Erdély induló : PART THREE

My mother decided one day to meet up with one of her friends, who she last saw in 1975 or so. The vast majority of people my mother knew left for Canada, the States, Sweden, Germany and Israel, so it was quite exciting for her to remember the past with her old colleague from med/dental school.



They found my mother's old apartment from when she was really little while her father was at war in Korea. She tried to climb out of the balcony once at the age of three. It was one of the many stories my mom told me of her climbing out of a balcony.



This was the last place my parents were before they left Romania. It's still a police station. She remembers watching my dad get interrogated. "They hurled endless insults at him, and threw things in his face, and I just sat there saying nothing," she told me. A sympathetic bureau official gave them a visa to leave, and the next thing they knew, they were on a plane to Israel. A year later, they made it to Toronto.



A back alley caught my mother's eye. Turns out a childhood friend lived there, a Romanian girl she used to play with, whose name escapes her. The remains of the house were the greatest signs of decay that Tirgu Mures had to offer.





This is where the cool kids hung out in the 60s. It's now marshland and illegal to swim in it due to pollution. I'm trying to look like my dad in his Kafka phase, circa 1966.

There's a ferry on a zipline that can take you to an island, but it'd be prudent to take your own boat, as the ferry driver drinks a lot and sometimes forgets to bring people back.



The abandoned pool, where my father used to teach swimming. Now a place where children in bicycle gangs pop wheelies endlessly. Wild dogs fuck each other in the boiler room. There must have been people living there, as I found dilapitated mattresses beside the boilers. The pictures have gone missing, but you don't really want to see them.



Down the way is a small Gypsy enclave. The Roma people, as they're known officially (Tsigani Bozgor if you're a dick), live poorly in the cities, but quite well in the country villages surrounding the towns. There were people outside of these houses we saw, but I was unwilling to photograph them, in consideration of the fact that they've been exotocised heavily ever since cameras were invented. They're usually a very cheerful, vibrant people, but the folks I saw living on that stretch by the pool carried a serious look of discontentment and dissatisfaction on their faces, as if life itself were a tedious chore.



No matter who you are in Tirgu Mures, you spend your weekends at...um, The Weekend, a giant outdoor swimming centre, with bars all along the walkways and watersport docks on the river. It used to be a field when my parents grew up there, but even then, it was called The Weekend and everyone showed up.

The poster supports President Traian Băsescu, who was being put to the test with a national referendum on his proposed impeachment. He was on the docket for a series of unrelated, low level corruption offences, but since corruption, theft and neglect are national pastimes, no one cared, and his impeachment did not stand.

More tomorrow. Check out PART TWO and PART ONE.

Erdély induló : PART TWO

Marosvasarhely / Tirgu Mures has been around for hundreds of years, and has existed since 1332, first as a papal estate, then as a royal settlement under King Matyas Corvinus, who was half Hungarian, half Rumanian and a huge hero to everyone. It was the home of the principality court during the Austro-Hungarian era. The Germans who settled there during that period call it Neumarkt am Mieresch. All of its names basically connote "market on the River Maros". In the first part of the Communist era, it was named the capital of the Hungarian Autonomous Province, which barely existed beyond a paper surface. After 1989, there were ethnic clashes between Hungarians and Romanians that made world news.



The town's symbol, which is a dragon's head on a stake. The other is a plaque commemorating "Latinity". While it's debatable whether or not Romanians have Roman genes, their ancestral people adopted a very Latin language. In the Renaissance period, a Latin based alphabet replaced the Cyrillic one (this can be attributed to Hungarian influence, but it never is), and in 1989, the alphabet was adapted once again, so as to rid words of "Slavic" letters as much as possible...hence the new spelling: Targu Mures.



Romulus and Remus suck on the teats of their mother, the Golden She-Wolf (not gold for this occasion).



I'm Jewish on my father's side, so we found the Jewish cemetary, dug deep into the hill on an unmarked road. It's run by an old woman and her husband, and she knows exactly where everyone is buried. She helped us find them, and it's a good thing she was there. It was a treacherous find, as walking between the tomb-like grave stones was near impossible. Whole stones were covered in ivy, and brushing back the leaves would reveal entire families killed at Auschwitz.



There's a statue in one of the commemoration room sculpted by Iszak Marton (or Martin Issac), a friend of my grandmother's, who used her family as his inspiration. The final version of the memorial can be found downtown.



The synagogue, open only for holidays since the 1950s, and occasionally vandalized by neighbourhood anti-Semites of all stripes, can be found by the memorial at the corner. On the memorial, the Holocaust is blamed solely on Hungarian Fascists, which only tells part of the story. As if the Romanians Fascists had any more love for the Jews?



"It's all a pissing contest", as one of my uncles likes to say. Squabbles aside, both cultures exhibit high degrees of artistic merit when commemorating their dead. The Romanian cemetary (not sure if it's Catholic or Orthodox) is a sight to see, especially the numerous photographs of the deceased encased into the stone surfaces.



The Hungarian Catholic cemetary is also a highlight of local craftsmanship. It's incredibly traditional, adopting Szekely symbols and runes. Much of my mother's family are buried there, as well as colleagues and friends. Let's not forget early Hungarian champions of the nation-state concept, hanged by the Austrians after 1848.



My mother's family are wonderful. Her nephew is married and has two hilarious, delightful kids who like AC/DC and Scooby Doo. Their mother is a fantastic actress at the town theatre, and has worked with some famous people in Romania.

Another of my cousins, closer to my age but a bit older, spent a couple of summers in America, and his English is much, much better than my Hungarian, but we learned a lot from one another. He was an amazing host, and gave up his room for me to stay with his girlfriend (a rehearsal for when they get married?). The two of them are the nicest peeople I can think of, and a symbol of the new successes people have found there. He's a real estate agent who just finsihed business school, with a talent for making jewelry, while she's starting her own dental practise, reopening her family's clinic that they owned before the wars.



While awaiting the completion of their new house on the outskirts of town, the kids and their parents had to stay with my uncle and aunt in a small apartment. There was always happy commotion there, meals galore, way too much booze and apparently, a couple of turtles.



I loved hangin' with the fam at both apartments, one downtown and the other on the hill. At the downtown location, some of the *ahem* less educated members of society use the courtyard as a personal W.C. while they wait for the bus. The city won't build a fence, and it's no consolation that they send someone to clean it once in a while. The city, it seems, is still figuring out who's job it is to clean up shit and build fences.

While there may be Number Twos in the bushes, there's still good times upstairs, like pipe smoking and drinking shots or alarmingly clear alcohol. On the streets, we can goof off and make funny faces and no one cares. Across town at the other apartment, we sing CCR songs, and drink more shots of alarmingly clear alcohol.



Then we party...



...and get crazy medieval.

More to follow...meanwhile read PART ONE.