The misterious stone formations in Costești village
Near the road between Ramnicu Valcea and Targu Jiu, in Costesti village, the nature created one of the most surprising stone sculptures, the trovants. We’ve heard about them, we called them „the growing stones”, we passed by many times but never stop to see what all this fuss is about.
But what are the trovants? The locals have their own theories regarding them, whom they call „the living stones”. Some claim that after a long rain little trovants appear from the wet sand and the bigger stones actually grow. But the scientists never confirmed this myth. The trovants represent local cementation in the reservoir of the sand that contains them and the cementation generates various shapes. The term „trovant” is usual in Romanian terminology for geology and was created by Murgoci in 1907. The trovants were formed 6.5 million years ago when on this land was a delta and the sand reservoir was found as a consequence of the successive sedimentation of materials transported by the rivers from the continent. Trovanti Museum Natural Reserve was created in 1996 and is administrated by the Kogayon Association, a NGO of environment protection, based in the village.
The trovants are strange, bizarre, have different sizes, from a few centimeters to a few meters, they „are born” in a sandy hill, get loose from a cliff and fall into a valley. Honestly, the first time that I saw them they reminded me of Kristoff’s trolls from Frozen. But enough with the scientific facts, the trovants they must be seen. We walked around them, we admired their weird shapes, we took several photos and we stared at the sand pit that is pretty high and where you can see some tiny trovants that haven’f fallen yet into the valley.
