A difficult accessible place in the Șureanu Mountains has kept the remains of the oldest sheep in Romania. Archaeologists say they were built by the Dacians and destroyed in antiquity, but their ruins resisted time due to the isolation of the mountain land.
The Șureanu Mountains, the place of the Dacian sheep. Photo: Daniel Guță. TRUTH
The Carpathian Mountains have been a land of the Alpine sheep and a bridge between the pastoral communities of Romanians at their foot from the earliest times.
The oldest vestiges of these pastoral settlements were discovered in the Șureanu Mountains, near the springs of Strei (called Sargetia in antiquity) and Sarmizegetusa Regia.
The peaks crowded with Dacian settlements and Roman castles have kept, according to archaeologists, traces of possible sheep and pastoral shelters. Researching sporadically in the 1950s, they remained difficult to access the travelers, the maze of forest roads in the area being difficult to cross.
The wild realm from the springs of Strei
One of the roads leading to these archaic pastoral settlements follows the Strei Valley, starting from the village of Baru (Hunedoara county), to the sources of the legendary river, in which King Decebal would have hidden the treasures of the Dacians.
The River Strei springs from the Șureanu Mountains (video), where nature depicts an impressive landscape, dominated by the large forests, surrounding meadows and alpine pastures, and adorned from place to place, waterfalls, caves and spectacular gorges.
Until the 1970s, a forest railway operated on the Strei Valley, climbing from Baru to Izvoare, on a route of over 20 kilometers, to the foot of the Black Peak.
On this winding route, today today of a forest road, the river bears the name of Petros and crosses frequent forests, steep slopes and meadows in which the locals raised holiday homes and halls.

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Stars of Șureanu Mountains Photo Daniel Guță Adveărul (12) JPG
A few kilometers from the village, the travelers arrive in Poiana below the Ticera Pinului Peak (1,057 m), where they can admire the limestone walls of the mountains, with towers, surplams and suspended valleys, ideal for mountaineering lovers.
Above the stream Șipot gathers its waters of three karst springs and forms waterfalls (video) and fast deposits with limestone tuff.
“The fatigue of the climb along this stream is rewarded by the disturbing views of waterfalls and rapids with beautiful concretions of limestone tuff, as well as by the three resurgents located at the base of a high vertical wall over 150 meters. Two of the springs appear from the caves, and one from a granquarous cone. There are also some caves, whose admirable stalagmic formations have been preserved precisely because they are difficult to access ”, informed the geographer Nae Popescu.
Legendary places in Șureanu Mountains
The forest road accompanies the river until near its springs, where its waters join with those of the Jigureasa stream.
From here, other hard -to -reach paths and roads climb steeply to the peaks of over 1,000 meters of the Paltinu, Maleia, Porumbelu Mare Mountains (video), The relatives, the big and, closer to Sarmizegetusa Regia, at the Godeanu Peak (1,659 meters) – named by the locals “the holy mountain of the Dacians”.
Some meadows surrounded by beech and Brad forests are hosting old sheepfolds abandoned by people during this period. The most famous of them is the Poiana of man (video) – where local legends say it would have been the place where King Decebal found.
“I know, like many of those who lived here, about this legend of the Poien of man, as a place of Decebal’s death, since I found myself. From the age of 13 I have wandered these mountains with her flocks, and the life of the shepherd has always liked it. Here, at the Poiana of the man, there was a very big thing. They were chosen and they were chosen here, and the shepherds were still here ”, Duțu report, one of the few shepherds left in the man’s meadow.
The mysteries of the Dacian sheep
From here, the travelers can descend to the Ponor Valley, to the halls under Ticera Izvorului or to the Foundation of Ponorului (video). On the peaks that dominate the mountain landscape, archaeologists have discovered remains of Dacian sheep.
The ancient sheep on the peaks of Meleia, relatives and Tupu were generally composed of two parts: a round porch with a diameter of 11 – 12 meters and a rectangular room inhabited by shepherds. In some, the porch was covered by shingle, with the roof supported by wooden beams, and from it the foundation stones remained visible, archaeologists were found.

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Stars of Șureanu Mountains Photo Daniel Guță Adveărul (25) JPG
“The surprising peculiarity of this construction consists in the nature of the stones of the foundation. It is made up of small blocks of conchilic, placed directly on slabs carved in the rock most often or, sometimes, directly on the native rock if it was on the surface. Today, most of the limestone blocks are partially destroyed,” Constantin Daicoviciu showed, in the report of the archaeological excavations on the peak of me.

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Poiana man from Sureanu Mountains Photo Daniel Guță 21 JPG
From other alleged archaic sheep, the housing pillars were kept, which entered the ground 60-70 centimeters, to support constructions that reached two meters. In their midst there was a firefighter. Carbonized wheat, several iron objects, including spearheads and numerous ceramic vessels were discovered in a former Dacian sheep on Mount Maleia and its surroundings. Nearby, on the same peaks, archaeologists identified the remains of other sheep with similar dimensions and shapes.

Șureanu Mountains. Photo: Daniel Guță. TRUTH
“On the plateau of meii there are two pastoral complexes that follow one another, although both dates from the 1st century AD. The first complex are four sheep, unsecured by us. These sheep were, at one point, abandoned and demolished, in their place, building, at a short distance, a second, a second, a second, Part of the Romanian troops heading for Sarmizegetusa Regia in 102 or 106 ”, the archaeologist Constantin Daicoviciu wrote in the 1950s.
How the old sheepfolds ended
The peaks relatives, Meleia and Tomău and, most likely, other hills around them, were crowded with seasonal Dacian settlements, which could only be inhabited a few months a year, the rest of the time, remaining under the snow. But some scientists have shown that they could have a role other than the Dacian sheep, indicated by archaeologists in the first decades of communism.

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Poiana man from Sureanu Mountains Photo Daniel Guță (39) JPG
The reason was represented by the nearby iron deposits and the Dacian Iron and Deposits discovered in the area, places from which the raw material from Sarmizegetusa Regia would have been provided.
The former Dacian settlements ended up as a result of violent fires or were abandoned, and their remains have reached the ground and vegetation, or hidden by the forests that include the mountains.
Many of the pastoral settlements of the modern era have also become abandoned, the number of animal breeders in the Șureanu mountains being in a continuous decrease in recent decades.