Among the narrow streets and gorgeous, though sometimes derelict buildings of the historical center of Constanta there is an empty spot, used today as a nameless, faceless car park. Nothing there to let you know that you are standing on the spot of the former Sephardic Temple of Constanta. The temple was built by the Viennese architect Adolf Linz in 1908, the same architect who three years later was to design the other synagogue of Constanta. It was built for the few, yet very influential and elitist families of Sephardic Jews in town (Sephardic Jews are the descendants of the Jews banished from Spain in the 15th century, that came to settle in various parts of the Ottoman Empire i.e. the Balkan peninsula and the Romanian principalities).
The imposing structure, which was the largest Jewish temple in Romania at the time it was built, was the highest building in Constanta, together with the Turkish Mosque “Carol I”, wonderful recognition of the mutual respect of the two religions. The Gothic Catalan style of the temple was complimented by a massive cast iron entrance gate and by the two multi-coloured stained glass rosettes on the façade.
An earthquake in 1940 seriously damaged the building, which was used as a military warehouse to store supplies and food for the German soldiers and horses on the Eastern front in WWII. After the war, massive emigration of the Jewish community led to the abandonment of the temple. A ruin after the 1977 earthquake, the temple was demolished in 1986 by a communist regime that did not care about the past. Today, the municipality does not even want to mention the existence of the temple – not even a sign to let people know of the once majestic temple that got lost in the complexities of history.
You can tell a lot about a nation from what they eat, what their diet is based on, how open they are to culinary experiences from outside, especially in today’s fast-moving world.So, what do Romanians eat? We’ll try to answer this very complex question by first trying to analyse what they eat in the street. So, what is the Romanian street food?
Judging by the increasing number of pastry shops in the cities of Romania, I would say that „covrigi” (the Romanian alternative for pretzels) are the favourite street food of Romanians. Not surprising at all, if you take into account that more than one third of the entire surface of Romania is made up of farming lands and that one of the largest productions of the country is wheat production.
Let’s get this right – it is not just pretzels. Romanians seem to have developed a real taste for them and eat them in a multitude of flavours and fillings. With chocolate filling, cocoa, jam, jelly or Turkish delight, covered in sesame seeds, poppy seeds, salt or a combination of all of the above, eaten with yoghurt, sour cream, milk or just plain soda, the pretzel seems to have won everybody’s approval as choice number one for street food – it is affordable, nourishing, tasty and not very messy when you want to walk and eat at the same time. Romanians all love their pastry and are convinced of their nutritional value, so much so that there is even a national programme in place that provides primary school students with free state-sponsored rolls and glass of milk on a daily basis. And the pastry shops are more than willing to accommodate this Romanian obsession with pastries. The variety they offer is overwhelming: strudels, buns, rolls, honey rolls, chocolate rolls, big rolls, little rolls (we even have a variety called Polish rolls, I wonder if the Polish know), bagels, pretzels, donuts, cupcakes, muffins, cakes, sponge cake, pies. And then, when we talk about pies, there is an entire new chapter opening: meat pies, sausage pies, spinach pies, cheese pies, salt cheese pies, sweet cheese pies, sweet cheese with raisins, goat cheese, cow cheese, sheep cheese, or a combination of cheeses.
And you thought pastry was just pastry!
ROMANIAN STREET FOOD (II)
Our second episode dedicated to Romanian street food focuses on more consistent food – dishes that contain enough calories to stand at least for breakfast, lunch, and dinner together. Interesting to notice: all the street foods in this category are meat-based (a vegetarian in Romania is a rarity) and are all imported foods that were adapted to the Romanian environment and caught on extremely well in the last 20 years, a sign that Romanians are open to culinary experiences and influences.
Schwarma – Once in Rome, do as the Romans do. Once in Romania, you should not miss this delight of mixed flavours and tastes. Not for the faint-hearted, though, and definitely not for people on a diet. Schwarma is a Middle-Eastern type of food that Romanians have adopted very quickly and adapted to their own tastes. It still consists of thinly sliced seasoned meat (mainly chicken in Romania, even though you can also get mutton or beef) wrapped in Lebanese pita, but Romanians like it topped with “everything”. “Schwarma cu de toate” (schwarma with everything) is the No 1 street food in its category. “Cu de toate” stands for French fries, cucumber, either fresh or pickled, or both, thinly sliced cabbage or red cabbage, tomatoes, onion rings, sometimes even olives or carrots, topped with ketch-up, mayonnaise or garlic sauce.
