The worksite where my father had been employed was located in one of the many forests around Anina and Steierdorf. Its main activity was logging in the area. The site was administered by Sovromlemn within the Ministry of Construction and Construction Materials (MCMC). Trucks loaded with logs left this site to be processed in specialized factories or sent abroad.
The site management found us two rooms to rent in the house of a Swabian family (Banat Germans) in Steierdorf. The house stood on a side street branching off from the main street of the locality, close to the Roman Catholic church and the school, which were considered the centre of the village.
The Habsburg Colonization of Banat
The war fought between 1716 and 1718 between the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires ended with the liberation of Banat from Ottoman rule and its annexation to the Habsburg Empire. Banat acquired the status of an imperial crown domain, administered directly from Vienna through the provincial imperial administration. Once under Habsburg rule, Banat received a special organization, being regarded as a domain rich in resources that had to be exploited, and was assigned the role of a centre of power in the region. The colonization of Banat was a large-scale, systematic action, planned in minute detail by the Austrian administration. Three waves of colonization took place in Banat in the eighteenth century: Carolinian, Theresian and Josephine, named after the three Habsburg emperors who encouraged them. Under Empress Maria Theresa, efforts to colonize Banat in order to extract maximum profit from a region devastated by Ottoman occupation multiplied. New towns and villages appeared, colonized with populations coming from various parts of the empire. Often, the Romanian population was displaced and stripped of any rights over the lands it held, thus making room for the arrival and settlement of the Swabians. Villages, towns and streets were drawn on the drafting board, in a symmetry that reflected the culture of Habsburg absolutism in the architecture and urban planning of the age. The immigrant colonists found in Banat a marshy, almost deserted land. In the first years they faced epidemics, fever and famine. Yet, through enormous effort, with many victims and many obstacles, within two or three generations the recultivation of the region was successfully completed. The Banat Swabians best expressed the hardship of their effort in the saying: Den Ersten der Tod, den Zweiten die Not, den Dritten das Brot (“Death to the first, poverty to the second, bread to the third”).
The locality of Steierdorf was founded as a colony of the imperial treasury in 1773, when 34 families of forestry workers were settled here. They had been brought from Upper Austria, were specialized in producing the charcoal needed by the metallurgy of Oravița, and named the settlement Steierer Dorf. Before the arrival of the German colonists, Romanian charcoal burners (bufani) of Oltenian origin lived there, scattered in isolated farms.
In 1790, in a nearby alder forest, a piece of superior coal (hard coal) was found by chance, a discovery that led to the rapid emergence and development, next to the locality, of the coal-mining settlement of Anina. Later, after 1850, other colonists from Bohemia, Slovakia and Lorraine joined the German colonist population and were soon Germanized as well. In the same period, the inhabitants of Steierdorf were granted possession of the land on which they lived. A narrow-gauge railway line was also built between Anina and Oravița for a small train known locally as the “mocăniță”. In a short time, Anina became the most important coal-mining locality, first called Steierdorf by the locals, a name preserved until 1952, when the settlement was declared a town under the name Anina, thus incorporating Steierdorf, which became merely a district of Anina. In this way, a tradition of more than 150 years disappeared, absorbed into a newly created reality which, unfortunately, would itself not withstand time for very long.
At the end of the nineteenth century, the mountains around Steierdorf were often popularized as the “Switzerland of Banat”. Near the cobblers’ houses built in 1868–70, on the western slope of the hill, a holiday resort called Freudenthal developed around today’s Drum Nou and Crivina streets. Besides a few villas, the Sommerfrische sanatorium was built there in 1893–95; between the two world wars it was renamed Aurora Banatului. In 1952 I found them in ruins, and during the construction of the disastrous oil-shale power plant, around 1977, I later learned that both the sanatorium and the holiday houses had been demolished.
Around 1884, in order to secure the water flow required by the industry of the Anina coal basin, a small reservoir was created by damming the Buhui stream, right where it emerged from the cave of the same name. This wonderful place, located only a few kilometres from the town of Anina, was one of our family’s favourite weekend destinations.
