The valley where wooden churches still reach toward heaven and farmers still scythe by hand — the part of Europe that the 20th century forgot to change.
Eight of them are UNESCO World Heritage sites — tall, dark, impossibly delicate structures built without iron nails, raised by village craftsmen whose names were never recorded. The oldest dated one at Ieud traces to 1364. Most still hold Sunday service.
At Săpânța, a local woodcarver began painting grave crosses with cheerful colours and irreverent biographical poems in the 1930s. The tradition continued after his death. It is simultaneously funny, moving, and entirely Romanian in its refusal to treat death with false solemnity.
Europe's last working industrial narrow-gauge steam railway runs into the Vaser Valley forest, used by loggers and tourists side by side. The locomotive is from the 1950s. The forest it enters is old-growth. The combination is unlike anything else on the continent.