Wooden cheese-press, hand-carved in traditional style, with Cross, Star, and apparently the Elibelinde fertility symbol.
Romania is the only Latin-speaking country in the Balkans. The Latin comes from the conquest of the Kingdom of Thrace by the Roman Emperor Trajan; the country became the province of Dacia. The modern language is mostly latinate with some words of Russian, some derived from ancient Dacian, and quite a lot of borrowings from French, not to mention influence from Turkish and Arabic. The country is mostly Orthodox (Christian) but in the folk tradition of the villages there are clear animist or pagan leanings. An aside: a sculptor friend remarks that the outline of the cheese-press, if repeated, forms the sort of toothed motif familiar from Brancusi's sculptures. Brancusi worked in Italy but presumably drew on his Romanian roots for imagery.