Executives from the end of Europe

I arrived in Sfântu Gheorghe by chance in July 2007, for a few days. It wasn't a vacation plan, it was a last minute decision, as most of my departures are. By then, I knew about the Delta what you usually find in geographical encyclopaedias and what everyone knows - the Delta is a mixture of land and water, with a constantly changing surface, the second largest delta in Europe after the Volga, a paradise for birds and wildlife in general, with a few fishing villages scattered along the Danube's arms, a mixture of ethnic groups that arrived here in different historical times.
And a small town, Sulina, thriving when the European Danube Commission had its headquarters there. Sulina had fascinated me after reading a novel I had written about in my undergraduate thesis, in which I had followed the photographs mentioned in inter-war novels. Jean Bart's Europolis, a novel that is clumsy in its literary construction but anthropologically very interesting because it conveys the vintage, irrecoverable and cosmopolitan, old postcard air of the polis that had already begun to decay between the wars. A city I first imagined, then saw. I titled the chapter of my bachelor's thesis Cadre at the end of Europe, and as a result of that title, on which I had given it a lot of thought, the Danube Delta remained for me the end of Europe - titles have always been an issue that I have found hard to decide on, because they give the key to the reading and can totally change the meaning of any text, even if you don't change a word of what you have written. By chance, in 2007, the year of my first trip to the Danube's spill into the Black Sea, the Delta had officially become the eastern end of Europe, of the European Union, at least.

After 15 years

Sfântu Gheorghe - with its wild beaches, with its blond people and soft, Slavic speech, with houses still covered in reeds and gardens on the sand, between canals and countless water lilies - fascinated me, and then I kept coming back here. I say here, because I am writing this article from Sfântu Gheorghe, fifteen summers away. Year after year, summer after summer, I went to stay for a week or two in Sfântu Gheorghe, always with the same family in the village, Ukrainians, the Haholis to be exact, descendants of some Zaporozhnian Cossacks who had taken refuge here during the reign of Tsarina Catherine the Great. In fact, the word 'hahol' etymologically refers to the old Cossacks' mop of hair, a haircut designed to frighten the enemy. The Hahol used to resent it - less and less nowadays - if you called them Russians or Lips.
Today I go to St. Gheorghe with the feeling that I'm going to visit relatives. I know the stories of the hosts, their problems and their joys, the rhythm of their lives, we hear each other over the years, we bond over long summer evenings in which, still talking, we have grown closer. The elders, our first generation of hosts, spoke an archaic Ukrainian dialect among themselves, of which I only knew a few words. They spoke Romanian to us. With their daughters and sons-in-law, they mixed their words, switching from Ukrainian to Romanian, which was unrecognizable to them. In fact, they weren't even Ukrainians, as all the families in the village mixed surprisingly different origins in their blood for such an isolated place. The old man had come from somewhere in Moldova when he was young, fell in love with Cornelia, stayed here and learned the local language, became a fisherman. He didn't tell anything about life before St. Sfântu, but he talked quite a lot about his youth here and answered all my curious questions about what life and the village had been like before, briefly but very plastic. Aunt Cornelia was half Greek, only Ukrainian on her father's side. She was in her 70s when I met her, but looked older. The harsh life at the mouth of the Danube. Always joking, called her husband her lover. He died first, the lover. Then Aunt Cornelia, a few years later, although she could have lived, but one winter the Danube froze and she couldn't be taken in time to Tulcea, to the doctor. My hosts in the meantime were Eleonora, Cornelia's daughter, and Dan, Eleonora's husband, also a fisherman from the village, after Hahol and Bulgarian blood. Eleonora and Dan always speak in Romanian, although they know the local Slavic dialect very well. They have two children, a girl, Anca, and a boy, Cristi. They only know a few words of Ukrainian. Anca, mostly because she's the eldest and grew up around her grandmother's kitchen. Cristi, less and he's a treasure of kindness! Today, Anca is past 30, and David, her 4 year old son, talks to me about Spider-Man (he is Spider-Man!) and declares me his best friend as I write this article. Four generations, not an easy story, with too many problems, but lived firmly and resolutely, a story I have witnessed and I could tell it in more detail...

