Category Archives: Romania

by | 8 August 2026 · 5:21 am

Małgorzata Rejmer’s Book Bukareszt

This week’s newsletter from Culture.pl contains some articles about Polish connections with Romania. Here are some excerpts from an article by Mikołaj Gliński titled “Everyone Remembers Their Own Past Differently: Małgorzata Rejmer on Romania & Albania“:

The author Małgorzata Rejmer talks about similarities between Romania and Poland, and reveals the way Poland is perceived from a Romanian perspective. She shares details of the first reactions to her book ‘Bukareszt’, which is due to be released in Romanian. The writer also reveals the beginnings of her latest project, a book about Albania.

Mikołaj Gliński: When and how did you first find yourself in Romania?

Małgorzata Rejmer: I think it all began with the documentary Dzieci z Dekretu (The Decree Children), which I saw in 2007. It tells the story of a Romania in which Ceaușescu banned access to contraception, and it conveys how the absurd becomes normal, and how the everyday becomes hell, with a constant string of humiliation. It’s [shot in] the late 1980s, and factories run gynaecological check-ups of women, with testing material made of frog skin which changes colour in contact with the urine of a pregnant woman. I read all of Herta Muller’s books at the time, but it was only after my trip to Bucharest in 2009 that my curiosity was truly aroused. It was the longing for a city which I associated on the one hand with chaos and crumminess, and on the other hand, with beauty and pathos. For me, in a way it was a ‘crooked Paris’, an absolute mishmash, the glamorous and the plebeian all in one.

MG: When did you first have the idea of writing about Romania?

MR: In 2010, I began to write my doctoral thesis about Romanian cinema, and I read many books about Romania in a short period of time. And I just couldn’t believe it all. I knew that Romania was a fascinating country for a writer and anthropologist. On the one hand, it’s European and looks up to France and Germany, and on the other hand, it also looks back onto the Balkans and Turkey, it’s a mix of the culturally unique, of the provincial and the peripheral.

MG: Why did you choose reportage as a form of description? Your previous book, Toksymia, was a novel…

MR: I am not too attached to the idea that Bukareszt is a reportage piece. I don’t really consider myself a writer, and even less so a reporter. I am just a person who writes. I don’t have the workshop of a journalist, it’s difficult for me to write about a given subject. Either a subject flows out of me and writes itself, or no one could drag me with horses to sit down by my laptop. My writing is very capricious, and it costs me a lot of energy.

MG: The style in Bukareszt is very rich and diverse. You used different conventions (for example, the chapter about the revolution is written as a play, or even a parody, with acts, etc). You also draw on different cultural texts, (The Ballad of Master Manole, the epic of a lamb) as well as styles. I suppose those are not the typical elements of a reporter’s workshop?

MR: Bukareszt is literary and varied in style, because I had the feeling that this city is eclectic, and and that all of Romania is one big patchwork, and this was something that I wanted to render in the book’s language. When I write about a famous Romanian ballad, the language imitates the ballad, and when I write about the chaos of the revolution, I choose the form of a drama. I wanted to adapt the style to the theme, for the polyphony of the book to match the diversity of Bucharest. In the end, if I tried to write all the texts in one style, I would die of boredom. I have to have some fun in my life, to play around with form, and to try out different things. I adore Herta Muller’s reportage from Hunger and Silk, although nobody calls Muller a reporter. Using short sentences, she sketches out touching human portraits and universal stories about humanity. Muller is relentless, she writes with images, doesn’t back away from symbols, and she is at the very centre of the texts herself. I prefer this kind of writing to the most meticulous kind of reportage about some incredibly important and pertinent issue of our times.

MG: How did your Romanian friends react to your book? You do write about rather terrifying and shameful things from the country’s history: the terror of the security services, people spying on each other, prisons, the completely inhuman stories of women which resulted from the 1966 anti-abortion decree, and the taboo of a revolution – which perhaps never even took place?

MR: The book was read by a couple of Polish friends who live in Romania, and they were quite enthusiastic.  Some time ago, a Romanian woman wrote to me saying that after reading Bukareszt, she felt proud of her country again, and wanted to get to know its history. This was moving for me. Only the chapter on abortion has been released in Romania so far, and it was well received. I read comments by young people for whom the text was a discovery, because they had become accustomed to an idealised vision of the Ceausescu era.

Bukareszt is my way of seeing Romania, and a certain selection of facts. You can polemicize about this selection, but it would be harder to argue with the facts. The question of memory is a separate issue – everyone remembers their own past differently, and everyone has their own vision of it. Bukareszt would be a collection of these crumbs, but they are all fragments of a shattered mirror, and they don’t reflect a reality but rather convey a mosaic.

