"This was my grandfather's house

"And this is where you used to play with your friends from the village?!", I ask - and when I describe "here" I'm no longer looking at the homestead, because it no longer exists, but at an empty, barren, sandy, wild horizon. Life seemed to be interrupted by a skip or cancel.
I go to the Delta every year, as it's one of the few places where I can totally relax. I go there neither for the fishing nor for the cuisine: I go there for the people, the places, the nature and a very particular architectural context, just as there are still fragments of forgotten villages in Romania, where the word authentic is synonymous with left in disrepair, untouched by the years, untouched by the weather, or by the good taste of the post-1990s Romanian, who has perverted most of the local built environment, especially the rural one. In remote areas of the country, such as certain parts of the Delta, you can still find houses, old rural structures, settlements lost to time which, although all with problems, to an outsider, represent something else extremely pleasant.
At the time Ioana called me, I was on a small expedition with some friends in the Delta, asking them to go to some dilapidated villages to photograph them. They are all expressive places, inspiring by their degradation and their drama: abandoned farms, houses still standing, but still abandoned, alleys full of sand from the sea, and still abandoned: I could say, a noble desolation, a noble abandonment, because all this context and degraded landscape has something extremely fine and elegant in it. Perhaps it is because of the nature of the Delta, which surrounds these places and which constantly gives you the illusion that, once you get there, you can somehow survive in this green context. The reality is different, because life in the Delta, talking to the locals, becomes complicated, and the agriculture that sustained these places, in addition to fishing, has proved hopeless, although the "per hectare" reports before 1989 were positive. History has shown otherwise.
And I was sitting with these friends from the Delta on an almost barren and seemingly limitless plateau, with a few dilapidated structures of wood, adobe and reed still in the distance. As we approach, one of the friends, Dragos, tells me:
"This was my grandfather's house, this is where I grew up, there were many houses here once; most of them were demolished by people when they left, others were destroyed by time".
This "here" was, in fact, a vacant lot with a half-standing skeletal structure, which still had some adobe infill and a few beams in some areas. My great-grandfather had been an important man in the village: a householder and resourceful, he was the enterprising spirit of the village, his family growing and branching out over time. In fact, you'd expect such a man to now have a lane of his own with households side by side, belonging to relatives and cousins. Instead, a horizontal wasteland, a dilapidated ghost-house generated the image of a general, social drama.
"And this is where you used to play with your friends from the village?!", I ask - and when I describe "here" I'm no longer looking at the household, because it no longer exists, but at an empty, barren, sandy, wild horizon. Life was interrupted by a skip or a cancel.
"Yes, here, right here in front of us were courtyards with gardens and houses," he replies. Describing with his hands in the air a former urban-rural density that now seemed swallowed up, non-existent, absorbed by a virtual "matrix". It was like being in a Superstudio image from the 1970s, depicting a hypothetical, domestic, idyllic life superimposed over a technological white grid, ominous in its exactitude. Such was this wasteland, dotted with a few traces of houses, but fierce in its roughness.
Places like these in the Delta are a rare opportunity to meditate and be inspired by the amalgam of nature and rural communities.
These dilapidated houses, with their households almost lying on the ground, become the sites of a nostalgic and highly topical imagery. Here you find abandoned houses where domestic animals live. In the good room, where on Sundays the whole family used to come home from church to eat, wild horses and cows belonging to the farmers from other villages now lie huddled night after night. A strange animal fauna invading the human environment, nature reclaiming what it has lost. The spectacle of these abandoned houses is inspiring but sad, especially here in the Delta, where the vastness of the landscape leaves room for the imagination.
The life of the villages in the Delta is one of people together, it is a life of communities, whole villages identifying with local communities.
In fact, what struck me from the first moment I visited the villages or settlements in the heart of the Delta is the relationship between the fences, the boundaries, the scale of the houses and the human scale. If in the villages in the mountains or in the hills, the fences are high, over 1.60 m and up to 2.50 m, in the traditional villages in the heart of the Delta, the fences between the houses are between 1.20 and 1.50 m. Everything is a sign of community, of dialog, of living together.
In fact, the "bucureștenten" who have come to the Delta, with properties in the Delta, are immediately recognizable by the high fences of their houses, seemingly out of place in this rural landscape of community. Their fences, over six feet high, are a double sign: a sign of the positive, the house has been saved, by someone who bought it and now lives in it seasonally; a negative sign, the loss of the shared privacy that a rural community in the Delta has.
The real sign of transformation in the Delta is the loss of this shared community intimacy. Low fences have many roles. They provide the possibility of visual and verbal access for neighbors, a communication from one household to another household, because in a Delta community people help each other. Being close to one another, one family to another, one household to another, through a boundary attributed only to demarcation and not total enclosure, is a simple formula for real, sustainable (some would say, using everyday clichés) communion. A fence or low boundary provides the opportunity for a show of gardens, flowers, greenery, but also the cleanliness of the house, all a sign of good neighborliness, of offering the best of the household to the village, the lane, the community. These are all simple, old-fashioned things, but they are becoming increasingly rare and less obvious. The new fences, made of various supermarket-type materials, are clear, firm and opaque, a sign of a different kind of life that saves what can still be saved in the Delta, but introduces a different pattern of living. Young people who grew up in the Delta, left the area but have returned to tourism and fishing: "It's cleaner, it's nicer, it's safer, tourists like it this way," they say.
Actually, tourists don't like it that way, but that's what the new villagers understand from the mix of contemporary and traditional. Besides, the new houses being built are just as unconvincing and out of context as the new fences and boundaries. Strange for a protected area, valuable both biologically and naturally, but also communally, ethnically and architecturally. In the end, culture has its say and, however much you hope for more, the reality of everyday life always wins out.
I keep going to the Delta, regardless of the transformations. I hope, however, that all those rural settlements that still have something left do not turn into built-up areas like those on the Sulina Arm, similar to suburban neighborhoods in Bucharest, full of a false urbanity, bad taste and devoid of culture. In the Delta, you're lucky enough to be able to get rid of them by turning your head: you can see something else, a green area that compensates for the ugly built-up area. In Bucharest, we're not so lucky.