Two Towns in One
Banat, with its wooded hills and the slow rhythm of life, was a world completely different from the bustle of Bucharest. My father hoped to find a certain peace at the worksite, doing a type of work for which he had trained at university. I, on the other hand, had to get used to my new schoolmates, who would certainly look at me with curiosity and distance, as someone who had come from the capital. Then there was my mother, who had to take care of me, cook and run the household, something she had not done in Bucharest until then, but for which my grandmother had prepared her well.
Our stay in Steierdorf coincided with the change in status of the little town, which was administratively absorbed into Anina, a settlement with a strong industrial resonance. Yet in my perception the differences between the two localities were considerable.
Anina was an industrial town, dominated by mine shafts, coke ovens, blast furnaces and a refractory brick factory. It seemed to me an austere place, far from the aesthetics of the towns I was used to. In the town I saw barracks, small one- or two-storey apartment blocks, a railway depot, but also a few villas for the managers of the mines and factories, and an imposing railway station, just as the ironworks and the mine tower were imposing at that time. The town could appear alive, prosperous, but to me, accustomed to Bucharest architecture, its industrial architecture was not appealing. During the communist period, Anina went through a period of sustained development, following the coordinates of the centralized economy. Industry developed and the number of inhabitants reached more than 10,000. It is said that German soldiers taken prisoner during the Second World War were sent to camps in Romania and then forced to work in the mines. I do not know how true this account is, but I know that most of the mine workers spoke German.
Later I learned that, after the fall of communism and of the centralized economic system in 1989, Anina entered a period of continuous economic decline. The hard-coal deposits became depleted; coal had come to be extracted from a depth of 1,400 metres, and mining was no longer profitable. The illusion of using the oil shale extracted at Anina in a large thermal power plant at Miniș-Crivina produced one of the greatest failures of the communist period. The power plant was closed in 1989. A new district of apartment blocks had also been designed for this plant. They remained unfinished, at the stage of “skeletons”. The ruins of the “new district” give the area the appearance of a ghost town. First of all, the mines were closed, leaving a large number of inhabitants without jobs and forcing them to leave the town. Large-scale industry had to be restructured or simply shut down. The Germans, who had begun to emigrate even during communism, left en masse after 1989. Thus, in the period after 1989, the demographic situation in Anina gradually became desolate. From the prosperity of earlier years, Anina turned into a town struggling with the lack of jobs, insufficient infrastructure, and the absence of younger generations who had decided to leave the region in search of a better life elsewhere.
A similar fate befell the uranium mines of Ciudanovița, 30 km from Anina. After 40 years of reckless uranium exploitation, the environmental situation in the area became dramatic, with spoil heaps contaminating a town of only a few hundred inhabitants. But this was not the situation in Banat in 1952, when we arrived there.
Steierdorf, only a few kilometres from Anina, remained entirely different in my perception. Also wedged between the hills of the Anina Mountains, it was a quiet little town, developed around a main street, Strada Victoriei, which was part of the Anina–Oravița road. From this central street, several side streets branched off and stopped at the foot of the slopes of the hills that embraced the town. Whereas on the main street there were old houses with two or three floors, clean and well maintained, on the adjacent streets stood rows of houses with courtyards typical of the Banat Swabians, who, I believe, were the majority in the town at that time. The entrances to the households had tall wooden gates under a masonry arch.
My Life in Banat
Our acclimatization in Steierdorf was rapid. The family that hosted us was very kind to us, although because of us they had to squeeze themselves into the other two rooms of the house. They spoke Romanian quite well with us, but among themselves they spoke a language that I believed to be German. The main building of the house was made of brick, raised on a stone foundation, with four rooms along a hallway reached from the courtyard through a porch, after climbing six steps. Two of the rooms had windows facing the street, and the other two faced the courtyard. The roof had two slopes and was covered with tiles. The façade of the house facing the street continued into a masonry arch supported by two pillars, which held a two-leaf gate of solid wood. The gate was opened only when carts arrived with winter provisions: firewood for the stoves or food for people and animals—bales of hay and fodder for the cow, sacks of bran and maize for the poultry, and so on. We and the cow used a small wicket cut into one leaf of the large gate.
The courtyard was relatively large, with a poultry yard for turkeys, hens and ducks, an annex to the house with two other rooms, and a stable with a cow that had to be taken out to graze every day. The stable (“stălog”) had a shed and a storehouse, completed by the maize crib (“clet”), the pigsty and the dovecote.
