938) described them as ‘massive mountains with bridges extended as a table over huge distances […] rich in pastures and springs up to the top’, hence favourable to intense human pressure. Therefore,

Historical documents from the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries mention the intensification of human pressure in the mountains through transhumant shepherding, practised especially by the Romanian population, concomitantly with the development of crafts connected with the processing of wool. At the same time, more shepherding led to forest cutting in order to extend pastures and hayfields, which also favoured wood-processing activities. This situation is attested by the presence of many local toponyms standing for deforestration. The most representative of these is the toponym Poiana Sibiului (from the word ‘poiană’, meaning ‘clearing’ – a place in the forest devoid of trees and covered with grass and flowers) (Vlad, Reference Vlad1996: 104–105), which is a standout village for shepherding activities in Mărginimea Sibiu. This name also engendered toponyms in the mountains bordering Mărginimea Sibiu, where the shepherds of the area would lead the flocks: Poiana Brăneasa, a peak in the Şureanu Mountains (1131 m), Poiana Făgeţel and Poiana Tisa, slopes in the Lotrului Mountains at an average altitude of 1500 m. Oaşa Depression, located between Şureanu and Cindrel Mountains (1260 m average altitude) and Oaşa Mare Peak in Cindrel Mountains (1731 m) (from ‘oaş’/deforested slope – a place in a forest, cleared of vegetation to be cultivated) are other representative toponyms which prove deforestation. The Şureanu Mountains, with large grazing areas, used by the people of Mărginimea Sibiului, abound in such toponyms: Curata Mare (peak, 1326 m) (from ‘curătură’ – a name bearing the same meaning); Ciungu (peak, 967 m) (from ‘ciungi’ – trees with branches cut or defoliated by intentional or accidental burning); Prisaca (peak, 1219 m) (from ‘prisacă’ – also with the meaning of ‘clearing’); Preluca (ridge, 1200 m) and Prelucele (peak, 1225 m) (from ‘prelucă’/glade – deforested land ploughed and ready to be sowed); Pleşu (peak, 996 m) (from ‘pleş’, ‘pleaşă’ – bald, naked, devoid of vegetation); Runcuri (peak, 788 m) (from ‘runc’/clearing – meaning a place in a forest where trees have been cut down, burned or felled by the wind; deforested place used as pasture or agricultural land); Smida Mare and Smida Mică (peaks, 1774 and 1509 m, respectively) (from ‘smidă’ – small, cut forest) and Seciuri (peak, 993 m) (from ‘seciu’, ‘seciuri’ – name given to places where the forest was cut down and a grazing ground was left behind). In the Loviştei Depression and the Lotru Mountains, located in the east of Ţinutului Mărginimii, deforestation is indicated by the names of various villages: Lazaret, Boiţa commune, Sibiu County, (from ‘laz’, ‘lazuri’/clearing – cleared land, transformed into hayfield or arable area) and Priloage, Câineni commune, Vâlcea county (from ‘prilog’ – clearing), as well as by the toponym Dealul Runcului (a peak in Lotrului Mountains, 1200 m).

The intensity of deforestation in the Sibiu area was documented by Crăcea and Crăcea (Reference Crăcea and Crăcea2010), who demonstrated, on the basis of cartographic documents, that in two centuries (between 1769/1773 and 1973) the forest areas in the Sibiu Depression were reduced from 24% to 14% of the total land area (that is, from 79.6 km² to 48.9 km²).

Transhumance appeared at the beginning of the feudal period and got momentum in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, becoming a specific form of pastoral economy (Conea Reference Conea1960; Laffront Reference Laffront and Laffront2006; Brisebarre Reference Brisebarre2007). It developed mostly in those local communities where animal breeding was the main living resource, and where grazing was not sufficient (Popa Reference Popa1979). Transhumance led to the considerable expansion of the shepherding area, the Mărgineni shepherds travelling long distances. Thus, in the nineteenth century, special consulate offices were opened at Hârşova (Dobrogea) and Rusciuc (presently Ruse in Bulgaria) for the Transylvanian shepherds, Hârşova hosting ‘Starostia Mocanilor’ ever since the seventeenth century (Vâlsan Reference Vâlsan1928). The apex of transhumance was in the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries, when the number of sheep kept growing, with transhumance being practised freely on vast territories, beyond the present borders of Romania, as far as Croatia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Ukraine (Voicu-Vedea Reference Voicu-Vedea1998: 140), Caucasus, Crimea and even North America (Dragomir Reference Dragomir1938) (Figure 3).

Figure 3.

The shepherds’ roads from Mărginimea Sibiului to the north of the Black Sea, the Caucasus, Central Asia and North America (according to Dragomir, Reference Dragomir1938).