The village

The village at the mouth of the southern arm of the Danube into the sea has changed since I first came. I could recount today how, on each return, something was a little different, so that much is different now.
The locals have always hosted tourists over the summer. Among them, me, for fifteen years.
...in the beginning, the big ship came from Tulcea twice a week, it was three hours long and the first trip on the Sfântu Gheorghe Arm resembled, in my imagination, a trip on the famous Mississippi, the river from a book I read and reread dozens of times as a child, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Today there are daily, over the summer, speedboats for tourists from Tulcea, Mahmudia or Murighiol. And quite modern guesthouses in the village, perhaps too modern.
.... In the beginning, tourists were waited in the harbor by the villagers (everyone had their own), with small donkey-drawn carts in which were loaded the luggage, too much, of the guests who came to the end of Europe and Romania, for the beach and fish. Today, the village's three sandy streets, with the water not a meter below them, are criss-crossed by tuk-tuks as in tourist photos of contemporary Asia. Unfortunately, the 4 x 4 cars have also multiplied. There were just two in 2007, a stationary Trabant and another.
...on my first visit to Sfântu Gheorghe I took a shower in the courtyard, with the water warmed by the sun in a barrel suspended on wooden legs - how I loved the warmth of that water! Now the host's house has real showers and the natural comforts of the day, but behind it is the hard work of the family who live there and penny upon penny.

