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Carved Wooden Bread Stamp from Maramures
Ref: 1959
As Suffolk or Shropshire are to Middle England, or as the Lake District was to the English Romantics, so Maramures is to Transylvania, a rural backwater where hidden in hills time seems to have stopped.
At least this was the case. Here was a centre of the Romanian wood ivilization, a place where even well in to the 20th century country people lived much as they would have done in the days of Shakespeare. One of the characteristic folk art collectables from this region amongst the distaffs, and other farming utensils are the wooden crosses and bread stamps used in the region’s plentiful wooden churches. The stamps, normally pyramidal-shaped and sometimes with crosses topping them and made of wood and stone were used to “stamp” bread cakes at Easter time. This slightly larger sized one is in the shape of a cross and may also have been used in procession in the Orthodox ritual.
Northern Transylvania 19th cent.
H: 24.5cm (9.6in)
W: 8cm (3.1in)
D: 2cm (0.8in)
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