By the Treaty of Adrianople (1829), trade on the Danube was free so that cultivated areas expanded into Wallachia and Oltenia. The importance of transhumant shepherding was constantly diminished, especially after the Russian–Turkish War (1877–1878) which led to the independence of Romania, to the drastic limitation of migrations in the south of the Danube, and to the economic conflict with Hungary (1885–1896) that caused the closing of the old border with that country. The shepherds who remained at Mărginimea Sibiului sold their flocks and turned to additional activities (Buza et al. Reference Buza, Cojocaru-Costea and Turnock2009) (Figure 4).

Figure 4.

The wintering roads of the shepherds from Sălişte (Mărginimea Sibiului) in the middle of the nineteenth century (Drumurile spre iernare ale săliştenilor (mărgineni) la jumătatea secolului al XIX-lea by Nicolae Dragomir, according to the shepherds’ stories) (source: Dragomir, Reference Dragomir1926).Legend: (from top) customs, sheep counting place, sheep road, the way of the Masters, probable road, fixed bridge, mobile bridge, temporary sheep fold, place for shearing sheep, wool and cheese warehouse, bacon fairs, light fairs, cheese and wool fairs, supply villages.

The downwards trend of pastoral activities in Mărginimea Sibiului continued in the twentieth century, first because of the destructions caused by the two world wars, then because of collectivization during the socialist-type central-based economy, and finally traditional products and activities could not compete with the products of the global consumption market. For all that, shepherding has been going on to this day as one of the main traditional forms of the rural economy in the Mărginimea Sibiului villages, giving the region a particular ethno-culture. In the commune of Răşinari, for example, the number of sheep had decreased in 1899 to only 10,429 head. In the years 1910–1920 there was an increase reaching 35,000 head; in the period 1920–1940 there were 150,000 sheep declared, but the real number was, according to some estimates, about 30,000 (source: file no. 346 from the Răşinari City Hall archive). After the Second World War, the number of sheep had dropped to 21,000 head (in 1948) and even 14,964 head (in 1955). In 1957 there were 16,000 sheep in the village, in 1959 their number was 12,085, reaching 17,645 head in 1960 (idem., https://primaria-rasinari.ro)

Shepherding at Mărginimea Sibiului: Present and Future

While, in the past, shepherds owned large flocks and took part in transhumance over great distances, usually in the Romanian Plain, the Oltenia Subcarpathians or the Dobrogea Plateau (Popp Reference Popp1933), in the contemporary period this occupation has been considerably reduced. Thus, in the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries, when pasturing was flourishing, there were over 1,000,000 sheep heads in Mărginimea Sibiului, at Poiana Sibiului, with annual variations between 150,000–300,000 head (Voicu-Vedea Reference Voicu-Vedea1998). Sheep flocks began decreasing at the beginning of the inter-war period, rising to a maximum during the central-based economy period and after the 1989 Revolution, with a historical minimum in 1990, down to a total of 90,000 head. Legislative protection measures for traditional activities started being introduced in the 1990s (Shirasaka Reference Shirasaka2007), and the number of sheep doubled in Mărginimea Sibiului in the next two decades up to nearly 190,000 head in 2010 (Velcea et al. Reference Velcea, Toderaş, Crăcea and Negoescu2016), proving the effectiveness of this traditional activity in the current social-economic conditions.

Given the industrial decline between 1990 and 2010, the Romanian foreign investments and state programmes have contributed to the rehabilitation and development of various traditional economic branches, whose viability was confirmed over time, and which contributed to the mitigation of social risks (Creţan et al. Reference Creţan, Guran-Nica, Platon, Turnock and Turnock2018). Thus, shepherding remains an alternative source of economic development in regions such as Mărginimea Sibiului, which were severely affected by emigration and demographic decline (Triboi Reference Triboi2017; Rîşteiu et al. Reference Rîşteiu, Creţan and O’Brien2021). The centralized economy has shown that mono-industrialization is a limitation in the development of many rural settlements or small towns in mountain areas, and shepherding is a viable alternative to economic reconversion (Vesalon and Creţan Reference Vesalon and Creţan2013). In addition, pastoral products and festivals promoting them contribute to the development of tourism both in the respective rural areas and in the large cities bordering said pastoral areas (Sibiu and Braşov, etc.) (Light et al. Reference Light, Creţan, Voiculescu and Jucu2020).

