René Duda

What people wore

Men's field work clothing

Men working in fields in the Bărăgan region wore handmade wool aprons (pistelcă) over their linen drawers (izmene) instead of traditional trousers.

Getting around

Dining habits on interwar Romanian trains

On long train journeys, passengers could either dine in first-class cars or buy food like bread, cheese, and hard-boiled eggs from women selling them from wicker baskets during brief 10 to 15-minute station stops. Third-class passengers often arrived covered in sooty grime from the steam locomotives, a reality they accepted as a natural cost of travel.

At the table

Pork as the preferred meat

While meat was often a luxury reserved for holidays in poor households, pork was the most appreciated meat and a standard part of the diet for many urban workers by the 1930s. In 1935, a kilogram of pork cost between 26 and 56 lei, depending on the quality.

Music

Signaling with the tulnic alphorn

In western Transylvania, young women used the tulnic, a wooden alphorn up to nine feet long, to signal to each other across valleys.

Daily life

Limited infrastructure in Bucharest housing

In 1935 Bucharest, 60 percent of buildings were not connected to the electricity grid, and water was frequently supplied by public wells rather than running water. Many suburban homes were simple earth-and-wood structures.

What it cost

The high cost of footwear

In the interwar period, a pair of shoes cost 605 lei, which made footwear difficult to purchase for many ordinary workers.