Bukareszt will probably get released in Romania this year, and, possibly, there will then be a discussion around it. It’s possible, but not certain. Romanians are not interested in working through the collective memory. Even at book readings in Cluj and Bucharest, the question hanging over me was “Why do you write about such difficult things from the past? If the present is terrible, why would we need to dig into the past, on top of that?”

MG: Was the work on Bukareszt a difficult experience for you, personally? I am addressing the talks that you had to conduct with people who have had some terrible experiences. Almost all of the topics from the first part touch upon some kind of trauma…

MR: I always approached my protagonists with the conviction that I really want to talk to them, and not that I want to do an interview. These talks went on for hours. I had to recover after many of these stories, and I repeatedly returned to some of them. At times, I would cry together with the people who told me those stories. Suffering is inscribed into life, but I am most interested in the way that these people were able to cope with it.  We all strive for normality even in the most abnormal of times.

MG: What was the most difficult thing for you get used to when you lived in Romania?

MR: I didn’t have any problems with getting used to Romania, but for a long time, I live there in house which very much resembled a squat, with parties running on until 5 in the morning. Recently I went to Bucharest once again, and I decided to stay in the old place out of nostalgia. There was a party once again, and this is something that is hard to get used to.

But apart from that, I didn’t have any problems getting acquainted with Bucharest. I spent some time growing up in a small town, and some time in the northern Praga district [in Warsaw], so Bucharest is close to my heart both in terms of the aesthetics and the atmosphere. And when a Romanian friend came to visit me, he even began to mark out [the district of] Grochów in his own way. For him, the Wiatraczna roundabout was evocative of the Fifth Iancului, the Astoria restaurant reminded him of Intermacedonia, and he would call the local kebab place the same way he would in Bucharest: ‘Ali Baba’.

MG: While reading your book, one can have the impression that many of these historical experiences and situations are, to a certain degree, similar to Polish history, except for over there, things were somehow… a lot worse, a bit like a nightmare. Is it possible to compare these histories? Where do the parallels end?

MR: I cannot answer your question, because I am not able to define where the limits of these similarities lie. I am not the one to trace them out, let the Polish and Romanian readership do it themselves, in accordance with their own subjective feelings.

But looking at this issue from an objective side, looking at the facts, we could say that after 1965, the Romanian version of communism was completely different to the Polish one. It had the face of one man, Nicolae Ceaușescu. He was the one responsible for the situation in the country, he bestowed all of the important posts upon members of his family, and prepared his son to become his successor. Historians call this ‘dynastic communism’. Ceaușescu was Romania. But let’s not forget that in the 1960s and 1970s Romanians led rather good lives, and in many ways, their situation was much better than the one in Poland. It was only the 1980s that brought about a sudden collapse and the fall of the state, as well as a suffering of the people with the complete indifference of the authorities.

The chapters on Romanian communism stir a lot of emotion, but it’s enough to read Kolymskoye Stories to see a completely different scale of human suffering. No matter what atrocity we would think of, man is capable of inventing a greater and more effective one. In this place, the book should have some kind of quotation about man being the most cruel of all animals. I agree.

MG: What is the stereotypical idea that Polish people have about Romania?

MR: To put it bluntly, Poles associate Romania with poverty, Gypsies and Dracula. It’s all stems from ignorance. Just go there, visit Transylvania, Bukovina and Maramuresz and your whole stance towards Romania changes. Poles have no idea about the scale of Romanian influence on European heritage. They don’t know what extraordinary intellectuals surfaced in Romania in the interwar period. A majority of the most acclaimed ones emigrated. And very few Poles know that Romanian cinema has been storming European film festivals for more than a decade, it’s the country’s best export commodities.

MG: Was your perspective as a person coming from Poland at all helpful in understanding Romania? Poland is unarguably also a country from the East of Europe, and a member of the former communist bloc. It possibly has a similar cultural and historical background, being a quite big but peripheral country, under foreign rule for a period of time, and one looking up to the West with both admiration and fascination…

MR: Yes, I think that this kind of stance that we are saturated with as Poles – the sense that we have been wronged by history, that we are underappreciated and marginalised in Europe – helped me understand Romanians. I often explained to them that Poles have a very similar inferiority complex, a problem of peasant roots, and that they are terribly sensitive to any outside criticism. But for Romanians, Poland is Europe, and it’s almost Germany. When I told them about the 123 years of history under partitions, about the sense of inferiority, Romanians would cry out: ‘But in the Middle Ages you were a superpower! And we never had a period of imperial Romania.’ They would also often say: ‘we have a common enemy, Russia!’ In the area I lived in in Bucharest, I once saw a huge, dirty garbage container with the phrase ‘Russia e gunoi’, meaning ‘Russia is garbage’.