Kebab in Romania is not what Westerners usually expect. It is the same delicious mixture, but this time in a bun, rather than wrapped in pita. Again, “kebab cu de toate” (kebab with everything) is what people normally request.
Souvlaki is the same type of thinly sliced seasoned beef or chicken with French fries and tomatoes wrapped in pita. In true Greek style, the distinctive feature of this delicious combination is the Greek tzatziki sauce (made up of yoghurt, cucumbers and garlic).
Our second episode dedicated to Romanian street food focuses on more consistent food – dishes that contain enough calories to stand at least for breakfast, lunch, and dinner together. Interesting to notice: all the street foods in this category are meat-based (a vegetarian in Romania is a rarity) and are all imported foods that were adapted to the Romanian environment and caught on extremely well in the last 20 years, a sign that Romanians are open to culinary experiences and influences.
Schwarma – Once in Rome, do as the Romans do. Once in Romania, you should not miss this delight of mixed flavours and tastes. Not for the faint-hearted, though, and definitely not for people on a diet. Schwarma is a Middle-Eastern type of food that Romanians have adopted very quickly and adapted to their own tastes. It still consists of thinly sliced seasoned meat (mainly chicken in Romania, even though you can also get mutton or beef) wrapped in Lebanese pita, but Romanians like it topped with “everything”. “Schwarma cu de toate” (schwarma with everything) is the No 1 street food in its category. “Cu de toate” stands for French fries, cucumber, either fresh or pickled, or both, thinly sliced cabbage or red cabbage, tomatoes, onion rings, sometimes even olives or carrots, topped with ketch-up, mayonnaise or garlic sauce.
Kebab in Romania is not what Westerners usually expect. It is the same delicious mixture, but this time in a bun, rather than wrapped in pita. Again, “kebab cu de toate” (kebab with everything) is what people normally request.
Souvlaki is the same type of thinly sliced seasoned beef or chicken with French fries and tomatoes wrapped in pita. In true Greek style, the distinctive feature of this delicious combination is the Greek tzatziki sauce (made up of yoghurt, cucumbers and garlic).
Tucked away in between buildings, normally overlooked by pedestrians in a hurry to get on with their daily business or by tourists interested in the more impressive landmarks of the city, Wind Street reveals its secrets only to those who take their time to explore around.
No wider than 2 meters, the narrowest street in Constanta goes down a small incline and opens onto the sea, a reminder of the charm of the old multi-ethnic districts of the peninsula on the Black Sea Coast. Actually, historians of the city all agree that in the past this small street separated the Greek area from the Armenian area in the old town – this not to understand that the small town of Constanta had distinct areas for the distinct ethnicities inhabiting it more than a hundred years ago, but rather that the small town was made up of a conglomerate of houses, old and new, big and small, with narrow streets and labyrinth alleyways in between. Wind Street is the only such street that survived, probably because some of the houses that flanked it were impressive enough for the authorities to preserve when they modernized and restructured the area.
Indeed, one of the impressive buildings on the street is the creation of a famous Romanian architect, C. Cerchez, while another house used to be the property of a renowned historian of Constanta, Marin Ionescu-Dobrogianu. The others just complete the picture of the eclectic and charming provincial town Constanta was.
Urban myths speak of the world-known Hans Christian Andersen mentioning the street in his description of his visit to Constanta in 1841. Historical research, however, found reference to the Wind Street starting only with 1912 – there is no historical evidence that it existed before that year, but then again how much reference is there about Constanta at the end of the 19th century? There is nothing keeping an imaginative traveller from conjuring up images of the past, even a fictional past, to fill in the gaps of memory in the present.
THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE MONUMENT IN CONSTANTA
Each year on 24th April Armenians all over the world commemorate the Armenian Genocide. In Constanta, the Armenian community gather at the Armenian church dedicated to The Virgin Mary on Callatis Street. The church functions inside the former school built for the Armenian children of Constanta at the beginning of the 1880s. Inside the yard, right at the entrance there is a memorial dedicated to the 2,000,000 Armenians that lost their lives 100 years ago.
