Is it time? The Romanian mountains in winter do not ask politely, they beckon with frostbitten fingers and a low animal hum that crawls up your spine. The Carpathians close in, white and uncompromising, a place where silence is not empty but dense, pressed together like old snow under boots. This is not a postcard winter. This is a working winter, a lived-in cold, where villages smoke from chimneys and the forest smells of resin, iron, and hunger. The Carpathian range wraps around Romania like a