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Filed under language, literature, nationalism, Poland, Romania, Russia

by | 5 July 2026 · 2:45 pm

Romanian Realia: Online Investing

This flyer is from a bank in Moldova:

Ai Grijă unde investești ONLINE!
Take care where you invest ONLINE!
Nu te lăsa păcălit de promisiuni false.
Don’t let yourself be fooled by false promises.

STOP investițiilor false
Stop false investments

STOP! Informează-te înainte să accepți oferte “atractive” de învestiții online.
Stop! Inform yourself before accepting “attractive” offers of online investment.

Cănd sună prea frumos să fie adevărat, e momentul să te OPREȘTI.
If it sounds too attractive to be true, it’s the moment to STOP.

VERIFICĂ! Dacă ai dubii, consultă o persoană de încredere sau un angajat bancar.
Verify! If you have doubts, consult a trusted person or a bank employee.

EVITĂ completarea sondajelor care cer informații sensibile și nu oferi datele tale personale sau bancare pe site-uri necunoscute.
Avoid completing surveys that ask for sensitive information and don’t offer personal or bank data on unfamiliar sites.

Ferește-te de “juriștii” de pe internet care promit că îți recuperează banii rapid. În realitate, poate fi doar o altă înșelătorie.
Protect yourself from “lawyers” on the internet who promise that you can quickly recover your money. In reality, it may be just another scam.

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Filed under economics, education, language, Moldova, Romania

by | 27 June 2026 · 12:13 am

Russia Closes the Steppe Frontier, 1774

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 204-205:

The Treaty of Kuchuk Kainarjae, signed in 1774, looked like a setback for Russian aspirations in the Black Sea region. Imperial troops had to leave the Danube principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia. St. Petersburg also had to remove its troops from the Crimea. The reason was simple: a number of European powers were unhappy with the sudden growth of Russian influence in the region. But the treaty benefited the Russian Empire in other ways. It effectively expelled the Ottomans from the northern Black Sea region and the Crimea. Russia established its outposts on the Azov and Black Seas. The Crimean Khanate was now declared an independent state. That was a one-sided description: while the peninsula became independent of Istanbul, it now depended on St. Petersburg.

The formal annexation of the Crimea to the Russian Empire took place in 1783, with the Russian army entering the peninsula and sending the last Crimean khan into exile in central Russia. Bezborodko, by then a leading architect of Russian foreign policy, played an important role in this development. He was also an author of the so-called Greek Project, a plan to destroy the Ottoman Empire and establish a new Byzantium under Russian control, as well as to create Dacia, a new country on the Danube consisting of Moldavia and Wallachia. The project never came to fruition, but its echoes still resonate in the Greek names given by the imperial authorities to the Crimean towns, including Simferopol, Yevpatoria, and the most famous of them, Sevastopol—the Russian naval base established on the peninsula two years after its annexation.

Alarmed by Catherine’s trip to the Crimea in 1787 and rumors of the Greek Project, the Ottomans began a new war for control of the northern Black Sea coast. They lost once again, this time to allied Russian and Austrian troops. According to the peace treaty signed at Jassy in 1792 by Oleksandr Bezborodko, the Russian Empire extended its control to all of southern Ukraine. The Ottomans now recognized both the Crimea and the Kuban region across the Strait of Kerch as Russian territories. With a stroke of Bezborodko’s pen, the Russian Empire had closed the Ukrainian steppe frontier. The cultural frontier, however, remained in place, simply becoming an internal one.

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Filed under Austria, migration, military, Moldova, nationalism, religion, Romania, Russia, Ukraine

by | 21 June 2026 · 3:17 am

Poles & Cossacks vs. Ottomans

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 127-131:

The Ukrainian Cossacks, who had begun their international career in the 1550s by serving the tsar of Muscovy, Ivan the Terrible, paid an unsolicited visit to Moscow during the first decade of the seventeenth century. Muscovy was then in turmoil because of an economic, dynastic, and political crisis known as the Time of Troubles. It began at the turn of the seventeenth century with a number of devastating famines caused in part by what we today call the Little Ice Age—a period of low temperatures that lasted half a millennium, from about 1350 to 1850, peaking around the beginning of the seventeenth century. The crisis afflicted Muscovy at a most inopportune time, when its Rurikid dynasty had died out and a number of aristocratic clans contested the legitimacy of the new rulers. The dynastic crisis came to an end in 1613 with the election to the Muscovite throne of the first Romanov tsar. But before the crisis was resolved, a number of candidates for the throne, some of them “pretenders” claiming to be surviving relatives of Ivan the Terrible, tried their political luck, opening the door to foreign intervention.

