Discover Maramures villages at the 7th edition of the Long Road to the Merry Cemetery festival

The Intercultural Traditions Associated, founded by Irish Peter Hurley, is organizing the seventh edition of the Long Road to the Merry Cemetery project during August 14-21.

The festival aims at promoting and supporting the Romanian villages to preserve their traditions. This year, the villages from Maramures are in the limelight, presenting their local particularities.

“In a truly impressive and remarkable community effort countrywide, unprecedented at a festival in Romania, all those 63 villages from Maramures Land got active to participate with a smaller or bigger event, where visitors can meet authentic values of the traditional villages,” said Peter Hurley.

According to him, an impressive number of interactions are available, sort of “micro-journeys” for all those who want to discover and appreciate the culture of the traditional live village.

“We create bridges! Bridges between rural and urban – be it Romanian or foreign urban. Bridges between generations-particularly generations from the countryside – especially in Maramures. We want to confirm that true values are also relevant to the youth, form the city and from the countryside,” the organizers state.

The festival also aims at sending a solidarity message in the name of those over 12,000 villages in Romania.

The 7^th edition this year is presenting the United States of Maramures concept.

The association’s founder, Peter Hurley was born in Ireland in 1968 in a large ten-children family. He came to Romania in 1994 when he was 26 years old and he has been here ever since.