Romania Maramures Wooden Churches Route (127 km)
Baia Mare to Sapanta
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Why this ride
127 km one way from Baia Mare - plan on about 2 h 08 of riding. The stops in between: Surdesti, Barsana and Sighetu Marmatiei. A steady touring day rather than a sprint.
Roadbook
- Baia Mare
start
Baia Mare means the big mine, and the town has earned it. For centuries, gold, silver, lead and copper were dug from the hills around it, and the city grew rich on metal, with medieval Hungarian kings granting it privileges and encouraging German miners to settle. A hundred and thirty-six thousand people live here now, in a bustling northern city with a lively centre, and the mining past is visible in the old buildings, the museum and the scarred hills around.
The old centre has a few good surprises. Stephen's Tower, a Gothic bell tower from the fifteenth century, is the best-known landmark, and the Butchers' Tower is a remnant of the old defences. The main square has colourful baroque houses, and the Mining Museum tells the story of the trade. In the late nineteenth century, the town became a magnet for painters, who set up a colony, the Baia Mare School, that produced much of the country's modern landscape painting.
There is a darker chapter too. In January 2000, a dam holding the waste from a gold-processing plant near the town burst, and cyanide-laden water flowed into the Lăpuș and then the Someș and Tisza rivers, killing fish for hundreds of kilometres, one of the worst environmental accidents in Europe at the time. The rivers recovered, but the memory lingers, and mining remains a sensitive issue here.
Baia Mare is the gateway to Maramureș, a remote, deeply traditional region of valleys and wooden churches. Eight of the churches, tall and narrow with shingle-covered roofs and slender spires, are listed by UNESCO, and the ride leads through villages where carved gates, haystacks and horse carts are an ordinary sight. The roads wind up and down the valleys, with bends and short climbs, and surfaces can be uneven, with potholes after winter. Heavy traffic on the main roads includes lorries and slow vehicles, and animals wander across the road.
Fuel and services are plentiful in Baia Mare, with stations on the outskirts and shops in the centre. It is a good place to fill up and eat, since villages in the valleys have fewer options. A bowl of sour soup, ciorbă, and a plate of grilled meat will see you through the day.
Start early, take time to talk to people, and bring a scarf if you intend to enter a church.
- Surdesti
scenic
Some churches are tall for the sake of it, and Șurdești's is one of them. The wooden church of the Holy Paraskeva, in the village of Șurdești in Maramureș, has a bell tower that stabs about fifty metres into the sky, which is often claimed to be the tallest wooden church in Europe. It was built in the eighteenth century by local carpenters using oak and spruce, with a steep, slender spire that rises from a modest nave like a pencil from a pocket. Along with several others in the region, it is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The Maramureș villages sit in hills and valleys in northern Romania, and they preserve a way of life that has vanished from most of Europe. Hay is stacked in conical ricks around wooden houses, carved gateways stand in front of farmyards, women in headscarves walk beside horse carts, and the churches are tucked among orchards and fields. The building tradition is more than decoration: after the Tatar raids of the Middle Ages, and later under foreign rule when Romanian Orthodox and Greek Catholic communities were limited in how high or grand their stone buildings could be, the villagers built in wood instead and turned the material into art.
The riding here is slow and rewarding. The roads between villages are narrow and winding, mostly asphalt but patchy in places, with horse-drawn carts, cyclists and grazing animals sharing them. Do not push the pace. The best moments come when you stop beside a hayfield, switch off the engine and listen to the bells. Early autumn is lovely, with plum brandy being distilled in the yards and the hills turning orange, while spring brings meadows full of wildflowers. In rain the track to the church can be muddy, so keep to the paving.
You can usually find someone to open the church if you ask politely, and a small donation is appropriate. Dress modestly: covered shoulders and knees are respectful inside. Fuel is not a given in Șurdești, so use Baia Sprie or Baia Mare nearby, where there are proper stations, and fill up before you wander the side roads.
The local food is hearty, with cabbage rolls, polenta, smoked meats and sweet cheese pastries, often served with a glass of țuică, the plum spirit, which you should take in moderation if you are riding.
- Barsana
scenic
Maramureș is the corner of Romania where the twentieth century arrived late and politely, and Bârsana is a fine place to see what it left alone. The village strings itself along the Izei valley under forested hills, with high carved wooden gates in front of the farmhouses, haystacks built round tall poles in the meadows, and women in headscarves going about their business as if no coach had ever stopped. Sighetu Marmației, the nearest real town, lies about fifteen kilometres to the north-west, and the Ukrainian border is not far beyond it.
