Eight wooden churches in Maramureș carry a UNESCO listing, and every one of them is oak from sill to shingle — no plaster, no stone, no gilding. Village carpenters stacked low log bodies and then pushed a narrow steeple far past any structural need, four pinnacles at its corners, the whole thing sheathed in hand-split shingle.

Inside, local painters put the Last Judgement and the Passion straight onto the log walls in earth pigment, flat and frontal, eyes too large, the Holy Land drawn as a Maramureș valley. Three hundred years of candle and censer smoke darkened the oak around them, so the figures now read as light emerging from soot, not paint on a wall.