Last year at Herkulesbad

I don't believe in photos or explanations.

Ion Theodorescu

I went to Băile Herculane more to oha. I had just escaped a hard time, which I will only say had to do with the hunger and misery of isolation, but also with the feeling that everything was blex. I needed a break.

Retinal optographs

I can't remember who told me I should go to the baths, like the old people, to go on a cleanse. That idea reminded me of the stacks of letters and postcards my grandfather on my father's side used to send to family in the resorts. I hadn't thought about them in decades. I don't even know where they are. But they've fascinated me ever since I was a kid. As a child, I knew nothing but the sandy seaside beaches, and maybe that's why images of old wooden buildings or huge brutalist monoliths rising out of the woods became etched in my mind's retina. So did the words written in seventeenth-century typefaces that I struggled to spell: So-va-ta, Va-tra Dor