During the lengthy interregnum, the Cossacks supported the two pretenders seeking the Muscovite throne, False Dmitrii I and False Dmitrii II. Up to 10,000 Cossacks joined the army of Field Crown Hetman Stanisław Żółkiewski of Poland when he marched on Moscow in 1610. The election to the Muscovite throne three years later of Tsar Mikhail Romanov, founder of the dynasty that lasted until the Revolution of 1917, did not end Cossack involvement in Muscovite affairs. In 1618, a Ukrainian Cossack army of 20,000 joined Polish troops in their march on Moscow and took part in the siege of the capital. The Cossacks helped end the war on conditions favorable to the Kingdom of Poland. One of them was the transfer to Poland of the Chernihiv land, which the Grand Duchy of Lithuania had lost in the early sixteenth century. By the mid-seventeenth century, Chernihiv would become an important part of the Cossack world. As always, however, the Cossacks both helped and hindered the Polish kings in advancing their foreign-policy agenda. In its war with Muscovy, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth never got the support it hoped for from the Ottoman Empire, partly because of continuing Cossack seagoing expeditions and attacks on the Ottoman littoral.

In 1606, descending the Dnieper and entering the Black Sea on their longboats, called “seagulls” (chaiky), the Cossacks stormed Varna, one of the strongest Ottoman fortresses on the western Black Sea shore. In 1614 they pillaged Trabzon on the southeastern shore, and in the following year they entered the Istanbul harbor of the Golden Horn and pillaged the suburbs, much as the Vikings had done some 750 years earlier. But whereas the Vikings had also traded with Constantinople, the Cossack expeditions were akin to pirate attacks on seashores from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean. They came to rob, take revenge, and, as Ukrainian folk songs related, liberate long-suffering slaves. In 1616, they attacked Kaffa, the main slave-trading center on the Crimean coast, and liberated all the captives.

The sultan, his court, and the foreign ambassadors who witnessed one Cossack attack after another on the mighty Ottoman Empire were stunned. The Christian rulers could now take the raiders seriously as potential allies in a war against the Ottomans. The French ambassador in Istanbul, Count Philippe de Harlay of Césy, wrote to King Louis XIII in August 1620, “Every time the Cossacks are near here on the Black Sea, they seize incredible booty despite their weak forces and have such a reputation that strokes of the cudgel are required to force the Turkish soldiers to do battle against them on several galleys that the grand seigneur [the sultan] sends there with great difficulty.”

While Count Philippe was informing his king about the inability of the Ottomans to curb the Cossack seagoing expeditions, advisers to sixteen-year-old Sultan Osman II were considering how to wage war on two fronts: against the Polish army on land and the Cossacks at sea. In the summer of 1620, the Ottoman army marched toward the Prut River in today’s Moldova against the commonwealth, whose troops included private Cossack armies of Polish and Ukrainian magnates. The campaign aimed ostensibly to punish the commonwealth for not curbing Cossack attacks on the Ottomans. In reality, the agenda was much broader. The Ottomans were trying to protect their vassals in the region from the growing influence of the commonwealth. The Polish army, numbering some 10,000 soldiers, and the Ottoman force, twice as large according to some estimates, clashed in September 1620 near the town of Ţuţora on today’s Moldovan-Romanian border. The battle went on for twenty days, ending with a crushing defeat for the commonwealth.

Since the commonwealth had no standing army, the court and the entire country panicked. Everyone expected the Ottomans to continue their march on Poland. Indeed they did. In the following year, a much larger Ottoman army, estimated at 120,000 soldiers and led by the sultan himself, passed through Moldavia on its way to the commonwealth. The Ottomans met a commonwealth force approximately 40,000 strong, half of it made up of Ukrainian Cossacks, led by Petro Konashevych-Sahaidachny, hero of the Cossacks’ raid of 1616 on Kaffa and commander of their march on Moscow two years later. The battle lasted a whole month, waged on the banks of the Dniester River near the fortress of Khotyn, which the Ottomans besieged.

