The Banat Village Museum in Timisoara has opened a new permanent exhibition showcasing centuries of farming traditions and craftsmanship in Romania's multiethnic Banat region, highlighting the agricultural tools and techniques that shaped rural life.

Titled 'Tools of the Land. Agriculture and Crafts in Multicultural Banat', the exhibition brings together 56 objects illustrating the evolution of agriculture and traditional crafts in a region where different ethnic communities lived side by side and contributed to the development of a strong agricultural tradition.

From ploughs, harrows, sickles and scythes to threshing machines, seed drills, mechanical mowers and grape presses, the exhibits illustrate both the work of the traditional farmer and the gradual modernisation of agriculture in Banat.

At the entrance to the exhibition, visitors are greeted by a monumental object: an oil press from the Arad area, bearing the year of its manufacture, 1877. Like a bell ready to announce the hours of prayer, the wooden oil press was once the pride of the family that owned it, holding the secret of the millions of pumpkin seeds it turned into the fine oil used by housewives on every occasion, from the midday meal eaten towards evening after returning home from work in the fields to fasting cabbage rolls and their meat-filled counterparts served at weddings, Christmas and Easter.

The exhibition's central message is summed up by Andrei Milin, a curator at the Banat Village Museum: the peasant was 'the creator of the civilised world'.

'There are 56 objects on display, but their number will grow, because we intend to keep the exhibition for a long time and display as many pieces from the museum's collection as possible, replacing some of them so that visitors can return and discover something new each time. (...) What does this exhibition reveal? The fact that the peasant was the creator of the civilised world. He invented everything that matters; cities emerged from the peasant's village because, 12,000 years ago, farmers had a surplus of produce and people began selling it at grain markets. Craftsmen joined them, and that is how cities emerged. But peasants were also the first geneticists, because they experimented with plants, organised the agricultural year, made countless innovations and adopted technological advances very quickly. The Banat peasant did not hesitate to spend his modest savings on bringing all kinds of machinery from the United States, including a very smart plough, and within 10 years these machines were ploughing the fields of Banat. We also have threshing machines and threshing implements. Basically, the modern world perfected and diversified what that peasant already had,' Andrei Milin told AGERPRES.

According to Milin, most of the exhibits come from the Ethnographic Collection of the Banat Museum, dating back to the museum's establishment, when it did not yet have separate sections.

'Some of the exhibits were also acquired. All the tools had their own importance at the time, as they were an important part of working the land,' the curator added.

We cannot leave the exhibition without taking another walk through the history contained in each corner, a small fragment of the world of the Banat village.

In Banat, the main traditional ploughing tool was for a long time the wooden plough with a broad iron share and a forged-iron coulter. A major change came in 1850, when the blacksmith Schultz of Comlosu Mare made the first ploughs with an iron share. Ridging ploughs also appeared in the final decades of the 19th century. Unlike other regions of Romania, Banat had developed an early mechanisation of agriculture as far back as the 18th century, encouraged by Habsburg rule, urban regulations, the development of nearby mining areas and commercial links with the European market.

The imperial colonisation patent of 1782 required every newly established household to have a basic set of tools: a plough, hoe, spade, pitchfork, harrow, scythe and sickle.

'Harvesting grain was one of the most demanding stages of the agricultural year on a Banat farm. Manual harvesting meant almost four weeks of strenuous work, with reapers getting up before three in the morning and going to bed after ten at night. For a long time after the Germans colonised Banat, sickles were also used during the harvest to ensure that none of the valuable ears of grain were lost. There were grinding tools that crushed the grain by rubbing it between two hard surfaces. Fruit processing, a tradition brought by the German colonists, was carried out using manual tools until the mechanisation of vineyards in the 20th century, alongside the traditional processing of fruit for making spirits, which has survived to this day. We also have tools used in cooperage for making barrels, because plum brandy production developed alongside fruit growing in the mountainous part of Banat. The choice of wood was crucial to the quality of a barrel. Acacia and oak were used mainly for vessels for spirits and wine, and less frequently mulberry or plum wood,' Andrei Milin explained.

Few subjects illustrate the technical diversity of traditional Banat better than milling, with almost every type of mill known in Central Europe, from the hand mill to the industrial mill powered by an electric motor.

A wooden washing machine and wooden clothes dryer testify to the ingenuity of rural households, where people, having relatively few clothes, had to wash what they wore very frequently.

In front of the pottery, used to make vessels for storing water, grain and other products, the curator reveals one of the potters' traditions: they would fast before beginning work, because food had to be kept in vessels that were spiritually clean.

'Potters worked with clay, but in a divine way. (...) You will not find a potter without arthrosis, because clay is very cold, regardless of how hot it is outside. Blacksmiths, by contrast, worked with fire, which is also a purifying element, but also evokes the world of hell,' the curator said.

In Banat, the production of agricultural tools and machinery developed from the second half of the 19th century and during the interwar period. One notable example was the factory in Bocsa, where a factory producing agricultural machinery and tools had been operating since 1898 and later became the Bocsa Metal Construction Enterprise. More than 20,000 ploughs were produced there annually during the interwar period. The factory is mentioned in works on the history of Romanian technology.

Until after the First World War, Banat grain — wheat, maize, barley, alfalfa and clover — became a 'brand' on the European market because of its superior quality, while flour made from locally grown wheat was known as 'Hungarian flour' and competed with bakery products from overseas. AGERPRES (RO - writing by: Otilia Halunga; EN - writing by: Simona Iacob)