The Ceanu Mare Festival and Competion is for carol singers. It is the only one of its kind in Romania. This fifth year it attracted contestants from as many as 8 counties and as far afield as Constanta, on the other side of the country.

Ceanu Mare (literally “Big Pot”) is a hill-top village of no more than a few hundred families in Transilvania. How do the inhabitants of such an isolated community manage to accomplish an event of such national importance in contemporary Romania?

The Ceanu Marea carol festival is indeed a model of community effort in present-day Romania. It is also an instructive example of today’s clash of cultures between the old, authoritarian, communist Romania and the emerging, community led initiatives of a more democratic, modern Romania.

The Ceanu Mare Carol Festival is the brainchild and sole initiative of a local school-teacher, 55 year-old Istvan Czekely (pronounced “Sekei”), a man so modest that at the prize-giving I attended he could not be found. The contestants themselves pulled him out from behind the cramped community-center stage to shouts of applause from 500+ assembled children, parents, local residents and pupils: “Szekely, Szekely, Szekely, Szekely….”

The hub of the festival’s organization is the village school, where Isvan Czekely teaches. The school building has been transformed into a massive canteen with local mums tend huge pots of goulash and sarmale, local specialities in this multicultural Romanian – Hungarian region, and enough for the assembled 500. This is the time of the year when families slaughter a pig or two anyway, and so there is plenty of food to go around. In many a yard here, the men of the household can be seen burning the bristle off their Christmas dinner – a feast of cuts from every part of the beast, including kidneys, liver, toba (a sort of brawn), and spicy caltabosi (pronounced “caltabosh”) and other tasty sausages.

The school’s young director, special needs teacher Nicolae Petruta and his fiancée, fellow teacher Ioana Bocos, this year masterminded sponsorship for the event, attracting heavyweights such as ProCredit Bank, a Romanian bank backed by the EBRD and Germany’s Commerzbank, and putting the school and its staff at the Festival’s disposal.

The local authority has not put in a penny, but as so often happens here, at the festival prize-giving, the mayor now takes all the credit. Mayors, after all, are elected officials and elections are due in 2008. Since school directorships are still political posts here, Nicolae Petruta has to bite his tongue or risk losing his job. The money prizes the mayor hands out at the festival’s closing session are not even his to distribute either – they are funded by the local Casa de Cultura, the local offshoot of the Ministry of Culture. But here, in a typical Transilvanian village, the mayor still reigns supreme.

Apart from this small money contribution by the Casa de Cultura, everything else is a community effort: 300+ carol-singers and their chaperones are all housed in village homes. Food from the village has been pooled for central preparation and meals service in the village school. Programs, flyers, lapel-badges and prizes have all been sponsored by local businesses (some whom obtained by the Ratiu Family Foundation). Such community efforts as these are rare indeed in present-day Romania. And those who attempt them can usually expect obstruction rather than support from their local authority, because, as one local mayor proudly announced to me: “Nothing happens in this community unless I say so”.

Such is the success of the Ceanu Mare Carol Festival that other traditional artists are also attracted these days, performing in a kind of “Fringe” to the main event during program breaks and at mealtimes: traditional instruments, ancient renderings of traditional Christmas themes and national costumes are all featured here, as well as exhibitions of icons and collages.

Over an hour passes while we are entertained to still more sarmale as well as coffee and cakes in the school director’s office. In the school visitors’ book I write: “How good it is to remember that God came to earth as a child, so that we might come to Him”.

Then his deputy bursts in: “Domnul Director….We have to get the jury into the hall. They have been deliberating for over two hours now and the children are getting impatient”. The deputy is dispatched to fetch in the jury while we make our way over to the village hall, where there are rhythmic shouts of “Jury, Jury, Jury, Jury…..”, and a burst of applause as we enter a space packed so tight that children appear to be hanging off the walls and the ceiling…

Although not a member of the jury, I make a short speech recognizing those who have traveled furthest (applause), and thank the organizations who have given the prizes we have brought today, in particular Turda’s Potaissa Cooperative whose Christmas globes sell as far afield as the USA. I make things short because these kids want results and prizes….not long speeches (which were yet another feature of communist life).