The Battle of Khotyn ended with no clear victory for either side, but that uncertain outcome was regarded in Warsaw as a triumph for the Kingdom of Poland. The Poles had stopped the huge Ottoman army at their borders and signed a peace treaty that involved no territorial losses. Everyone understood that this result would have been all but impossible without the Cossacks. For the first time—and a short time at that—the Cossacks became the darlings of the entire commonwealth. Books that appeared soon after the battle would lionize Petro Konashevych-Sahaidachny, whose monument stands today in the Podil district of Kyiv at the head of the street named after him, as one of the greatest Polish warriors.

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Filed under migration, military, Moldova, nationalism, Poland, Romania, Russia, slavery, Turkey, Ukraine

by | 10 June 2026 · 12:38 am

PCV Exit Interviews in Moldova

From Lenin’s Asylum: Two Years in Moldova, by A. A. Weiss (Everytime Press, 2018), Kindle pp. 239-241:

The COS [Close-of-Service] conference convened on a spring weekend at a campground that wealthy Russians used as vacation property. The Peace Corps staff had reserved us several cabins that overlooked the river separating Moldova and Ukraine. For the first time in two years, the entire group of remaining volunteers was in the same place at the same time. Our original class had dwindled from thirty-seven to twenty-two. The meetings were brief and confusing. Our boss, the Country Director, described how we should avoid areas like shopping malls and rock concerts when we returned to America; large groups of people would probably unnerve us. He read updates from the previous volunteers who had quit or been evacuated; Callie was teaching English in Turkey and Paul was completing his first year of law school in Cincinnati. They were happy. We listened less to their advice for readjustment, and more to where these people lived. America was a big place. Jesse would live in Minnesota, Colin in Virginia, Will in North Carolina. And Sadie would be in New Jersey. I wouldn’t be anywhere near those places. The medical officer asked that those of us who’d contracted ailments continue our medications when we returned home. Jesse—in direct relation to his refusal to ever seek medical treatment—was awarded recognition as the group’s healthiest volunteer over the two-year period. The safety officer asked that we not celebrate our final days in country with binge drinking; our final benefit package would be delayed if we were arrested and deported from the country at the last minute.

The lecture portion of the conference now concluded, the necessary advice for readjustment into American life dispensed, the Country Director congratulated us and excused us to our exit language interviews.

* * *

The Country Director’s secretary was the only one in the office who spoke Russian well enough to test Jesse and me. I waited outside as Jesse spoke with her for ten minutes. He came outside smiling and said, “Piece of cake.” The secretary had given him an advanced mark.

Inside the cabin, I found the secretary sitting on the bed, her feet not touching the floor. She pointed to a chair in the corner and asked me to sit. She asked me to spell my name and then we began. We talked about transportation using verbs of motion, of food preparation, of my likes and dislikes and specific events in the past and future. It took five minutes to finish her checklist of language proficiency.

“So,” said the secretary. “We have some time to kill. What shall we talk about?”

I shrugged my shoulders and said, “It’s all the same to me.” The secretary giggled.

“Your accent is good. Your body language is good, also. Very Russian, it seems to me.”

I nodded, brushing aside the compliment.

“You live with Russians, I must guess. Is this true?”

I nodded.

“Tell me about them.”

“Not much to tell. Very good people. They treat me well.”

“Do you respect them?”

“Of course.”

“What do you mean by, ‘Of course?’”

We sat in silence for a moment as the secretary allowed me to compose my thoughts. My mind returned to my imagining Dima working across the border in Romania, taking orders in a language he hated. And in Bulgaria the women drank coffee on the street corners, I thought. Dima would never be happy anywhere else.

“I spend most of my time in family with the father, Dima. He’s a baker and enjoys working, perhaps not the amount that he must, but the work itself.”

I paused to see if the secretary understood me. She nodded encouragement and waved her hand in a rolling circle to keep me going.

“Like this there is happiness, which I respect. In Riscani, where we live, the streets are clean and pleasant; there is always someone to stop and chat with along the way on these roads. The purpose of life is open and understood, I think. Every day, life has a simple and direct purpose. Walk to work, don’t hurt anyone along the way, and get back home at night for a drink and a sleep.” The secretary nodded and then dismissed me from the cabin. She scored me advanced as well.

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Filed under Bulgaria, education, labor, language, migration, Moldova, Romania, Russia, U.S., Ukraine

by | 8 June 2026 · 8:58 am

Our Quick Visit to Moldova

The Far Outliers have just returned from a short visit to Moldova, flying from Warsaw to Chișinău for Poland’s Corpus Christi school holidays. We had multiple reasons for the visit.