The wooden churches are the reason for coming. Several of them in this district are on the UNESCO list, and the old church of Bârsana, dating from the early eighteenth century, is one of them, a dark, steep-roofed building with a shingled spire whose walls are painted inside with saints and sinners. Higher up the slope stands a much younger monastery, built in the 1990s in the same timber tradition, whose great wooden church is among the tallest of its kind in Europe. It is a strange and gentle sight to find a new building made with the old skills, in oak and shingle, and it gives you a sense that the tradition is alive rather than preserved.
The roads in the valley are narrow but mostly sound, running through villages where horse carts are still a common sight, so keep your speed down and stay alert for animals, children and carts coming round the bends. Potholes appear after winter. The valley is at its best in late spring, when the meadows are full of flowers, and again in September, when the hay is stacked and the mist hangs in the hollows. Summer afternoons bring thunderstorms, and the road gets slick fast.
Food here is simple and good. Ask for bulz, a hearty dish of polenta with cheese and sour cream, and a glass of țuică or pălincă, the local plum brandy, which is stronger than it looks. Fuel is available in Sighet or Vișeu de Sus, so fill the tank beforehand, and do not count on card machines in the village shops. Many families offer rooms in their own houses, and breakfast comes with homemade jam, cheese, and sometimes a lecture on the gate in the yard.
- Sighetu Marmatiei
scenic
Sighetu Marmației sits where the Iza meets the Tisa, and across the Tisa is Ukraine, so the whole town has the slightly watchful air of a border place that has changed hands more than once. It was Hungarian for centuries, Czechoslovak for a short while, then Romanian, and in the early twentieth century it had one of the largest Jewish communities in the region. Elie Wiesel was born here in 1928, and his childhood home is now a small museum. The town is the biggest in Maramureș, with about forty thousand people, and it has every service you could want, including plenty of fuel.
Two places in town are worth the time. The Memorial of the Victims of Communism and of the Resistance occupies a former prison where, in the early 1950s, the communist regime locked up political figures, academics, priests and others who had stood in its way, and many died in the cells. It is a stark, serious museum, and few visitors leave it unmoved. Outside the town, the open-air village museum has gathered old houses, barns and churches from around the region, which gives a good summary of the carpentry traditions you will see in the villages that follow.
For the rider, Sighet is a hub. Roads lead east along the Iza valley toward the wooden churches at Bârsana, Ieud and Șurdești, north to the border at the Tisa, and west to Săpânța, where the Merry Cemetery, with its painted wooden crosses carrying jokes and portraits of the dead, is the single most famous sight in the region. The surfaces on the main roads are patchy but passable, and truck traffic is heavy on the national road. Keep your speed down in villages, where children, dogs and horse carts share the tarmac.
Eat well here. Markets in the town sell cheese, smoked meats, honey and pickles, and the local restaurants serve cabbage rolls, grilled sausage, and soup in bread. Pălincă, the plum brandy, is offered with every meal, and refusing it too often is thought slightly rude. Come in September if you can, when the hay is in, the plums are ripe and the light over the hills has an autumn softness, and the wood smoke from village chimneys drifts across the valley.
- Sapanta
finish
Săpânța is a village at the far north of Romania, hard against the Ukrainian border along the Tisza river, and it is known for a graveyard that makes people laugh and then think. The Merry Cemetery, Cimitirul Vesel, is packed with wooden crosses painted in a deep blue, each carved with a small scene from the life of the person buried below and a short verse in rhyming Romanian, sometimes tender and sometimes teasing. A shepherd with his flock, a weaver at her loom, a driver beside his lorry, and occasionally a verse about the dead man's unfortunate fondness for drink.
The idea came from a local woodcarver, Stan Ioan Pătraș, who started carving these crosses in the 1930s and carried on for decades, training apprentices who still keep the tradition going. There are hundreds of crosses now, and the cemetery has become one of the most visited places in Maramureș. The philosophy behind it is gentle: death is part of a life that was worth living, and the honest summary is better than a solemn one.
Maramureș is one of the best-preserved rural regions in Europe, where the wooden churches, tall and shingled with needle-sharp spires, are listed by UNESCO, and carved gateways stand outside farmhouses. The ride up here is easy and slow, along valley roads through haystack country, with scythes still in use and horse carts sharing the tarmac. The surface is mixed, so keep your speed modest, watch for potholes and for animals, and remember that many roads here have no hard shoulder.
The village has plenty of small guesthouses, and the restaurants near the cemetery serve hearty local food: stuffed cabbage, polenta with sheep cheese and sour cream, and the plum brandy called horinca or țuică, which is stronger than it looks. For fuel, ride to Sighetu Marmației, the main town of the area, about fifteen kilometres to the west, and fill up there before you set out for the mountains. A final point: because the Ukrainian border is close, keep your passport with you and do not wander towards the river banks and border posts, which are monitored.