Storybook photos

My summer vacations in Sfântu Gheorghe turned into an involuntary anthropological study and field research. The community has changed, life is still hard, the wildness of nature has diminished, but it is still wildness. Only that's not what I want to talk about now. It was just an introduction, paradoxically longer than what will follow. Because I choose to send three postcards from here to you. Three frames from the end of Europe. On each one I have written a story. They are digital photographs taken by me over the years I've been coming here. Sfântu Gheorghe is probably the place in the world where I've taken the most photos, thousands, many thousands, but it wasn't hard at all to choose only three of them.
...in fact, old Cornelia was fully our hostess. And he, the lover, only showed up now and then, especially in the evenings, for stories accompanied by wine or brandy. He hadn't been out to sea for years when we asked him if he fished in the sea or in the Danube. I didn't know it was difficult to cross from the Danube to the sea in a wooden boat - there are strong currents when going out to sea and it's a test of youth and manhood. In the morning, as the sun was rising, we photographed an old man and a sea against the light. He was our host, he was fishing, and my questions had awakened in him a new memory and a new willingness to meet the sea....
Subjectively, it's one of the most beautiful photographs I've ever taken. With it, I realized one of the most important lessons for an anthropologist. Your questions, even the simplest, can change a person, a community, a past. Always be careful what you ask.
In the evening we ate the fish the old man caught in the sea.
At Sfântu, the sun always rises from the sea and sets over the delta, towards mainland Dobrogea, sometimes, when the atmosphere is very clear, you can sometimes guess the line of the hills of Babadag. For only a few days in the middle of August, you can see the sun setting from the pontoons at Sfântu Gheorghe, at around half past eight in the evening, from the southern arm of the Danube, exactly on the pontoons. The spectacle is extraordinary because, in just a few minutes, the color of the water changes rapidly, taking on dozens of shades and ripples that cannot be recounted and, in fact, cannot be photographed. That is why postcard number two that I am sending to you from the end of Europe is more a photograph taken with my mind's eye than with a digital camera, although year after year I try to memorize these amazing colors in pixels. The St George's Arm turns gold as the sun falls on it. Then the gold turns lilac, going through a whole range of colors in less than ten minutes. Nowhere else in the world have I seen - and I've traveled enough - waters of this color. As the sun is no longer visible at all, the water of the Danube turns a paler and paler purple. On the opposite side of where the sun sets, from the pontoons at St. George's you can see exactly where the Danube arm flows into the sea. The waters of the sea and the waters of the Danube are different, they have a different color, a different chemistry, they don't mix, the contours are clearly demarcated. And sometimes, against the sunset light, the course of the Danube appears perfectly flat and calm, and at the end, at the mouth of the Danube, you can see the waves of the sea snaking over them, just as in oriental prints curving waves are suggested as if they are moving, only here they are really moving. Above is the sky, also lilac. There is sometimes, just sometimes, in privileged moments on those warm August evenings, a very brief moment when, after sunset, in shades of paler and paler purple, the sea water and the Danube water quickly become indistinct. Then comes the most beautiful, miraculous part. This indistinct color of the water blends perfectly with the sunset tones of the sky and everything becomes, I don't understand how, a luminous gray. Water and sky are one. And if you happen to be floating at that moment in a boat on the Danube, just before it spills into the sea, you may feel that you are floating, beyond time, straight up into the sky above the sea. This whole chromatic story, which I have experienced on a few occasions, reminds me of a novel by Marguerite Yourcenar, entitled How Wang-Fo was rescued. It is the story of the painter who, after a lifetime of wandering through immense China with his apprentice, is summoned to the Emperor's court. The Emperor wants to take revenge on the painter and kill him, because he spent his childhood in the palace among his paintings, and then the real world seemed to the Emperor too bland and too colorless. Wang-Fo's prints had a dark center. The Emperor asked the painter to finish an old, unfinished painting of his from the imperial collection before the death he had mercilessly decreed. As Wang-Fo finishes a print he had begun as a young man, in full view of the court and the soldiers, the waters of the sea he is drawing begin to move and a boat is silhouetted against them. The painter's apprentice, who has just been murdered by imperial order, is the boat's spar. And the painter gets into the boat and disappears towards the horizon, floating on the sea he had drawn himself.
In Sfântu Gheorghe, the colors are as strong as in the Chinese painter's print, sometimes even stronger, for a few moments, in an August that becomes infinite, just after sunset in the southernmost arm of the Danube.
This year, the hosts told me how the Russian bombardment of Snake Island, perhaps the legendary white island of Achilles, rattled the windows of the village houses. Photo number three speaks for itself. It's a rainbow sprouting from where the Danube flows into the sea. It disappears into the cloudy sky, and then the other end emerges again, far across the sea, in the very direction from which the Cossack ancestors of the Hahol people from Sfântu Gheorghe once came, to leave behind their weapons and their fighting and start afresh, here, among the smârks, a life that was not suited to their nature, for they became peaceful fishermen, at war only with the fresh waters of the Danube, the salty waters of the sea and a life that was far too hard. The rainbow is always a promise, and in the blackened backdrop across the Black Sea, I choose to see this setting at the end of Europe as a promise of peace after the storm, cast from heaven over the great, unprimor-primor-primorous sea, haunted and recounted in the early days by the ancient Greeks.

The best photographs are taken with the mind's eye, not the camera

Close your eyes, traveler. A bird is flying over your boat. You don't know its name, your town has no sisters like it. She doesn't know her own name either, in their language birds call, but have no names. You don't know her story, traveler. Close your eyes, above you is a bird in flight, it has come from somewhere far away, from North Africa, from the Prespa lakes or somewhere else, in its language places have no names. In the reed beyond is its nest. Close your eyes, traveler. A bird's flight can be watched by thought, guessed. The wings of the bird in flight cut the air that now touches your face. Its wings have not long ago flown over the Mediterranean, rested on the dome of a church in the south, on the roof of a mosque elsewhere, on the tops of trees. Its wings are white or black, not the color you must see, traveler! Try to feel their beat as you now feel the fish under your boat. It was in the storm the bird above you, traveler! And stop trying to remember what you have read somewhere, traveler, of how many kinds are the birds here, how many rare species, what names they have, where they come from and where they go. Forget, traveler, that you are in the place which scientists rank among the world's foremost in the study of birds. Close your eyes, traveler, a nameless bird flies overhead. All around you is the Delta where everything is alive and wild.