We had earlier considered doing another year abroad under the English Language Fellow program after our year in Poland. In fact, we had originally hoped to go to Romania, but there were no current openings. Moldova has an opening for next year, but my scary health problems during our deep winter in Poland made me fear I might not make it through a Moldovan winter, despite my advantage of arriving in Moldova still fairly fluent in Romanian. Public signage all over Chișinău was indeed almost fully in Romanian (not in Moldovan Cyrillic or Russian), and I enjoyed being able to converse much more readily in Romanian than I have been able to in Polish. (My ability to navigate written Polish is far ahead of my conversational ability.)

Our other reason for visiting Moldova was to make a pilgrimage to the village where Ms. Outlier’s Bessarabian German grandfather was born, and from which his family emigrated via Odessa to Canada and the Dakotas in the 1890s. Their rural village was named Neudorf, like dozens of German villages around the world. (There is a Neudorf village in Saskatchewan, and a poorly documented Neudorf cemetery in Eureka, South Dakota, originally settled by Germans from Russia). All the remaining Germans were expelled from Bessarabia in the 1940s, and Neudorf was renamed Carmanova (in Russian, Карманово).

Carmanova now lies in Transnistria, so near to the Ukrainian border that T-Mobile sent us “Welcome to Ukraine!” text messages when our phones came within range of their Ukraine cell towers. To get us there (and back), Moldova Tours was able to arrange for a private driver fluent in Russian, Romanian, and English, who had prior experience driving groups into the Transnistrian capital, Tiraspol, on their Soviet-era culture tours. But he had never been to very rural Carmanova and was curious about it. We ended up getting turned back twice at Russian Army checkpoints that could not handle international passports, and we had to wait in a long, slow line at the Grigoriopol checkpoint that could process our passports. They gave us a temporary insert but did not stamp our passports.

The rolling green hills of the Transnistrian countryside are quite lovely in June, with vast acres of foot-high sunflower sprouts. Several forks in the road had signposts directing us to the German settlements, and the road into the village featured a roughly made tall welcome sign with the year 1809 (when Neudorf was founded), its name in Cyrillic, Нойдорф, the year 1944, and its new name Карманово (from Карман ‘pocket’?). There was also a rock monument in the village inscribed to mark the 200th anniversary of its founding in 1809.

The village itself was very small and quiet. We were given a tour of the House of Culture by its cordial manager. It contained a curtained stage and auditorium, a disco hall, a barre-lined ballet studio, and several rooms for workshops of various kinds. We also visited the cemetery for Soviet soldiers who died there, billboards with the names and faces of local citizens who died between 1941 and 1945. We saw no sign of a former church. The little country store where we bought a bottle of Ukrainian water took only Transnistrian rubles, so our driver/translator handled the payment.

I’ve added a Moldova album to my Flickr site, Joel Abroad.

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Filed under family, Germany, language, migration, Moldova, Romania, Russia, U.S., Ukraine

by | 6 June 2026 · 5:25 am

Ecology Speech Olympiad in Moldova

From Lenin’s Asylum: Two Years in Moldova, by A. A. Weiss (Everytime Press, 2018), Kindle pp. 104-105:

Each year every school in the country competed in contests of Language Arts, Science and Mathematics to determine Moldova’s top scholars. Teachers of winning pupils were also rewarded. The Russian School of Riscani, known regionally for subpar students, perennially lost to the rival Moldovan Lyceum up the hill. But this year the odds were in the Russians’ favor, as I—Mr. Aaron, the town’s foreign expert—would be the guest Olympiad judge.

Today’s contest was in ecology, a subject of which I knew nothing. Regardless, the presentations would be in English and I was therefore the authority. The entire event transpired over a hectic two-hour period.

We arrived at the Moldovan Lyceum, a castle with narrow windows that had once been the residence of the town’s founder. A legend stated the fortress had withstood an assault by raiding Turks. Once inside, I was introduced to the Moldovan half of the judging panel: a biology teacher from the Moldovan Lyceum and a Romanian language teacher from Mihaileni, one of the competing lyceums from a village within the district. Nadezhda and I were the other two panel members. The two Moldovan teachers knew Nadezhda and hated her. I did not know where this animosity came from, but I witnessed it in the side-whisper conversations and the politely sterile manner in which they greeted her by her full name, Nadezhda Ivanovna.

The competition began; presentations would precede a multiple-choice test.

The Moldovan team presented first, speaking about the need to use conservationist principles when building houses. I thought the presentation very fair. The two girls presenting were polite when they addressed the panel, spoke clearly, and despite repeating each sentence for effect, made some decent points about man’s impact on nature.

The Russian team went next, speaking about the need to clean apartments regularly unless one wanted to kill his family with the poisons that the human body produced every day and shed into the environment. I left the presentation unconvinced of the scientific rigor of the team’s investigations, but they’d presented with loud voices and had clearly convinced Nadezhda of their superior ecological intellect. She poked me in the ribs and nodded as though to say, winners.

