A Stop in Babadag …

Babadag was quiet on the Sunday Europe’s Constitution was voted. Nobody there would have found out anyway about important events unfolding in this world, because Babadag (TR. NOTE: a small city 208 kilometers east of Bucharest) lives in another era than Europe and the rest of the world. Here, at Babadag, there are hours to count only because there are watches and clocks to keep their track. In there absence, Babadag could well live its life in any other year of the last half century, since time stood still when those clocks adamantly refused to tick, or worse, started to turn counter-clockwise, going back in time. I would not be able to tell in what time they would take Babadag, as the city lives on the threshold between the dream world and the real world. It sometimes submerges into the past, now and then making it to the surface of the present times to not cut loose from its link with reality, with real life.

This real life means here sheer poverty. This is a city, a little town, or a hamlet, I do not know how best to describe it, which is not living but surviving. From the only one-star (and that a dubious falling one) hotel to the last hut in town, all stood still for the past 15 years and the passage of time left its marks everywhere.

Half of the Babadag people, particularly the young, left to find work abroad; the other half stayed home waiting for their return or for the money they would send. Thus small Romanian inhabited islands are drifting apart, making an archipelago of the people left behind, waiting and impoverished, and of the people who left to work abroad, full of hope.

"Poverty, poverty!," cries out loud, at dusk, a little Gypsy girl walking on the Babadag streets; her figure is reminiscent of the corn-made puppets used in the folk rites to call on the rain.
These days, calling on poverty as once people called on rain sounds like a curse that will haunt Babadag to the grave, as Babadag - the city once called the flower of Dobrogea region - is well dead. Only its shadow lives on, peaking behind the illuminated signs of the mobile phone operators and the National Savings Bank building, looking like the money is long gone from it, which cannot be far from the truth.

In the hotel lobby, the great actor Dem Radulescu, now deceased, still smiles from a poster advertising for a beer brand. He looks to be the most alive person in this town where the passage of time neither hurts nor proceeds …