And the prize-giving begins: delegates from each group struggle up to the stage to collect stacks of wooden “treasure houses” from the Potaissa Cooperative and sacks full of Christmas goodies, all sponsored by local businesses. A neighbour of ours from Turda, whose family own land here and a former Orthodox priest now ministering again according to the Greek-Catholic rite of his ancestors, both help me with the distribution. We have 98 prizewinners to satisfy.

But night is beginning to fall. The road home will be freezing over. So I leave my two deputies to complete the distribution, bid my farewell to Director Petruta and Prof. Czekely, and struggle to the door amidst a crowd of smiling faces. The biggest prize of all is still to come and these proceedings look set to go on until late…

Outside, laden with gifts of this season’s jams: quince, apricot, rose-hip and plum, we clamber into our van. The snow-plough has just passed through, leaving a swathe of sand every 20 meters. Everything else is white with freshly fallen snow, except for the outlines of the roadside nut trees and haphazard, drunken-looking telegraph poles. As we drive gingerly back down to Turda, our headlamps pick out a flock of goats out in the road ahead. Further on, a flock of sheep, mounds of yellow wool against the snow with their shepherd indistinguishable from his sheep, except for his black hat and stave.

This is the first year since my arrival in July 2004 that we too have celebrated the Day of the Dead as a family. My 83 old uncle Mircea Ratiu and my aunt Rodica returned home to Turda this last Spring, after more than 30 years in Oakland, California. “I’ve come home to get myself buried” he says with a grin. And today he can’t wait to visit the family cemetery… “Did you get flowers?… The candles?….Time to leave?”

At the cemetery, which we reach only with difficulty due to a massive traffic jam on the hilltop, we find none other than the same Orthodox priests – Father Rau (= Father Bad) and his assistant Fr Marius – who today look after what used to be our own family church until it was seized by the communists in 1948 when the Greek Catholic rite was suppressed by the government and handed over to the Orthodox. I know Father Rau quite well, and enjoy chiding him (with a grin of course) with such words as: “Father Rau, doesn’t it feel bad to be hanging on to stolen goods?” I can do this because Father Rau is my orthodox brother after all…

All around us in the dusk, families are scrambling over the tumbled graves, seeking out parents, grandparents and other relatives and talking in low voices. This is how Turda children learn their family history. They set down their flowers on the graves and place candles, wherever they can find shelter from the breeze, and chat.

The two priests are saying prayers for their dead colleague Father Lupu, who somehow got himself buried within the confines of our own small family cemetery during the communist 1980s – something that infuriates my uncle Mircea because he was in California at the time and could do nothing to stop it. What is more, Father Lupu’s grave is large and ornate, whereas our own family graves are simple and small. Uncle Mircea would have liked that space for himself one day. But Father Lupu has taken up space for three..

As Uncle Mircea and I show up, the two priests politely switch from Father Lupu’s grave to saying the traditional prayers for our own dead… When they are finished I thank them and ask for news of Father Lupu’s widow – because I have often noticed that her name and birth-date are already on the grave, but her death date is blank. Yes, indeed, I learn, she’s alive and well….just go to Str Eminescu 29 and ask for Dmna Preoteasa – Mrs Priest.

I confess that my plan is to visit Mrs Lupu with my uncle, because once he meets her I suspect it will be much more difficult for us to prevent her joining her late husband in our family cemetery as well. Surely, I reason to myself, we can find room for everyone… We could even, as my wife Pamela suggests, turn part of the remaining family cemetery space into a Greek-style mausoleum, with slots for further generations…

But my uncle Mircea is one step ahead of me: “Priests were traditionally buried in the churchyard, not here in the cemetery. We’ll persuade Mrs Lupu that the churchyard is the right place for her and her husband to rest, and for Father Rau that will be hard to refuse.”

But meanwhile Father Rau and Father Marius have taken their leave and set off down the hill for their evening service. Such discussions as these can wait.

We finish setting our own candles – a struggle because it’s wet and breezy – and then stand awhile before the graves of my father, my aunt, my grandparents, my great grandparents and many others. As we turn to leave I look back: the whole hillside is dancing with candles. It is a single community of light.