The village team from Mihaileni went last, presenting about the need to protect well water. Their presentation was exceptionally well researched; however, I felt they’d relied too heavily on the bilingual dictionary. I audibly groaned when a young girl used the phrases “excrement cocktail” and “repeated, daily consumption” in the same sentence. Nadezhda—an English teacher herself—found no objection in that usage. And though I’d expected as much, I then knew for certain that the other Moldovan panelists did not speak English, and were merely grading these presentations on the volume and emotional conviction of the speakers.

The judging panel stepped outside during the multiple-choice test. The biology teacher from the Moldovan Lyceum tried to speak to me in Romanian so that Nadezhda wouldn’t understand the conversation. “He only speaks Russian,” said Nadezhda. “He speaks only modern languages.”

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Filed under education, language, Moldova, nationalism, Romania, Russia, U.S.

by | 2 June 2026 · 12:15 am

Language Lessons in Moldova

From Lenin’s Asylum: Two Years in Moldova, by A. A. Weiss (Everytime Press, 2018), Kindle pp. 26-27:

Our language instructor gave us directions to a landmark in the center of town, and we soon realized the directions had been intentionally complicated so that we’d have to ask questions of locals. Away from headquarters, we passed a yellow, onion-top church and were then sucked into the central bazaar, an outdoor black hole of discount merchandise. Anyone dealing any type of transaction came at us with booming Slavic accents, as if their words need only enter our physical space to stun us and take control of our wallets. I considered buying cheese, batteries, soap packets, tin cups for drinking, but managed to pass through without losing money.

Vendors conversed with their friends in shouts from stall to stall. Flip-flops, light machinery, dried fish, bulk tea, clothing, duplicates of keys, endless buckets of salted cheese, olives, rice, cucumbers, tomatoes, liters of wine in reused soda bottles. These vendors were the types who’d ridden with me on the bus in the morning—old babushkas selling whatever they had too much of at home. Grandchildren ran wild in the corridors of the bazaar, dashing in between, behind, and under the vendor stalls with their rubber toy guns.

It seemed everyone in the capital spoke only Russian. Romanian might have been spoken at home among family members, but Russian was the language of money, spoken openly at shops and on the streets. And though I understood the majority of volunteers sent to Moldova would learn Romanian in order to serve the poorest communities, I didn’t envy them. Unlike other colleagues, Jesse and I would never complain about policemen and bazaar women refusing (or unable) to speak Romanian, checks from all restaurants presented in the Cyrillic alphabet, and host families only speaking an angry-sounding foreign language to them at home, expecting them to respond to the sharp sounds as though they were dogs.

The din of commerce activity decreased once we left the maze of the bazaar. We hadn’t yet asked directions, still waiting for someone who appeared within our age range to approach. A girl walked fast and picked up speed as we addressed her, perhaps to shorten our opportunity to harass her. But she stopped shortly after passing us, having responded to the softness and insecurity in our accents. She pointed toward a busy intersection a block away and seemed disappointed that we ended our conversation by wishing her health and happiness. I think she wanted to tell us her name. At the intersection a woman selling popcorn perked up when she heard our accents and pointed across the street to a sidewalk art sale. At the art bazaar a man selling Russian stacking dolls said we were on the right track and asked where we were from, and recommended dolls to match any personality. He thought our accents sounded Polish. A block farther we stopped another girl and she pointed across the street to our destination.

McDonald’s.

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Filed under economics, education, language, Moldova, nationalism, Romania, Russia

by | 1 June 2026 · 7:27 am

New Peace Corps Teacher in Moldova

From Lenin’s Asylum: Two Years in Moldova, by A. A. Weiss (Everytime Press, 2018), Kindle pp. 16-17:

I was born in Ohio during the Cold War.

At that time Moldova wasn’t yet a country. Tucked between Romania and Ukraine, I’d never noticed it on the map during geography pop-quizzes or seen mention of it in National Geographic (my two childhood sources of world knowledge). Through pre-departure research I learned a recent civil war had ended, the president was a communist, and many outpost towns spoke Russian exclusively instead of the national language, Romanian. As the poorest nation in Europe, Moldova’s workers had little work—one in four adults left the country to seek employment. Those who stayed used their bodies for income and sustenance, working in the fields, yes, but also trafficking themselves to those trading in sex and human organs. It lacked an international marketplace for wine—its only export—so people tended to drink up what was on hand. It had schools without adequately trained teachers and politicians without scruples. Orphanages were filled with children whose parents had either departed the country or couldn’t afford to feed them.

