#ethnography

What is lost when a village empties: a living peasant house in Florițoaia Nouă

The Culture Section published a few photographs from a peasant house kept intact in Florițoaia Nouă, in the Ungheni district — a porch with carved wooden pillars, a rail hung with woven cloths, an icon in the corner, a bread oven. It looks like a pretty gallery. Read with an ethnographer's eye, it is more: a grammar of how Moldovans once lived, kept alive by a single person, at a time when villages are emptying and houses are left without owners.