Today is Romania’s National Day!

Romania is my country and the sweet hills covered in vineyards are my home place.

I have yet to find more beauty in the world as to measure the balmy vineyards in the shade of moonlit evenings.

Here, in Romania, Beauty follows you everywhere. When you think you’ve lost it, it’s there breathing magic on your neck, tugging at your sleeve with gorgeous sunsets, misty mountains, bluish lakes, Shire-like emerald hills, fortresses that once kept invaders at bay…

Romania is like its people. Beaming with startling beauty and when you think you’ve had it all and seen it all, there appears another corner of mesmerizing one-of-a-kind piece of marvel… A patriarchal silence clings to all, the same silence of the world being born. Nothing to be heard, only the silent song of the fields, trees, hills, mountains, lakes, rivers and waterfalls.

Life is like a foreign country. “Literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we’re visiting, life.”- Ursula K. Le Guin

In my country, the most useful guide is our folklore. Here, stories emerge from under each stone or any trail in the mountains as mediators between the ideal and the real. The land is teeming with legends, the one depicting the magnificence of Curtea De Arges Monastery epitomizes the sacrifice that must be done for building something of lasting beauty, so as to cut out your heart and lay it as foundation.

This is a text written in 2017 for the blog of a dear friend. https://mohamadkarbi.com/romania/

In the picture – Curtea de Arges Monastery