Eastern Unorthodox - Frank McNally on not watching GAA in Romania

The evening of the All-Ireland quarter final between Monaghan and Armagh, I found myself in a village in darkest Transylvania, where the GAA is little known.

Not that there is anything dark about Transylvania, really. It was brighter than Tullamore, where I’d been a week earlier to see Monaghan squeeze past Kildare to reach the last eight. And despite its apparent remoteness, the village had 5G wifi, which meant – in theory at least – I could live-stream the game from Croke Park.

The problem was that my friend and I had just arrived at the home of an extraordinary couple called Peter and Gabriela Kennedy, who invited us to visit after the Flann O’Brien conference in Cluj.

And as the game’s 6pm throw-in (8pm Romanian time) loomed, we were already being subjected to remorselessly lavish hospitality, including a banquet of Transylvanian food, champagne and the local but world-class Pinot Noir, a secret Romania has somehow kept from the west until now.

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Worse still for the prospects of me watching football, the company was riveting. Peter is an English-born Irish academic and poet, who lectured in Romania in the bad-old days of communism but now teaches literature at a university in Hong Kong. His irrepressible wife, Gabriela, was born in Bucharest but escaped with him from the horrors of Ceauşescu in the 1980s and has since become one of the best intellectual property lawyers in Asia.

On top of this, their son Richard (a compromise name for international purposes, because his Irish and Romanian names, Tadhg and Rareș, both require specialist knowledge), was home from Munich for the weekend with his girlfriend Marina, a Ukrainian medical student in exile.

So the conversation touched on war, the last days of communism, and the troubled history of Europe in general, among many other things. And gradually, the internecine conflict between the Gaelic footballers of Monaghan and Armagh lost some of its urgency.

By then, the hospitality had also extended to palinka, a local fire-water distilled from fruit, like schnapps. After the first shot of that, I finally relinquished plans to watch any of the game live. It was a schnapp decision, as they say in Mayo.

There is a strange pleasure, sometimes, in feeling yourself cut off from the noise and chaos you know is happening somewhere else. As darkness descended on the Carpathian Mountains, and the effects of the palinka descended on me, I imagined the gut-wrenching drama in Croke Park.

Had it gone to extra time, I wondered? (Yes.) Or even penalties? (Yes – 20 of them.) And the feeling of being in exile from all that emotional turmoil, for once, only added to the calm of my surroundings.

Of course, the pleasure was crowned when, later, I scrolled through the scores, as they had happened, watching from between my fingers, before at last punching the Transylvanian night air in triumph.

Only then did I access message notifications, which included the congratulations of a Leitrim friend who – knowing my location – declared the Monaghan footballers “harder to kill than Count Dracula”.

Next morning, in gratitude, I went to Mass. Well, not Mass, exactly. The village’s former Catholic church is now defunct, except as a funeral chapel for the Romanian Orthodox community.

It was the nearby Orthodox church we attended. And not for all the Sunday service, because that lasts four hours, starting at 8am. But we crept in at the back about 11.30, past men drinking schnapps outside the door, to find the place full, with no sign of anyone flagging.

For western visitors, the place was full not just of people, but of drama. Orthodox churches are like highly ornate grottos, every inch of the walls and ceiling covered in iconography. Incense filled the air. The singing, led in part by the priest’s wife (marriage is a compulsory condition of priesthood) was full-throated and heartfelt.

After a collection for a local widow, the congregation finally queued for long-waited communion. The priest first blessed them on foreheads and hands, then they themselves collected communion – actual pieces of white bread, torn from a loaf – out of a large chalice: often taking whole handfuls, to be distributed to absent others.

Introduced to the foreign visitors afterwards, the priest established we were “catolici”. Then, he noted that we were nevertheless “Christians – that’s important” and gave us half the blessing: foreheads only.

We bypassed the schnapps on the way out: it was still a bit early in the day, even for those of us with an All-Ireland semi-final to celebrate. But the drinks at the church door were part of a memorial service for someone who had died six years before: one of many milestones Romanian families commemorate.

The tradition also used to involve providing meals. Here, as often now happens, scarved women relatives instead dispensed the makings of a meal, even to the foreigners. We too left laden down with Lidl bags containing flour, sugar and cooking oil, as well as a candle to light the way of the departed.