I · The letter
A map sent by post to every village
Ion Otescu taught mathematics in Bucharest and would go on to run the Mihai Viteazul high school for forty years. He had spent his childhood in the country, in Ilfov, Vlașca and Buzău, where his parents held land and where his mother collected the villagers' stories and repeated them to him in the evenings. Grown up, he waited for someone better suited than himself to write down what the peasants knew about the sky. When nobody came, he started on it alone.
In 1896 he drew a map of the sky calculated for the latitude of Bucharest, showing every constellation visible from Romania, and had it printed. He posted it to schoolteachers across the country with a letter asking one thing: go to the oldest people in your village and ask them what they call the stars, the sky, the earth, the sun, the moon, the eclipses, the thunder, the clouds, the rain.
Papers came back from seventeen counties. Thirty-nine of them were useful, thirteen from Neamț alone, five from Prahova, three from Argeș. Out of those, and out of what he had from his mother, came the study published in 1907 in the Annals of the Romanian Academy: the only systematic description of the Romanian folk sky, and made in time. Two generations later, the people who could have answered were gone.
What the papers show is a different division of the same stars, made by people who looked up in order to know the hour, the month, and what had to be done in the field the next day.
II · The same stars
The Greeks saw a hunter. The village saw a tool, and then three more.
Today's sky has eighty-eight constellations, with borders ruled by the International Astronomical Union in 1930, straight as land parcels: every star belongs to exactly one box. The sky in Otescu's replies has thirty-nine figures, and their borders run over one another. Nowhere is it clearer than in Orion.
The three stars of the belt are Trisfetițele, the three saints Basil, Gregory and John, whose feast falls on 30 January; in other villages, the kings from the East, or the kings Saul, David and Solomon, or simply three staffs. The same three stars, with Rigel, Saiph and Bellatrix, make Rarița, the small ridging plough used on maize. The same three stars, with Betelgeuse set at the tip, make Sfredelul Mare, the great auger. And between Rigel and the belt, an arc of small stars is Secera, the sickle.
The tool and the church calendar sit in the same points of light, at the same time, and nobody ever had to choose between them. Of the 355 stars the peasant sky uses, ten are worked into more than one figure, and three of those are the belt stars themselves.
The overlapping goes further. The six stars that draw the bull's face are, for some, Taurul, the bull, and for others Vierii, a sow with her piglets behind her: the same six stars, not one more, not one fewer. Beside them, inside the astronomers' single Taurus, stands Cloșca cu pui, the hatching hen, which is the Pleiades and which was the most important group of stars in the sky.
For the Great Auger, the Stellarium figure runs the handle down to Rigel. Otescu says otherwise: the handle is the belt, the point is Betelgeuse, and the point is aimed at the Treasure Chest, which is Pollux, because at the world's end the auger will bore into God's money box. Only that way does the tool point where the story needs it to. The drawing here follows the source.
III · The whole sky
Thirty-nine figures over real stars
The circle below is the sky as seen from the middle of Romania, at 46 degrees north, the way you see it if you walk into the yard and look up: the rim of the circle is the horizon, the centre is the point overhead, north is at the top and east on the left. The stars sit at their real positions, with their real brightness and colour, and the diffuse band is the Milky Way, which the villages called the Slaves' Road.
Drag with a finger or the cursor to move the hour. Choose a figure to read what was said about it.
All thirty-nine
IV · The clock
The hatching hen, the night clock of winter
The Pleiades are a knot of small stars about the width of a fingernail held at arm's length, and in the whole folk sky they do the most work. In winter they were the clock: from how high the Hen had climbed you measured how long was left until dawn. They were the calendar too. Whoever saw her rise on Great Sunday had luck for the year; whoever caught her every morning up to Saint Peter's Day was a person who is never late; and if she stood in the sky at midsummer, she had the power to make the maize grow.
The chart shows, for every night of the year, between six in the evening and six in the morning, when the Hen is above the horizon and the sky dark enough to see her. The blue band running from one corner to the other is the clock itself: the same height, at the same hour, means a different day of the year. The two straight steps, at the end of March and the end of October, are the clock change, the only thing on the chart that comes from us rather than from the sky.
To the left and the right of the band there is the gap. The calculation gives fifty-one nights a year when the Hen never rises in the dark at all, from 2 May to 21 June. She comes back to the sky in the days of Sânziene, Romanian midsummer, and the belief Otescu collected says that if she stands in the sky at Sânziene she makes the maize grow. The feast and the star land at the same place in the year.
Orion's belt, which is the Little Plough and which announced the end of the night with the cry "wake up, the Little Ploughs have risen", is missing ninety-four nights, from 2 May to 3 August. It returns in August, exactly when the harvest starts.
V · The edge
A sky that ends seven and a half degrees up
The southernmost star in the entire peasant sky is Xamidimura, in the tail of the Scorpion, thirty-eight degrees below the celestial equator. From Bucharest, on the best night of the year, it climbs seven and a half degrees above the horizon, about the width of four fingers held at arm's length. From Iași, under five.
Geometry would have allowed more. From Bucharest, stars as far down as forty-five and a half degrees below the equator do rise, at least for an hour. The strip between them and the Scorpion is visible, and in the village sky there is nothing in it. The folk sky stops eight degrees higher than the horizon requires, which is to say exactly where a low star stops being something you can see from the edge of a village.
Of the eighty-eight modern constellations, fifty-one have no figure at all in Otescu's sky. Twenty of them never rise over Romania. Of the remaining thirty-one, nineteen were invented after 1600 to fill the gaps between the older figures: the Lynx, the Giraffe, the Sextant, the Fox, the Lizard, the Microscope. They are precisely the patches of sky where there is nothing to see, and the people who named them did it with an atlas on the table rather than an eye on the sky.
In blue, the constellations that never rise from Bucharest. In grey, those that do rise and were never given a name in the village.
VI · What it is made of
A farmyard, a set of tools and five holy things
Sorted by what they depict, the thirty-nine figures divide almost as simply as a country household.
Nine of the figures are household objects, and only one of them, the scales, is not held in the hand at work. The rest are a chariot, a scythe, a ridging plough, a sickle, an auger, an axe and a well: the gear you plough with, mow with, reap with and draw water with, lifted into the sky and left there.
The church settled on top of all this later, without erasing anything. Perseus is the Axe, and also the Devil's Chariot, in which the sinners will be carried off after the Judgement; next to it, the She-Goat with Three Kids is also God's Chariot, the one for the righteous. Libra is the scales on which Christ will weigh people's deeds. The crayfish stole the longest nail at the crucifixion and carried it away walking backwards, and has walked backwards ever since. Noah's raven, which left the ark and never returned, sits a sky apart from the dove that came back with the branch in her beak.
And a few figures remember something older than the church. The two chariots carry the slaves Trajan took out of Dacia, the Milky Way is the road they ran home along, travelling only by night, and the Twins are not Castor and Pollux but Romulus and Remus. The Slaves' Road, it was said, will vanish from the sky when slavery ends on earth.