I remember how I happened to be a guest in a mountain shepherds’ camp. That morning I went out to shoot landscapes with herds of sheeps and cows. I was too brave to get close to sheep, and a dog attacked me. The dog was very angry indeed — I could easily be a wolf — but fortunately I had a stick, which allowed me about 1 meter of untroubled world around me. I even tried to photograph, but it did not work out. So we stood there, me with the stick and the dog with the teeth. After a while a shepherd came to rescue me and invited into their camp, a fenced area around a robust hut and simple raw cheese installations. There were three more men there, not young, tough, seasoned.
We did not talk at all. Not because we had no common topics, for sure we had. But we could not find any common language, even my scientific Roman did not help with their highland Romanian. So I got my lamb soup and was left alone because they went to do — you know what? — to milk the sheep of course! That was something you should have seen.
Milking. The queue of sheep is waiting behind man's backs.
Three men milking several hundreds of sheep. It was arranged ingeniously, something like the Ford’s roll conveyor. The technique is difficult to explain here in words, you better see the pictures. Anyway, it took about ten seconds per sheep, in total more than half an hour. As I learned later, they have to do it three times per day! Wake up, milk, herd out, herd in, milk, herd out, herd in, milk, good night. Some milk fermenting and cheese boiling inbetween. And I thought shepherd is one of most relaxed professions. Of course some clever dogs help them during the day.
Notice THE dog and its still distrustful eyesight.
Most of my travels last year were because of preparing a book about small businesses in nature areas, the project of WWF International called One Europe More Nature. The book is by now ready and its PDF version can be seen here (Size 16 MB).
