If you miss a holiday like as grandparents, meals and clean air, re...

If you ever going the steps through the Mestecanis step to Vatra Dornei, it is worth a stop in Ciocăneşti, a village-museum where everything is to be visited. The place is easy to find, even if the locality lies at the foot of the Suhard Mountains. Going to Vatra Dornei, stop at Iacobeni and then make 7 kilometers right, on your way to Maramures. The first settlement that comes into your way is the Ciocăneştiul, lying on the meadow long, long as the valley on which it is seated. You will recognize it, I guarantee you, after the decorations of the houses, representing reasons of traditional folk costume, unique architectural monuments around the world.

About Ciocăneşti, the land from which Stephen, the Lord of Moldavia, procured his weapons for the battles with the Tutankhamad or the Turks, the elders of the village would tell you a whole life; time to have, stay listening to their legends. The place of wild beauty, both in the summer core and in the midst of cold winters, as if you would not let go. Everything related to this settlement, founded with the dismantling of Bogdan, the Maramurean voivode, is created, without the fear of using a cliché, in a living museum where the exhibits are both houses, steep meadows, hidden hills, Bistrita The golden one shrugging through the shroud, the people, and then the whole array of customs and traditions unaltered by the passage of time. Not for nothing, a panel placed in the center of the commune warns passers-by that the tourist season here is permanent.

In recent years, the village's name has become famous even in the farthest corners of the country, but also abroad, thanks to a mayor devoted to his native lands, Gheorghe Tomoioaga, who has fulfilled his mission from his grandparents: not to let forgetting the treasure of popular art from the past.

Through his care, for six years now, at the Great Post in Ciocăneşti, there is a National Festival of Eggs, which is met in all the Romanian centers with tradition, and in August, by St. Mary, it has a National Trout Festival, where organizers are preparing trout, lipan and horseradish fishing competitions, rare fish, float demonstrations and parades of the popular harbor.
Also on this occasion the voivode Bogdan from Maramureş is rebuilt to Moldova. "On the evening of August 14, the lights turn off in the village and the Bogdan's men, the Maramures, come from the Tatars' Road, descend from Colac Hill and the Moldovan troops descend from Obcina Mestecanis. I come with torches, riding in popular costumes and meet at Bistrita water. It is a special event, "said Mayor of the village, Gheorghe Tomoioaga.

These are the great events of the village, but the usual tourist does not have time to get bored on an ordinary day. There are so many places to see, to be talked to so many people, to admire so much beauty and wonder in front of the small works of art that are the eggs "cloaked" by Ciocăneşti that time, no matter how elastic it is, it does not allow you everything.

The first image of the Ciocanesti, which will definitely remain imprinted on the retinue of the memories, is that of the decorated houses, like them, with brightly colored motifs inspired by the traditional port.

The first house with such architecture was built in 1950, by the very father of the current mayor, the mason master Dumitru Tomoiaga, and can be admired today. It's called the Leontina Taran House, and the 82-year-old bridegroom tells anyone who passes the stitch threshold, from which he took over the patterns that he asked the craftsman to embellish his home. Subsequently, every neighbor who built his house took the habit of decorating it with folk motifs, giving rise to a real contest. So, in a few years, Ciocăneşti woke up, "dressed in" as a little girl.

Today, in order for the specificity of the village to remain unaltered, the Local Council approved by a decision the obligation that anyone who is building a house to decorate the facade with the already established motives.