Moldova needed a superhero, it seemed, not an English teacher.

I wasn’t the first American to be stationed in Riscani. Three other English teachers had passed through before me. Their site reports didn’t inspire confidence. “Kind of a ghost town,” and “very Russian,” one described Riscani. The mayor, a member of the communist party, was labeled “unhelpful and patronizing.” The schools were “terrible environments” which suffered from “daily disorder” and “undisciplined children.” Yet all the other volunteers had arrived speaking Romanian, and they’d clearly suffered for it. Each had recommended that future volunteers sent to Riscani speak Russian.

So there I was.

When I arrived at the Russian school for my first day of teaching, most people thought I was a parent dropping off a new pupil. I’d dressed in clothes purchased at the “professionals” section at the bazaar—a purple dress shirt with snapping breast pockets and a pink tie. Teachers asked if I was lost and told me where I might find my child. Sometime during the chaos of these first moments in the school, among the bodies of boys and girls and adults running to find the correct room, a small girl came up to me and complained that a boy had lit her hair on fire with a match. She showed me a collection of singed ends as proof. I understood nothing, patted her on the head and said, “Very good.”

I made my way to the English classroom, met briefly with the school director—a man with a naturally angry face attempting to smile—and was then alone with a class of fifth graders.

The look of serenity on my face was completely fake. Sweat rolled behind my ear down into my collar. I loosened my tie. I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. “Does anyone speak English?” I asked. Nothing came out of their mouths. I repeated the question in Russian, and almost immediately fifteen little hands began shaking in the air to indicate fifty-fifty. We did introductions in Russian and then in English and completed forty-five minutes of basic grammar and vocabulary. I could tell these fifth graders weren’t ready to write poetry. But they’d successfully introduced themselves and expressed their likes and dislikes. Nearly all had liked football and disliked mathematics. It seemed my new job wouldn’t kill me.

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Filed under language, Moldova, Romania, Russia, Ukraine, USSR

by | 19 April 2026 · 1:59 am

Polish zakąski vs. Romanian zacuscă

My latest compilation from Culture.pl includes some articles about Polish gastronomy, including Natalia Mętrak-Ruda’s 2020 article on Zakąski Culture in Poland: What to Eat with Vodka?

The Spanish have their tapas, the Italians have their aperitivo and in the Middle East they feast on mezze. Small plates, which you most often share with friends and which – at least in countries where it’s generally accepted to consume alcohol – are usually accompanied by a fair share of drinks, are a part of many food cultures worldwide. In Poland, these dishes are known as zakąski and go exceptionally well with vodka.

…

Traditional Polish weddings, especially in rural areas, are occasions where the culture of zakąski still reigns supreme. While we’ve observed a cultural shift in past decades, and people in big cities tend to drink more wine and often prefer a more Mediterranean or French approach to banquet canapés, smalec [animal fat, cf. schmaltz], sausages and other cured meats, meat jellies, pickles, and herring are still among the most popular items included in traditional wedding buffets – sometimes known as wiejski stół, ‘a country table’.

… Yet the king of all zakąski was herring, served with a tomato and onion sauce (the ‘Kashubian’ way), with mayonnaise and peas (curiously named Japanese herring), or simply in oil with some onions.

In the last decade ongoing efforts have been made by some Polish chefs, bartenders and spirit connoisseurs to start looking at vodka from a new perspective. Not just as something to get drunk on, or dissolve in a cocktail, but an interesting local product, which has the potential to become as important to Poland, as whiskey is to Ireland and Scotland, or champagne to France.

To do so, passionate chefs started to think about much more refined zakąski, which would go well with artisan vodkas. Chef Aleksander Baron and food writer Łukasz Klesyk even wrote a book about it entitled Między Wódką a Zakąską (which literally means ‘Between Vodka and an Appetiser’, yet also refers to the idiom wcinać się między wódkę a zakąskę – to meddle or interfere).

The authors claim that the most important rules in creating new zakąski are following the contrasts created by the pairing of the sweetness of vodka with either salt or acid. At the same time, keeping in mind that the appetisers should be rich and complex enough to handle high levels of alcohol. It can be achieved by adding fat but also by enriching the flavours by grilling, roasting, adding herbs, spices or mushrooms.

The Russian equivalent of zakąski is zakuski, singular zakuska, with pretty much the same meaning, but the Romanian zacuscă that we Outliers are very fond of is instead a vegetable concoction of roasted eggplant, red bell pepper, onion, tomato, and spices.

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Filed under food, language, Poland, Romania