In order at all to understand the Roumanian peasant, we must first of all begin by understanding his religion, which alone gives us the clew to the curiously contrasting shades of his complicated character. Monsieur De Gérando, writing of the Wallacks some forty years ago, says,
“Aujourd’hui leur seul mobile est la religion, si on peut donner ce nom à l’ensemble de leurs pratiques superstitieuses;” and another author, with equal accuracy, remarks that “the whole life of a Wallack is taken up in devising talismans against the devil.”
Historians are very much divided as to the date of the Roumanians’ conversion to Christianity, for while some consider this to have only taken place in the time of Patriarch Photius (in the ninth century), others are of opinion that they embraced Christianity as early as the third century. It is not improbable that during the Roman occupation of Transylvania in the second and third centuries Christians may have come hither, and so imparted their religion to the ancient inhabitants with whom they intermingled.
Up to the end of the seventeenth century all the Transylvanian Roumanians belonged to the Greek Schismatic Church. In the year 1698, however, the Austrian Government succeeded in inducing a great portion of the people to embrace the Greek united faith, and acknowledge the supremacy of the Pope; and at the present day the numbers of the two confessions in Transylvania are pretty equally balanced, with only a small proportion in favor of the Schismatic Church.
The united Roumanians in Transylvania are subject to an archbishop residing at Blasendorf, while those of the Greek Schismatic Church stand under another archbishop, whose seat is at Hermanstadt.
Old chronicles of the thirteenth century make mention of the Wallacks as a people “which, though professing the Christian faith, is yet given to the practice of manifold pagan rites and customs wholly at variance with Christianity;” and even to-day the Roumanians are best described by the paradoxical definition of Christian-pagans, or pagan-Christians.
True, the Roumanian peasant will never fail to uncover his head whenever he passes by a way-side cross, but his salutation to the rising sun will be at least equally profound; and if he goes to church and abstains from work on the Lord’s Day, it is by no means certain whether he does not regard the Friday (Vinere), dedicated to Paraschiva (Venus), as the holier day of the two. The list of other unchristian feast-days is lengthy, and still lengthier that of Christian festivals, in whose celebration pagan rites may yet be traced.
Whoever buries his dead without placing a coin in the hand of the corpse is regarded as a pagan by the orthodox Roumanian. “Nu-i-de-legea-noastra”—he is not of our law—he says of such a one; and whosoever stands outside the Roumanian religion, be he Christian, pagan, Jew, or Mohammedan, is invariably regarded as unclean, and consequently whatever comes in contact with any such individual is unclean likewise.