Every morning the herd of cows gathered from the whole locality passed in front of our house, and our heifer had to join her companions in order to reach the communal pasture, somewhere at the edge of the town. In the evening, the herd returned from grazing and each cow had to take its place again in its own stable, where the lady of the house was waiting to milk it. Although the cow was intelligent enough to find its own way in the morning to the pasture and in the evening back home, the youngest son of the family, Ernest, was responsible for all the operations of exporting and importing the cow. The boy was about my age, since we were both in the same third-grade class at the gymnasium school in Steierdorf. In rotation, Ernest would have his turn to supervise the communal cows on the pasture for half a day. Sometimes he invited me to accompany him, which gave me great pleasure.
Finally, in the courtyard, under the windows of our rooms, there were three cages covered with loose wire mesh, containing rabbits with completely white fur, pink little snouts and blue eyes, which were given carrots and other vegetables every day, gathered from the small garden that was tended, like the whole house, by the mistress of the household.
The master of the house went to work in the mine at Anina every morning and returned in the evening. At about the same morning hour, my father also left for the worksite. A site truck came for personnel transport, with benches and a tarpaulin, picking up from Steierdorf the few employees of the site administration who lived in the locality with their families. When the truck reached the gate of the house, my father, dressed in a padded jacket and boots, saw it from the window and left the house to climb into it. In the evening, the same truck brought him back home. Other unmarried employees slept in the site barracks, where the conscript soldiers forced to work on the five-year-plan construction sites were also housed.
Soon after our arrival, the school year began and my parents enrolled me in the second grade of the only school in the locality. Unlike the other schools I attended, I remember very little about the school in Steierdorf. I remember, for example, that during the German lessons I was allowed not to attend. I would stay outside in the schoolyard or cross the street into the courtyard of the Roman Catholic church. I believe I was a good, conscientious pupil, excelling in Romanian language classes, dictation and composition, which was not surprising in a class where most of the children came from Swabian families who did not speak Romanian at home, but their own dialect, which was not really German.
Then I remember the piano lessons. My father would not accept the idea of interrupting piano study, which for him mattered very much in my education. I no longer had the piano on which to practise at Steierdorf as I did at home in Bucharest, but I was not to lack a teacher to keep me trained. My father asked around among local acquaintances whether there was a piano teacher in Steierdorf, and found one. More than that, the teacher lived right on the main street, where I could go by myself. Her name was Amalia, and she lived together with her sister Frida in a beautiful house, Western in style, in fact colonial in an old-fashioned way, more elegant than most of the houses in Steierdorf, with their fortress-like architecture. The two sisters, both over sixty, were completely different, as if born of different parents. Amalia, my teacher, was short, plump, with hair dyed a glaring red, cut short and probably curled with rollers. Frida was tall, thin, with grey hair left to grow and gathered into a bun held at the top of her head by an amber-coloured comb. Both had blue eyes, but while Frida pierced me with her gaze over the glasses perched on the tip of her hooked nose, Amalia, coquettish, looked at me with moist eyes which, without glasses, suffered from the effort of focusing, and she placed the glasses on her small snub nose only during lessons.
The apartment occupied by the two sisters was crowded with old but well-kept Biedermeier furniture, carpets, curtains and German table runners (Tischläufer). In the entrance hall stood a Niendorf piano of rosewood, with bronze candle holders, though somewhat out of tune, the instrument used for lessons.
The sisters made efforts to please me. In the absence of other amusements, I was probably their main diversion. During the lesson Frida would bring us, on a silver tray, a glass of water each with a spoonful of raspberry sherbet in it. Then she would settle ceremoniously in a corner of the sitting room, where she crocheted while listening to my sonorous interpretations of the scores provided by Amalia. Oh yes, the scores... At my first audition, Amelia asked me what I knew how to play. Proudly, I named the composers I had studied: Hanon, Czerny, Beyer. She asked me whether I could play for her any piece from the scores I had studied. I answered no, because they were all abstract studies, without melody, useful for finger technique and for ease in reading the score. Amelia pointed out to me that after four years of piano study I should have been able to play before an audience a known piece, one that would be recognized and give pleasure to the listeners. Determined to correct this situation, she rummaged through one of the sideboards in the room and took out three notebooks, which she placed in front of me: “These will be your piano studies with me.” Leafing through them, I realized that they were piano transcriptions either of opera choruses and arias, or of well-known Lieder. During the period of lessons with Amelia I practised and played the hunters’ chorus from Freischütz, the triumphal march from Aida, the Toreador Song from Carmen, Cherubino’s aria from The Magic Flute, Schubert’s Lied “Die Forelle”, and so on.
