Meteleu

Meteleu lies on the flat plain of southern Buzău county, in the eastern reaches of Wallachia near the Ialomița border. The old place name appears in documents from the sixteenth century. Village life here was organized around estates and churches, and the land lay in the open farming country between the Buzău and Ialomița rivers. In 1825 people exempted from taxes, called scutelnici, were settled beside Meteleu on the estate of the Căldărușani monastery. The new settlement took the name Scutelnici from them, and the older name of Meteleu was long attached to it as a double name.