The Armenian Genocide, also known in history under the name of the Forgotten Genocide, refers to two different events that wiped almost the entire Armenian community of the former Ottoman Empire. The first event refers to a military campaign of Sultan Abdul Hamid II against the Armenian army and people in 1894 – 1896. In a climate of national awareness being born and becoming the main trend in Armenia at the end of the 19th century, the Ottoman authorities organized pogroms of the Armenian population and encouraged a civil war between the Armenians and the Kurds, whom they supported as they were Muslim. The events claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.
The second event refers to the deportation of the Armenian population from Anatolia, a region they had inhabited for centuries, towards the deserts of Syria. It was happening in 1915, in the early years of WWI and it led to the deaths of approximately 1,200,000 civilian Armenians, who died of hunger, disease and exhaustion. The number of casualties for both events is not exact and is estimated anywhere between 500,000 to 2,000,000, with the Turkish authorities minimizing the numbers and the Armenians giving high estimates. Turkey never officially recognized the genocide and never agreed to the use of the term “genocide” to define what they call civil war. As proof that the events of 1915 are still an open wound in the national memory, Turkey sanctioned the reference Pope Francisc made to the Armenian genocide this month by withdrawing its ambassador to the Vatican.
How many times did we just pass them on our way to our much more important business? How many times did we really think the funerary stones exhibited in the city are just some stones of ancient times? Let’s just face it – when it comes to antiquity, unless we have some special interest in archaeology, stones are just stones, sometimes too many of them. But if we stop for just one minute and read the epitaphs, an entire world, long forgotten, is waiting to be revealed. The texts are well written, with rhetorical devices meant to catch the readers’ attention (direct addresses to people who pass by – “Salutation, passer-by!” or direct involvement of the reader “You stopped wondering who lies here.”) and philosophical remarks on human destiny and free will: “Nothing depends on humans. Everything turns under the power of destiny.” They all contain presentations of the lives of the departed, many times with emotional touches, such as the story of Hermogenes, who “considered friendship for all as a title of glory”, or Cecilia Artemisia, a thirty year-old woman who died in childbirth delivering her fourth child.
In the Roman Empire, the duty towards one’s ancestors (pietas) was a fundamental part of ancient Roman culture. It included dedicated care for the cult of the dead, obvious in the attention the Romans paid to the burial places of their ancestors. Roman cemeteries were located outside the sacred boundary of the city. They were visited regularly with offerings of food and wine. Funeral monuments included Roman sarcophagi, elaborately crafted art work, usually decorated with relief sculptures depicting a scene that was allegorical, mythological, or historical, or a scene from everyday life. The epitaphs accompanying them included reference to date of birth and death, but also quite often they included information on family relationships, political offices, and Roman values, in choosing what aspects of the deceased's life to praise. In ancient times, small mausolea lined the roads to and from cities and invited visitors and those who passed by to read the epitaphs and remember those who were no longer alive.
The epitaphs carved on the tombstones exhibited in front of the Roman mosaics in Constanta are important written sources of information for life, death and commonly held beliefs in ancient Tomis. Evocative of the way people referred to death and especially to their own mortality in pre-Christian times, they prove to be a window into the lives and family relations of the deceased. More importantly, they remind the passer-by of the immense ancient tradition and lineage the present day citizens of Constanta should understand, honour and carry on.
THE RETURN OF QUEEN ELISABETH TO CONSTANTA
A familiar sight for locals before WWII, the statue of queen Elisabeth of Romania on the sea promenade in Constanta was brought back from the denial and forgetfulness of 50 years of communism and repositioned on the place where the queen loved the city the best – overlooking the Black Sea.
The statue is the work of the famous local artist Ion Jalea (1887 – 1983) and it was placed where it stands today on 15 August 1937 during the ceremonies celebrating the traditional Romanian Navy Day. In this way, the local authorities wanted to officially recognise the contribution of the queen to the development of Constanta at the turn of the 20th century. In 1948, after the king was forced to abdicate, the statue of Queen Elisabeth started its long exile into the basements of the Art museum, where the curators had to rename it Statue of Woman, hoping that anonymity will shield it from the fury of the regime that wanted to get rid of everything reminiscent of the royal family.
At the base of the statue there used to stand another smaller statue of a nymph with harp (as the queen was famous for the poetry she wrote and for being a patron of the arts). This smaller statue, though still taken down in 1948, had a much milder fate. It was donated to the town of Medgidia where it was placed in the central park for decades. It was brought back and reunited with the statue of the queen to restore the original idea of the artist and now, almost 70 years later, the queen finally returned to Constanta.