The Spring
When I came out of the piano lessons I would still wander through the centre of the little town, looking for new and interesting things, taking advantage of the fact that, knowing I was busy with the piano, my mother was not worried. Among these incursions I never missed the little park opposite Amalia’s house. It was a plot of thick grass between the main street and a not very high hill. It had no benches or other arrangements; the name of park that I gave that empty space between houses existed only in my head. Usually there was no one there besides me, so I could walk through the grass, watching the coloured little flowers that appeared here and there or following the butterflies that sprang out of the grass as I approached.
One day, as I was looking down at the grass I was stepping on, I happened to step into a small puddle hidden under the tall grass, and suddenly felt a cool dampness surround my ankle. I immediately withdrew my foot and, seized by curiosity, began to look for the source of that little puddle hidden under the high blades of grass. The water did not seem to have come from a recent rain, nor was it a broken pipe. It flowed clear and quiet, seeping into the ground and seeking its way among grasses, roots and pebbles. It obviously came from the slope bordering the little park. I followed the thread of water uphill, feeling the ground with my foot, until I could no longer hear the splashing of water under my step. At that point a trickle of water emerged, murmuring, directly from the earth, then continued across the little park until it disappeared into a drain in the ditch beside the road.
It was a magical moment. A real spring, not caused by a man-made broken pipe, with no taps or hidden tubes. There, in that humble place, in that patch of little park that I had considered only a space of passage, something primordial and authentic was hidden. I felt that I had discovered a secret of nature, something that had always been there but had waited for me to discover it. That is how I discovered a spring for the first time in my life. The story of the discovery of the sources of the Nile came to mind—sources that even today are not known with complete certainty—and I felt like the lucky explorer who was the first discoverer of this watercourse. The spring I had discovered would, step by step, become an important river flowing into the Danube. It was therefore my duty to give the spring a name. I called it Amelia, a name now known, I suppose, on all the maps of the world.
The Forest of Steierdorf
Another memory that remains very vivid from my life in Steierdorf is that of the walks through the forests surrounding the locality, mixed forests of beech, sessile oak, spruce and fir. At first I took these walks accompanying Ernest, either to gather brushwood for the stoves in the house, or in search of mushrooms which, after rainy days, were plentiful—provided one knew how to distinguish the poisonous ones from the edible ones. Ernest knew very well how to choose the edible mushrooms, avoiding those with garish colours. In any case, once we arrived home, the mushrooms we had picked were still subjected to the inspection of Ernest’s mother.
The forests of Steierdorf were full of charm and mystery. For me, who had read the tales of the Brothers Grimm, the association of these forests with the forests so frequent in their stories was inevitable. The adventures in forests of Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White, or Hansel and Gretel were fresh and present in my mind. The 1909 edition of the Grimm Brothers’ Tales from the old “Biblioteca pentru toți” collection, which I had in the library of my childhood, fed me with the stories that any child of my age knew, stories that continue to populate the inner universe well into adolescence. The forest had remained in my mind as a mysterious place, full of untold stories.
Those same pages that nourished my imagination had, however, been the subject of heated controversies because of their cruelty and the macabre and violent aspects present in the narratives of the Grimm fairy tales. The time in which Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm lived was a time of despair due to frequent wars, when people often did frightening things in order to survive. For this reason, at the beginning, the Grimm tales were rightly addressed exclusively to adults, because of the horrors present in them. Only over time, and with certain revisions, did the stories for children and household use develop into children’s literature, in which the horrors were merely attenuated. These stories have been used throughout the world as a source for all media, such as advertising, films or illustrations. Above all, they served entertainment literature. In the twentieth century, the work was second only to the Bible as the most popular book in Germany. Still, it is not unimportant to ask whether these fairy tales, known to all children in Germany and across all meridians, did not influence the character of future adults. Idolized during the Weimar Republic and then by the Nazis because they encouraged nationalism, it is very likely that the Brothers Grimm contributed through their tales to the forging of the characters of future soldiers in the Second World War.
