Most post-socialist cities of Romania can be read as a kind of palimpsest with different layers of meaning, where stories and discourses collide in order to establish a new reading of the city, one that puts the recent communist past out of sight. New business networks, new places, new power relations, are being inscribed on pre-existing spaces, while abandoned industrial landscapes are being reinterpreted.
Sulina, the only town of the Delta, is a small place at the mouth of Danube, the most Eastern locality of Romania. The “city” is actually built on a narrow tongue of land between Danube and the Black Sea shore; surrounded by waters, it has no land connection to neighboring localities. A small, insignificant place in the margins of Romania, lost in between waters, a city looking rather like a village, with a dwindling population and a decaying urban landscape, Sulina has a bewildering, savage beauty, a lure of its own. The city bears witness of its different historical epochs and subsequent functionalities through its architectural blend of XIX century buildings, interwar houses, modern terraces and distasteful blocks of flats. Passing from street I to the other five parallel streets of the city entails a unique gradual translation from urban to rural, each with specific architecture and routine.
During communism, Sulina developed a local industry (mainly in fishing and tinning fish, in making carpets and in repairing naval ships). The demographic structure changed radically; most Greeks, Armenians, Jews have left the country; due to the communist politics of intense urbanization, the population was heavily “Romanian-ized”, and many Lipoveni from the neighboring villages in the delta came “to the city”, in the 70’s, to find work. Since the demise of communism, most of the local industry has dismantled; people lost their jobs, the unemployment rate become one of the biggest in the country, and the city continued to destroy itself. Described by newspapers as “a dying city, lost between two ages”, the city of Sulina struggles to have an implausible future by reviving a past it has long lost. Once part and nexus of one of the first European organizations (The European Commission of Danube), today doomed to isolation, Sulina tries to recuperate a regional identity and position. The official discourse increasingly pinpoints to European integration, portraying Sulina as “the gate of Europe”, thus reversing symbolically its - both geographical and socio-political - marginality, as summarized in the favorite catchphrase of the locals: “We are the first to see the light and the last to see justice”.
My research aims at describing how these ongoing changes (political, demographical, social) affect the outlook of the urban scene and, moreover, how they shape each other. In the case of Sulina, memory plays a vital role in (re)inscribing the landscape with new (old) meanings, erasing or obliterating other (and others’) denotation, and in giving a sense to “our’ city.
References
Petruţa Teampău, Kristof Van Assche - „Sulina - marketing diversity at the "gate of Europe"”, Anthropology of East Europe Review (in print)
Petruţa Teampău, Kristof Van Assche - “Sulina, sulina/when there’s water, there’s no light. Narrative, memory and autobiography in a Romanian town”, in Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender, and Culture (in print)
Petruţa Teampău, Kristof Van Assche - „Sulina, a dying city in a vital region. Memory, nostalgia, and the longing for the European future”, Ethnologia Balkanica, 2008, 13, 1.
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