Firmly off the tourist path
Trip Start
Apr 08, 2007
1
90
144
Trip End
Oct 01, 2007
Craiova,
Romania
Thursday, July 19, 2007
I've spent most of the day getting weird looks from locals every time I pull my camera out. Just wagering a guess, I imagine the number of independent Western travelers rolling through here annually stands in the double digits at most. This just isn't a tourist town and the bewildered reception I received at a downtown tourist office when I stopped in for a map quickly confirmed that. "An old town? Not here. This is the town center here, but there's nothing like Brasov or Sibiu or Sighisoara here," the girl explained when I asked about things to see
01: Crumbling old villa on the way into town
. The best she could advise was to visit the park outside of town. Eh?For all the relentless modernization it underwent in the 60s through the 80s, it's not a bad place, per se. Sure, much of the center has been thoroughly redeveloped into gigantic tenement blocks and the remaining, historic administrative buildings look a little beleaguered and isolated. But the sense of hopeless menace that pervades much of Tārgu Jiu doesn't really exist here. While the old urban fabric has been irrevocably damaged, at least effort was made to have the modern buildings conform to the same scale and some sort of logical form. And for once, the Communist-era buildings look like they're actually made of sturdy materials and won't collapse into dust if someone accidentally runs a truck into them. In a country full of decaying concrete structures, that's saying a lot.
While there isn't any true old core left on a significant scale here, there are still streets full of attractive old homes and gorgeous mansions. Many fine, historic villas from the 19th and early 20th centuries still dot the landscape, even if they're been stripped of their original, cohesive urban environment. Some of them have been converted to museums (a particularly stunning one now houses the city's art museum) and others function as important civic institutions and public buildings. The monumental, neo-classical university building still dominates the town center in its hulking mass, even if it's surrounded by faceless housing blocks and neighbored by arguably the city's ugliest construction - the modern National Theatre
02: Busy traffic out behind the university
. If you close your eyes and squint just right, sometimes the city is even slightly beautiful. Take the right backstreet and you won't even have to squint.So, it's not one of Romania's most inspiring cities, but it was worth a day of wandering. The high frequency of public fountains helped in dealing with the sizzling heat. If somehow a time machine could make it so that the last 60 years of Craiova's existence didn't happen, it'd probably be a stunner of a city. Certainly it's easy to picture the fine cultural metropolis that it must have been. Again though, it just makes you wonder what kind of lunacy the Communist-era civic planners were affected with. To completely gut a city of its architectural heritage in the name of "modernization" and then replace it with such sub-standard, bland construction smacks of idiocy. The saddest thing is that Craiova was just one of many - it happened all over this country. In many ways, Craiova got off lighter; some towns don't even have the low-rise residential backstreets or villas housing public institutions. I guess it was one of Ceausescu's generous days.
I'm moving on to yet another industrial city, the town of Pitesti, tomorrow, from where I'll then go up to the mountains and hopefully escape the heat for a couple days. I'll cross my fingers on that one.
Comments
Loved you entry about Craiova
I grew up in Craiova in one of those repulsive looking apartment building and I was impressed to see that you understood a lot about the place in a very short time.
The uneven look of the city that you noticed is not due entirely to the communist 'architectural experiments'. This City started as a conglomerate of huge mansions surrounded by vast plots of land belonging to the very wealthy landlords of Oltenia. However, in time most of them lost their fortunes and had to divide and sell their estates. This is how small houses started showing up in between the huge mansions, mostly modest dwellings with some upper middle class charming and more reasonably sized mansions.
Your comment about the Modern Theatre building as being the ugliest in the city made me laugh as I have to tell you, we think is quite gorgeous. I guess we can't blame that one on Ceausescu either, is just how we wanted it. Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, eh?:)