When I arrived in Steierdorf, the forest of the Brothers Grimm—at times threatening, at times protective—was the only one in my mind that corresponded to the concept of forest. This concept marked the difference between the “bad” forest, associated with dangers, magical creatures and challenges at every step, and the “good” forest, which symbolizes protection, security and closeness to nature. The trees in the forests of these tales either actively intervene in the story and act as characters, while other trees are passive, serving only as background or as something to climb.
In the German Romantic era of the two brothers Jacob and Wilhelm, the forest was elevated to a place of honour and stylized as a national symbol. The forest had central importance for the early movement for environmental protection and nature conservation, both for social-democratic associations and for German nationalist and racist movements that sought models in the heroes of Germanic mythology. What is specific in the German perception of the forest is not, I believe, the forest itself, but the equation between nature and forest.
Little and naïve, Little Red Riding Hood learns through her encounter with the wolf in the forest that she cannot trust everyone. The helpless, frightened children Hansel and Gretel defeat the evil and powerful witch who dwelt in the forest. Snow White, as long as she is not aware of her becoming a beautiful woman, must live in the forest with the seven dwarfs for a time before returning to her father’s castle. In “The Soldier and the Carpenter”, the carpenter refuses to enter the forest for fear of the creatures: “I will not go in; there are witches and ghosts leaping about in there.”
The interpretation of the concept of forest is first of all connected with the way this ecosystem appears physically: a landscape surrounding human settlements, where dangerous animals live, but also endearing ones, which provides important resources (wood, food) to people and which otherwise represents above all the opposite of human settlements.
On the other hand, if we think of the special relationship Germans have with the forest, there is no doubt that the forest also has a symbolic meaning. In order to understand my reaction while exploring the forests of Steierdorf, I should evoke what the forest actually means in a fairy tale of the Brothers Grimm, the prototype of the forest in my mind as a city child.
The recurring pattern of the forest in the Brothers Grimm’s tales is the following: the hero of the tale moves through the forest from one place to another and, while crossing it and facing trials and dangers, undergoes an inner transformation or maturation. The hero is afraid, but often finds support in the forest itself, and almost always his transformation is in some way “magical”. At this level of interpretation, the forest in the fairy tale, but also in my mind, is the space of change: the main character often undergoes an important personal transformation and leaves the forest as a changed person. We can therefore say that, in metaphysical connotations, the forest is more than a simple landscape. It is a symbol of the inner journey, of the mystery of existence and of our relationship with the unknown, a more authentic mode of existence, free of the constraints of civilization, or the place where the boundaries between reality and fantasy become blurred, where spirits, gods, fabulous creatures may appear, or where time flows differently. Finally, the forest, through the continuous rebirth of vegetation, may symbolize death and resurrection, the link between the ephemeral and the eternal. Of course, all these connotations were vague, not explicitly expressed in my mind at the time of my stay in Steierdorf.
My incursions into the forest with Ernest had a precise purpose, and I followed him to the places he knew, where we gathered brushwood that we tied into stout bundles with string, or mushrooms that we placed in two baskets brought from home, after which we returned home victorious.
An Incursion into the Forest
One day, in a moment of courage and curiosity, I decided to venture alone into the forest, without any precise purpose, out of curiosity alone. The forest was not far from our house—one only had to walk a few hundred metres along a road that left the locality and first became a broad path at the entrance to the forest, then a narrower one that disappeared among the trees. Walking carefully, without anyone to tell me where to step, I felt like a character from the Brothers Grimm’s tales, entering an unknown territory where everything could become possible.
At first the path seemed friendly. I followed it attentively, looking around at the trees that raised their tall trunks toward the sky, as if holding their breath until the burst of crowns loaded with leaves. My strained attention sharpened my senses. Every sound seemed clearer, every ray of light stood out sharply in the air and in the patch it left on the ground. The air was filled with the damp smell of earth and leaves, and the light filtered through the foliage gave the forest an almost unreal air. When I stood still, the silence was interrupted by the rustle of the trees’ leaves and by birdsong. When I walked slowly, the sounds of the forest were joined by the discreet crackling of twigs under my feet, the flutter of a bird taking flight, or the rustle of a small animal hidden under the carpet of leaves, disturbed by my approach.
