Andrei Codrescu on Romania

“In days too long ago now to remember, Romania was a breadbasket and among the largest corn producers in the world, and Bucharest was lush with fruits, vegetables and every delicacy.”

“After I had told them about my country for so long, stories both true and imagined, my family and friends wanted to hear for themselves what the new story was. One day, I told everyone, we will all go to Romania to eat plums from apple trees, pears from poplars, honey from streams. Romania was more fairy tale than real place to them; but now a miracle had taken place, and the fairy tale had sprung to life.”

“Situated at the very center of the ancient spice routes of the Orient, Romania was the golden apple that made everyone's mouth water, and consequently, everyone, the Goths, Visigoths, Huns, Slavs, Austrians, and Soviets, tried to swallow it whole. Amazingly enough, it survived the battering rams of a ceaselessly hostile history for hundreds of years until the regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu began accomplishing in a few years what the combined horrors of numberless invaders were unable to.”

“There is an untranslatable Romanian word that expresses with great precision the kind of unbearable longing and nostalgia that grips one's heart when thinking of home. That word is dor. I have felt it many times. Nostalgia for the medieval squares of Sibiu steeped in golden light, longing for the outdoor cafés of Bucharest, drinking new wine, all of us young, intoxicated with poetry and song. I missed the smells of flowering linden trees, the blue reflections of deep mountain snow in the evenings, the old peasant villages that Ceaușescu's insanity almost wiped off the face of the earth. I missed the real fairy tales I was raised on. The story of the waters of life and death, youth without age, the tale of the sheep Mioritza that recites the cosmic poetry of the sky, the story of the poplars that grew pears...”