National Geographic has a remarkable article and photos of life in Transylvania. The article is honest about the hardships of living a non-modern life. It’s not Pioneer Woman. At the same time, the scenes are so warm and domestic that you secretly hope that it never changes.
Apt. 11d 
I got to wonder if the photos aren’t staged. They’re shelling corn with their bare hands, but there’s a hand-cranked machine that does that. My dad was using it in the 1930s. Stacking hay by hand seems plausible, but cutting and raking it without using the horse when you have horses seems bizarre.
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Between the ages of 30 and 70 the women all appear to look the same age. I suppose early multiple childbirth and hard physical labor prematurely ages you, but it keeps you in shape when you get old.
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“…cutting and raking it without using the horse when you have horses seems bizarre.”
They might just not have the proper equipment (there would have been awful shortages during the communist days) to use with horses and never had the money to buy new equipment as it became available. Also, the communists elsewhere were notoriously rough on anybody who knew how to farm effectively.
I watched this movie recently:
“Tales from the Golden Age” (2009)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1422122/
I remember once seeing a guy in the Russian Far East plowing a large survival garden with himself harnessed to the plow.
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In Russia in the 90s, it was not that difficult to find villages without running water. The Soviet government’s priorities were pretty screwed up–space and nukes, yes, toilets and telephones, no.
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My dad grew-up without running water or electricity (except for a radio on a battery), but they still had a corn sheller and a horse-drawn rake. I don’t see how you can have a wagon pulled by horses (and a TV) and not figure the rake thing. That’s several centuries old.
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Anyway, I don’t know any Transylvanians, but my impression of Russians (who have immigrated to the U.S.) is that they are both too friendly and too scary. Too drunk when they drink and too often sober. I don’t get them.
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The ecological diversity may remain; there is roughly similar small-scale dairy farming in mountain valleys in Austria. Beyond that, I can’t really see wishing subsistence farming on people in 21st-century Europe. A stronger economy in the towns and cities, though, so that people don’t leave the farms to find nothing available elsewhere.
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MH, please remember that corn shellers and horse drawn rakes, not to mention horses, cost money. many people in poverty cannot amass even a small amount of capital for luxuries.
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