The largest sheep flocks were and continue to be at Răşinari, Tilişca, Poiana Sibiului, Jina, Tălmăcel, Sadu and Râu Sadului, these villages hold 77% of all the head of sheep. Sheep flocks are directly proportional to the size of the pastoral area, the number of animals depending on the share of pastures and hayfields in the agricultural use of the communes (Bărbulescu, Motcă Reference Bărbulescu and Motcă1983). Thus, in Sadu commune, for an area of 963 hectares of hayfields and 703 hectares of natural pastures (45.9% and 33.5%, respectively, of the agricultural area of the commune) in 2016 there were 9,500 sheep, 110 more than in 2011. The commune has two pastures in the lowland (depression) area with a total area of 400 hectares and seven pastures in the alpine area totalling 659.7 hectares (https://sadu.ro). Răşinari commune, one of the most representative settlements for shepherding in Mărginimea Sibiului, had 33,977 sheep in 2020 (of which 30,146 were females), owned by 157 breeders. Their number had decreased slightly compared with 2004, when the village had 40,000 sheep, but increased substantially compared with 1982, when there were only 18,000 head (https://primaria-rasinari.ro). In 2018, in the commune of Poiana Sibiului, there were 8147 head of sheep and goats with a grazing area of 1,418.79 hectares (872.79 hectares of pastures – 38.8% of the agricultural area of the commune – and 546 hectares of hayfields – 24.3% of the agricultural area) and a stable population of 2894 inhabitants (of which 96.3% were engaged in agriculture and animal husbandry) (https://comunapoianasibiului.ro). In Jina commune, there were 1700 sheep and 58 families involved in sheep husbandry, out of a total of 168 families (https://comunajina.ro). Over the entire area, the number of sheep from Mărginimea Sibiului total around 200,000 head, in relation to a grazing area of 40,400 hectares (Velcea et al. Reference Velcea, Toderaş, Crăcea and Negoescu2016).

The reinvigoration of the shepherding tradition in the Mărginimea Sibiului rural area was determined primarily by replacing state property for private property after the socio-political changes in 1989, and government support. In view of this, this agricultural branch has, over the past few years, benefited from financial support through economic development programmes for the Romanian rural area (Drăgănescu Reference Drăgănescu2006; Juler Reference Juler2014; Triboi Reference Triboi2017). Thus, during 2016–2020, Romanian farmers received some €5 million (24 million lei) to buy rams and goats under a support scheme to raise the efficiency of meat-and-milk production in the zoo-technical sector (Revista Fermierului 2016).

The villages that have a large number of sheep are Poiana Sibiului, Jina, Răşinari and Tilişca, and the town of Sălişte, with 158,240 head, i.e. 84% of all the sheep registered in Mărginimea Sibiului in 2010. In Jina and Poiana Sibiului alone they totalled 106,762 sheep – 56%. Elsewhere, values were below 10,000 head; it is noteworthy that another group at Gura Râului, Orlat, Râu Sadului, Sadu and Tălmaciu, had 4500–7000 head (Velcea et al. Reference Velcea, Toderaş, Crăcea and Negoescu2016: 92).

At Mărginimea Sibiului transhumance involved all the 17 settlements, with intensities varying in terms of period and number of animals.

Currently, transhumance is practised only in four villages Jina, Poiana Sibiului, Tilişca and Răşinari, and it takes on two-types (Huband et al. Reference Huband, McCracken, David and Mertens2010):

• large-scale transhumance (mountain-lowland), summering in the west plain area (Banat, Crişana and Satu Mare) and south plain areas (the Bărăgan, the Danube Floodplain and Dobrogea), differing from village to village in terms of the land possessed. The large-scale transhumance begins after 15 September, traditionally lasting for 30 days; the luggage is carried by donkeys or horses; and the return is after 15 April. According to European norms, sheep must be carried by car (Popa Reference Popa2010) (Figure 5).

• small-scale transhumance is practised in Spring and Autumn, yet over far smaller distances, usually in the settlements around Sibiu County and the neighbouring counties (Alba, Mureş, Braşov), in depressions and tableland areas (the Mureş, Târnava Mică, Târnava Mare valleys, Sibiului and Apold depressions, Hârtibaciu, Târnave and Secaşelor hills).

The shepherds that have few animals do not go on transhumance, but alternate between mountain and valley (residential village). Transhumance can be simple, i.e. over small distances (mountain–village), or twofold, when in transitional seasons (spring or autumn) the flocks reach the pastures or hayfields at certain distances from the village, then they go up or down, depending on the season, along the mountain–valley route. Representative of pastoral activities among Mărginimea villages are Poiana Sibiului and Jina, boasting complex mechanisms of moving the flocks and practising large-scale transhumance (Voicu-Vedea Reference Voicu-Vedea1998) (Figure 6).

Figure 5.

The summering in the Cibin Mountains (văratul în Munţii Cibinului) in 1937 (P. Begia and I. Fishner collection), a reproduction of the Romanian Ethnographic Atlas (vol. II – Occupations, 2005).

