The pantry and the attic

Narration text

The third room of the house is the pantry. This is where the family kept its provisions: flour, cheese, vegetables, dried fruit, everything needed for a long winter at the foot of the mountains. From the pantry you climbed into the attic.

The curators tell us that at holidays, peasants used to set up smokehouses for meat and sausages in the attic. At the front of the roof there is a small ventilation opening called an ursoaică, through which the smoke escaped. For a hungry and mischievous child, the pantry was a place of temptation.

Readers of the Childhood Memories will remember Nică's other exploits: the cherries stolen from Aunt Mărioara's tree, or the hoopoe from the linden tree. As you walk through the house, notice how small it really was. And yet, from this household came a boy who would become a deacon, a teacher, a close friend of Mihai Eminescu and one of the greatest storytellers in Romanian literature.