Tourist assets in Buzau county

Buzau County is renowned because of its tourist assets, but mostly because of its wine cellars. Slow Food Travel offers a new model of tourism, made of encounters with farmers, cheese makers, shepherds, bakers and vine growers who, jointly with the cooks who cook their produce, will be the narrators of their local areas and sole guides for the local traditions. Our guide for today's journey is Thorsten Kirschner, a founding member of Buzau Slow Food Community, the realm of legends and savors. Thorsten arrived in Romania 13 years ago. He spent two years in Bucharest, then he retired to Buzau. There he bought a mansion and founded an association promoting traditional craft produce.

Thorsten Kirschner:

"Slow food is a global movement that has been gaining ground in more than 160 countries, providing access to healthy food. It is an alternative to fast-food, created in Italy in the 1980s. As we speak, it is very active in Transylvania, in Brasov, Sibiu, Cluj, and Buzău. We're more like an NGO, bringing together farmers, food producers, agro-tourism guesthouses, restaurants and lovers of healthy and sustainable food. The idea we have come up with what that of creating a platform for the promotion of craft products, of the quality food in Buzau County. To give you an example of that, we have a honey producer with an innovative technology. He mixes fresh fruit into the honey and creates a new produce you can have for breakfast.  Tourists can also find the produce in the souvenir shop and can thus go back home with something new. Furthermore, we also have craft beer. We have a young entrepreneur who started up with mead. It is a honey-based beverage, with a low percentage of alcohol. "

The Buzau Land Geopark has been a UNESCO site since 2022. It comprises 18 communes, with 40,000 inhabitants and lots of tourist assets, one-of-a-kind around the world. As for the visit to the tourist assets, that can be combined with gastronomic experiences, says the founding member of Slow Food Community Buzău, Thorsten Kirschner.

"For instance, the tourist arrives in the commune of Berca and finds himself in front of the tourist info center. There he can find out what he can visit in the Buzau land. He can go to the Muddy Volcanoes or to the cave settlements in Bozioru and after that, the tourist can have a stopover at a guesthouse, a restaurant or a local producer where he can have a tasting of this and that. We for instance, offer cheese tasting as well. We make goat cheese made of raw milk, which best goes with a Dealu mare sort of wine, for tasting. It is a network, basically. We do not promote our products alone. Also, in the area we have growers of bio wine. You can go to them, you can visit their cellars, you can see for yourself how the wine is made and then a tasting follows, of three wine sorts. Another event we stage in Buzău is the truffle hunting. We go into the forest with specially trained dogs, we look for truffles, and, on our way back, we have an all-truffle tasting menu."

Slow Food Buzău targets anxious and responsible travellers who are eager to know for real the Buzau area's local cuisine culture, without overlooking food sustainability and biodiversity. For instance, after one such trip, you can get to know the Babik and its story. It is a spicy salami, presented as one of the best salamis according to the TasteAtlas, and being 15th-placed according to a world ranking. You can also find the babik on a traditional produce map, created by Thorsten Kirschner.

"You can access our platform at slowfoodbuzau.com, in Romanian and English. There you can get all the info on local producers, restaurants and tourist guesthouses, in Romanian and English. You can find all the info you need about local producers, about restaurants and tourist guesthouses that are part of our network. We also have a visiting hours schedule. Our work on the platform is still in progress and we hope that, until the nest season, in 2024, we can have a much more generous offer."

An event in the area has come to an end, recently. It was a celebration of good food, being also an excellent opportunity to socialize, for the participants. Also presented as part of the event were the most recent rural and adventure tourism offers.  

Thorsten Kirschner:

"We staged the third edition of the events titled the Craftsmen's Market. It is an innovative concept, by means of which we get the consumer come closer to the farmers and the local food producers in the Buzau Land UNESCO Geopark It is Romania's first such project by means of which the small local producers and tourism services providers collaborate, in a bid to create such a fair. For example, all the stands were made from recycled material. We call all the producers, urging them to collect woos and we worked on the stands. In two days alone, we had more than 2,000 visitors from all over Romania. It is a mix of a craft and farm produce, street-food, live cooking show, a craftsmen fair and creative and educational workshops for children. The feedback-ul we had was a very good one. It is a festival-fair, staged with the purpose of socialization. Foreign tourists came as well. 90% of them were surprised and said they did not know what they would come across in Buzau. They only heard about the Muddy Volcanoes but they did not know anything about Geopark, about the culinary offer. So promotion has not been efficient enough, just as yet. We, through the slow-food, provided some sort of marketing through collaboration, with no budget whatsoever. We did everything through the socializing platforms. Those who participated shared their experience and that is how we managed to have 300,000 views a week. "

You may not have reached the craftsmen's annual event, yet socializing opportunities do exist. The founding member of Buzau Slow Food Community Buzău, Thorsten Kirschner, says that, if you schedule a visit to the UNESCO Buzau Land Geopark, you can have the chance to find the legends of the people, of the culinary recipes, but also those of the numerous tourist assets in the region.

"Apart from the Muddy Volcanoes we're all too familiar with, we have cave settlements, a salt mountain, the Amber Museum, we have old monasteries. Then there is also an offer for active tourism, such as rafting or cycling with electric bikes. Also, we have two interesting areas. In Dealu Mare there are interesting wine cellars and there also is this slow food network, comprising producers of craft beer of honey. You can have a taste of the produce and you can take them home. "

One of the targets the Slow Food movement has set for itself is that of preventing cultures and traditions from disappearing. Furthermore, opting for that kind of tourism also means we can enhance the interest in the food we eat, in its origin and in the way our food choice impacts the world around us.