Romania Arrival

Arriving in Romania was not the smoothest. Got in a few frustrating situations including a shady cab driver, a sketchy hotel, and misinformation about transit to Tulcea. However, I am now in Tulcea safe and sound a found decent accommodations. Tulcea is the gateway city to the Danube Delta.

Romania has some significance to me as it is the only country I am visiting on this trip which I have ancestry from, as I am ¼ Jewish-Romanian. My grandmother on my father’s side had immigrated with her family from Romania to the U.S. just prior to World War 2. It was a good thing they did as up to 400,000 Romanian Jews had been killed during the war. Today there is only a small population of Jews still living in Romania.

This grandmother is the only one of my grandparents still alive today. She still lives in a nursing home in San Francisco, though her health has declined significantly over the past few years. On my last visit to her prior to departing we had told her that I was going to visit Romania. Her face lit up upon hearing this news, though she said that she would never want to return to Romania herself.

The Jewish traditions really had not been retained in my family though. Unlike her two siblings, my grandmother had not continued to practice Judaism for personal reasons and neither of her husbands had been Jewish. Additionally Judaism is passed down maternally and since it was my father’s mother, the practices were not passed down any further.

There were Jews in Tulcea and the Danube Delta, but apparently as the communities are no longer here, the traces of them have all disappeared as well. It does not appear that there are large amounts of Jewish Romania which have been preserved for tourism and education purposes. But there are several sites in Bucharest though that I have read about, including the Jewish History Museum. I am only going to be passing through Bucharest on my way out of the country, but if I do have time I would like to see these areas so that I can learn more about my roots.

Besides the Jews though, Romania has been an incredibly diverse country in regards to ethnicities. The Danube Delta alone has been home to Romanians, Lipovans, Haholens, Turks, Greeks and Aromunens, many of whom still live here. This is a parallel to the Sacramento San Joaquin Delta which also has had numerous ethnic groups working together to shape it into the landscape that it is today including Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos and Mexicans. One of the take home messages I was trying to make in my thesis was that there are a diversity of cultural heritage values of the Sacramento San Joaquin Delta that have been overlooked in the planning process due to the pressing environmental threats that have been the focus of people’s attention. Incorporating these values though could have significant benefits to the region and in turn could be used to help alleviate some of the environmental threats. Basically, more attention needs to be drawn to the Sacramento San Joaquin Delta as a cultural landscape, not just an ecological one. One of the objectives for me in visiting the Danube Delta is to see what efforts have made to incorporate this diversity of ethnic representation into the tourism planning process for this World Heritage Site so that I could have some ideas to being back to the Sacramento San Joaquin Delta.

Haven’t been able to see the Delta itself yet, but am going to take a tour or two this week. Today though I was able to explore Tulcea pretty thoroughly. There are a few decent museums including the Danube Delta Natural Sciences Museum and the Museum of Etnography and Folk Art. The docent at the Museum of Etnography and Folk Art was able to give me a pretty good explanation on culture and customs of many of the different groups in the region.

Tulcea is a pretty cute town and the Danube waterfront promenade is pretty pleasant to walk down. However there are a number of high-rise hotels and casinos which are a bit of an eyesore from an urban design perspective. But just a few blocks from the town’s center there are a number of cute houses, historic buildings and cobblestone streets that add to the cities character. So far I am enjoying Romania quite a bit. And wow, I never thought I could find desserts tastier than the ones in Portugal. But I may have just found them here.

Tulcea and Danube River

Museum of Etnography and Folk Art

Historic Building

Citadel

St. Nicholas Cathedral