Figure 6.

The large-scale and the small-scale transhumance in the current period.

After 1990, transhumance declined as private property replaced the state-owned property, a situation that made movement more difficult. And yet, despite reduced territorial areas versus the sheep flock size, Poiana Sibiului and Jina are still engaged in transhumance during the transitional seasons (Figure 7).

Figure 7.

Temporary shelter for sheep in the Cindrel Mountains (Jina Commune) (photo: M. Persu).

The modernization imposed by the accession to the European Union has contributed to the considerable limitation of several ancient traditions, such as transhumance (O’Brien and Creţan Reference O’Brien and Creţan2019) and, in the absence of measures to stimulate shepherding, this can even lead to the disappearance of transhumance. In addition, the adoption of the Law on the management of stray dogs (Law No. 258/2013), although having a positive impact on urban areas affected by demolition during the communist period, in pastoral areas such as Mărginimea Sibiului it contributed to the decrease in the number of shepherding dogs, leading to protests, which occurred in January, September–October, December (Creţan Reference Creţan2015), and October 2018 (O’Brien and Creţan, Reference O’Brien and Creţan2019).

Even if the animal movements have to cope with several difficulties, many sheep-owners who had bought terrains in the west of Romania, in Timiş, Arad, Bihor, Satu Mare and Sălaj counties, where they permanently kept their flocks, preserved their old residences (Velcea et al. Reference Velcea, Toderaş, Crăcea and Negoescu2016).

Pastoral activities led to a specific territorial organization in the villages practising this activity, adapted to the particularities of the natural environment (Cocean Reference Cocean2009). Thus, in each village, each household tends to benefit from all natural areas (forest, pasture, hayfields, cultivation sites, settlement, tall mountains), thus giving the opportunities for developing complementary economic activities. The villages of Mărginimea Sibiului have the following economic areas: village built-area, cultivation terrain, hayfield places with huts, grazing area, forest and tall mountains (Irimie et al. Reference Irimie, Dunăre and Petrescu1985: 119).

In the past, when transhumance was a large-scale practice, cultivated lands – agricultural rotational systems (with two or three fields) (Figure 8(a)-(c)) – were used. This solved soil recovery on the one hand, and annual grazing, on the other. Analysing the structure of village territories, of the estate – built-area relations in terms of their regional layout – and of the complexity of each village, coupled with oral statements gathered by interviewing the local population, with toponymic measurements and documentary attestations, it can be proved that Mărginimea Sibiului villages have evolved throughout history from the social-historical units of the traditional peasant community.

Figure 8.

Patterns of village territorial organization in Mărginimea Sibiului. Legend: (a) Jina: 1. Village hearth, 2–3. Pasturelands; 2. ‘Lower Boundary’ – with lower altitudes close to the village hearth, pasturing small flocks; 3. ‘Upper Boundary’ with higher altitudes, situated close to mountain area, pasturing large flocks; 4. The mountain – pasturing in summertime. (b) Orlat. 1. Village hearth; 2–3. Alternative rotation cultures (‘The two fields’) fields; 4. The mountain (pastureland, hayfields, alpine void). (c) Sadu. 1. Village hearth; 2–3. Alternative rotation cultures (‘The three fields’) fields; 4. The mountain (pastureland, hayfields, alpine void).

Shepherding at Mărginimea Sibiului is the result of a complex of natural and socio-historical factors that have characterized this area, triggering its economic functionality. Given the context, this study highlights the viability of this traditional activity in the current economic and social context, marked in 1990–2000 by the decline of industry as a result of the transition from the centralized economic system to the market economy, and later by the impact of the global economic and financial recession (2008–2012), by the pandemic crisis (2019–2022) and by the geopolitical tensions generated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

This article complements, develops and updates similar studies for this region by Irimie et al. (Reference Irimie, Dunăre and Petrescu1985), Voicu-Vedea (Reference Voicu-Vedea1998), Cocean (Reference Cocean2009), Buza et al. (Reference Buza, Cojocaru-Costea and Turnock2009) and Velcea et al. (Reference Velcea, Toderaş, Crăcea and Negoescu2016). The lack of current data and information regarding the shepherding activities pertaining to the entire studied area was the main limitation of our study, the latest data being provided by the websites of the town halls of some communities being representative of the shepherding activities in Mărginimea Sibiului and by the field research performed by the authors.

The future research directions that this article can engender are related to the enhancement of the challenges generated by the pandemic crisis, which triggered a decline in tourist activities in the area and in pastoral tourism in particular, as well as those related to the need to develop the Romanian agricultural-pastoral sector against the backdrop of the conflict in Ukraine and the diminishing contribution of this country to the world’s agri-food market.