Reservations open for an eight night Maramures wooden church trip in the hay cutting season

Eight churches, one carpenter's grammar

Eight wooden churches in Maramures went on the World Heritage list in 1999. They are not the only ones; the county holds close to a hundred wooden churches. These eight were picked as the clearest examples. Barsana, Budesti, Desesti, Ieud, Plopis, Poienile Izei, Rogoz and Surdesti.

They are built of squared oak or fir logs, notched at the corners, and most sit on stone or on oak sills. The plan is small, three rooms in a line, and the walls are low. Everything dramatic happens above them: a double pitched shingle skin, then a tower over the porch carrying a spire. At Surdesti the spire reaches about 54 meters, far taller than the church is long.

The shingles are split, not sawn, and they weather to silver gray. Look along the log walls for a carved twisted rope running the whole length. Look near the door for a cut sun disc. Both motifs are older than the churches that carry them.

Hay cut by hand, and why it still is

The meadows on the Iza and Mara valleys are mown with a scythe between mid June and late July. This is not a display for visitors. The plots are narrow and belong to many owners at once. Most sit on slopes where a machine would slide. One man cuts about a third of an acre in a morning.

The grass is turned, then built into a cone around a center pole. Each cone is five or six feet high, so that rain runs off. They stand in the fields for weeks. From the road a valley in July looks stitched.

Because the ground is cut late and never fertilized, the plant list is long. Surveys in Carpathian meadows of this kind have recorded more than fifty flowering species, in a plot the size of a small room. In May, before the cut, the same fields are mostly yellow and white and knee high. You walk through them rather than around.

Painted crosses at Sapanta

The cemetery at Sapanta holds about eight hundred oak crosses. Each is carved with a picture of what the dead person did for a living, and painted in one strong blue. A local carpenter began it in 1935, and the workshop he started has kept going since.

The pictures are literal. A driver at his wheel, a woman at her loom, a soldier, a man struck by a train. The verses under them are written in the first person, in the voice of the dead. A good number are blunt about drink, bad marriages and who was at fault. Nothing is softened for the family.

It is a small place and forty minutes covers it. On a July afternoon it is also full, and the noise sits badly against the object, so we go early. The church behind the cemetery is new wooden work from the 1990s, tall and unweathered; give it ten minutes.

By the fifth church you stop seeing them

Eight churches in eight days is more than most people can hold. By the fifth, the shingles, the low door and the smell of old wood run together. You catch yourself checking your phone. We break the week on purpose with two days that have no church in them at all.

The interiors are dark, and painted walls from the eighteenth century sit under two centuries of candle soot. The windows are about the size of a sheet of paper. The strongest painting is legible for a minute or so once your eyes adjust. Photographs of it come out badly almost every time.

Two practical points. Several churches are locked and someone in the village keeps the key. We arrange that ahead, and it can still cost half an hour standing at a gate. Afternoon thunderstorms are ordinary from June onward. The lanes are narrow, and nothing on this route happens quickly.

Where $1,485 else goes

This departure sits on the $1,485 rung, and it is not alone there. The office keeps every trip at that figure on one page so the number can be seen doing different work in different parts of the world. It does not rank them and will not tell you which is the better buy, because that is not a judgement a figure supports.

• The whole of the $1,485 rung
• All eight figures side by side
• Every departure in one table