Hundreds of students attend every year the creative camps initiated and led by well-known actor and ”maskology” expert Paul Buta, at the Vatra cu Dor museum in the Galati commune of Sivita; Buta built the museum – the name of which would translate as “The Hearth of Yearn” – with his own hands, attentively following the Lower Danube traditions.

Photo credit (c): Dan PAIC / AGERPRES ARCHIVE

At the beginning of each event, the master craftsman uses to give the teenagers and visitors some input on how the idea occurred to him to set up this museum, which includes a traditional house and pottery, mask-making, weaving and carpentry workshops.

Photo credit (c): Dan PAIC / AGERPRES ARCHIVE

“Works started back in 2003 and I paid everything out of the pocket. All I had saved for an apartment in Galati, I invested in this site I bought with an abandoned house on it. In my folly I thought I’d be able to inaugurate it in six months, but there was extraordinarily much work to do and then the clay doesn’t dry out when you want it to, rain doesn’t fall at your wish, neither does the sun show up at your desire, and I had to postpone the moment for two years during which time I effectively worked with my wife and with our two boys. We only had a few women whom I asked to come and help plaster the beautiful front walls of this traditional house. But it emerged exactly how I had pictured it in my dreams, from the wayside cross at the court entrance, carved from an acacia at the gate, to the tiniest corner, where we use to do some grill and wash it down with a jug of wine. Even the weeds, I placed them where I knew they had to grow near the fence,” Paul Buta told AGERPRES.

The museum includes a traditional homestead: the two-room dwelling house with thatched roof, a gallery with clay-floor porch and the kitchen. Each of them is complete with the necessary tool kit: the kitchen with the wooden trough for bread kneading, the traditional cooking pans and trays, the clay pots where raw milk is put to ferment into buttermilk, the wooden salt cellar, the wooden plate one overturns the polenta on, plus an assortment of wooden spoons.

The living room has straw mattresses and old rugs made of hemp or wool hanging on the walls. The homestead is surrounded by a wattle fence and has a water well going 37-m deep into the ground.

There’s a summer kitchen with the traditional bread-baking oven, and next to the kitchen is the pottery workshop with the clay-shaping wheel, and the carpentry workshop with tools some of which are no longer used today, as the manual wood auger. None of the workshops, nor the traditional house have electricity, and rushlights or gas lamps are used to provide light.

Photo credit (c): Dan PAIC / AGERPRES ARCHIVE

Photo credit (c): Dan PAIC / AGERPRES ARCHIVE

The weaving workshop is equipped with a weaving loom and a dowry chest of the kind girls used to stock in past times in anticipation of their marriage; it includes hand-sewn pillows with traditional models like the tree of life, the bird soul, solar rosettes, rugs, carpets woven in the pick-and-pick technique.

Photo credit (c): Dan PAIC / AGERPRES ARCHIVE

“The girls can see how the shuttle and weft pass through the warp yarns and how a span of cloth is woven. Here are also the tools needed to produce the weaving yarn: the distaff used to spin the wool, the spindle, the wool to be carded, they can see how to make the wool balls, they can get accustomed with yarn plying and with wool dyeing in natural colors traditionally obtained from leaves, bark, roots of sorrel, burdock, all in various colors and hues. Mother Mariuta or mother Vioara, some of my female neighbors, would come every time I invite them and they tuck the distaff in the waist belt and spin, it’s a delight for visitors,” the actor says.

The pottery workshop — initially a horse stable — was transformed after a traditional model into a beautiful room, and has a potter’s wheel mounted inside; in Galati County there’s just an old pottery center at Radesti, but activity there has been discontinued since long.

Photo credit (c): Dan PAIC / AGERPRES ARCHIVE

“I thought that those who come here, especially young people, should not see just masks, fabrics, carpentry, carvings, but pottery as well. It’s more attractive to put your hands in the mud and start doing a two-handle pot, because many think it’s a piece of cake: you just fix the lump of clay on the wheel and get the dish ready in an instant. Well, when they sit down in the workshop they see it’s not just like that, but they get some extraordinary memories because no matter how many hours they would spend in front of the wheel, they would never accomplish a clay pot without some initiation of at least two or three weeks. In my home village in Sivita, potter Marcel Mocanu provides instruction, or I even plan to invite master potters from Horezu to the creative camps for children,” Buta says.

The actor also initiates the children in the mysteries of mask-making, just as mother Safta, wife of Caramalau, an elder from the Fundenii Vechi village whom he calls “his expert in folk mask artistry”, helped him cut his teeth in the craft.

Photo credit (c): Dan PAIC / AGERPRES ARCHIVE

The old woman taught him to make masks that are unique in the country from halves of gourd, a sort of non-edible squash, and use an aubergine, a nut, a potato as accessories, because masks would play just one night after which they are destroyed and these would come in handier than, for instance, a rag nose. Children are taught to produce characters, not masks.

Paul Buta says that he bought a part of the museum items from the village elders and others were offered to him by the old folks when they grasped what he was set to do. He received decade-old towels with the request to place them at the wayside cross.

“I listened to their wish, so the cross has a towel on it all the time. The towels are from the village elders, and I just alternate them, wash them and replace them with others, so as to please everybody.”

Paul Buta says that the museum was organized for one purpose alone. “I wanted to get the children and the young out of the concrete blocks and bring them in this natural environment that is the ‘Vatra cu Dor’ living museum in Sivita, and I call it a living museum because I cannot stand the idea of a museum where visitors just come and look at some items, then leave asking themselves ‘what was actually this all about?’ I’m interested in this interaction, in what really happens, what the children really do, not just visit, but have some hands-on experience. Not all will succeed to go to all four workshops, but if at least half of them get dirty with clay, trying to do something, if the other half takes on the weaving loom and see how a belt or a pair of pants, half a yard of cloth is woven, it’s OK, these are memories for them to keep and they will know how to recognize the value of an object.”

Photo credit (c): Dan PAIC / AGERPRES ARCHIVE

Paul Buta wants to organize weeks dedicated to pottery, mask crafting, carpentry and weaving in every quarter of the year, with students from Galati high schools attending and learning the tricks of the trade from craftsmen from all corners of the country: Horezu, Maramures, Radauti or Bacau.

Mask-creating actor Paul Buta is nationally and internationally recognized as “an authentic maskology expert sprung from the spiritual matrix of Lower Moldavia,” as reputed Academician Romulus Vulcanescu said; he participated in dozens of exhibitions in the country and in Paris, Seujon and Macon — France; Venice — Italy; Odessa — Ukraine; Chisinau — the Republic of Moldova.

Buta is the only Romanian mask creator to have 12 masks on display at the anthropology ”Museum of Man” in Paris.

Some of his masks were purchased by museums in Tulcea, Sibiu, Paris or belong to private collections in the country or abroad, like Germany, Australia, France, Sweden, the USA.

53-year old Paul Buta is an actor at the “Nae Leonard” musical theatre in Galati.

Sources: AGERPRES