I saw nothing strange, but in my mind imagination began to work. In that hollow there could be an animal. A fox, perhaps? Or only a frightened squirrel? I remembered the tales of the Brothers Grimm and almost expected to see a wolf with shining eyes behind a tree trunk. I imagined that beyond each trunk either an unseen danger or an unexpected helper might appear, exactly as happened in stories. When, somewhere in the distance, I heard the crack of a broken branch, I stopped abruptly. Who could be there? A beast of prey? An unseen wind? Or perhaps... a fairy-tale character making its presence felt?
I approached an old tree whose thick roots protruded from the ground like gnarled arms. It had a large, dark hollow, and at that moment I was certain that, if I had put my hand in there, I would have found something—a forgotten treasure, a parchment with a map, perhaps even a magic key. Of course, I knew it was only my imagination playing tricks on me, but the magic of the moment was real.
I followed the path and, after a while, discovered a clearing. It was a small glade, with soft grass and yellow flowers, bathed in a gentle light that made the grass shine in an intense green. In the middle, a thick fallen tree trunk served as a natural bench. I sat down and listened to the apparent silence, yet one full of life, of the forest. There, in the middle of the forest, time seemed to flow differently. I wondered whether this was the kind of place where Hansel and Gretel, after losing the breadcrumb trail that was to lead them home, might have stopped to rest. Shortly afterwards, the two children would discover the witch’s little house.
I sat there, listening to the forest in the silence of the glade. It was the first time I felt that the forest was not only a wild and mysterious place, but also one that could offer refuge and peace, a living space with its own stories. Having lost the path by which I had come, the way back seemed longer to me, as if the forest wanted to keep me captive and test me a little longer.
On the way home, I kept the image of the clearing in my mind. I considered it a place of my own, a kind of hidden corner to which I could return at any time. And I was determined to return, to learn more about this fascinating realm, which always seemed to hide something new, something only for those brave enough to enter it. And that is what I did in the following months, even after winter came. Each time I discovered something new: the trunk of another fallen tree, destined to be covered by a soft carpet of moss; small animal tracks—perhaps of deer or wild boar—on the damp ground; or even the lugubrious cry of an owl making its presence felt at dusk. I learned to recognize the smells of the forest: that of wet leaves, the delicate scent of wildflowers, or the aroma of moist earth.
Once, in a more hidden recess of the forest, I discovered what seemed to be an old path, almost invisible under the thick layer of fallen leaves. A shiver of emotion came over me—who had used it before me? Where did it lead? I followed it carefully, stepping with some fear. At its end I came upon an old wooden hut, blackened, with collapsed walls and a ruined roof. The remains suggested that someone had lived there a long time before. I stood there for a while, trying to imagine the stories of that place. Had it been a forester? A hermit? Perhaps a forgotten character from an untold story? Joking to myself, I said: “Could it be Baba Yaga’s hut, the Russian version of the Grimm witch?”
From then on, I began to see the forest differently—not merely as the setting of adventures from fairy tales, but as a real space that received me and at the same time challenged me to let my imagination run free.
Lake Buhui
It was the beginning of October in Steierdorf. The days had grown shorter, it is true, but the special climate of Banat gave us sunny days, with a gentle sun. Our acclimatization in Steierdorf was complete; I had already begun school successfully and everything was going well. My father decided it was time to grant ourselves a little recreation and proposed, for the following Saturday, an excursion to Lake Buhui, 6–7 km from Steierdorf, a place frequented on weekends by the people of the area. He explained to us that it was a reservoir and that there was an interesting cave, one of the longest in Banat. Then he told us that we would walk to Buhui, but return in the evening by one of the trucks from the site where he worked.
As we climbed, my father told us how this place had come into being in 1884, through a caprice of collapsed limestone. In 1884, following the collapse of the Colonovăț plateau near the Buhui Cave in the limestone mountains of Anina, a small underground lake was created by damming the course of the Buhui River at its exit from the cave. Then, about 25 years later, upstream from the underground lake, a dam was built, resulting in a reservoir intended to supply water to the town of Anina.
The idea of seeing new places filled me with enthusiasm, so I woke up willingly at six in the morning. At seven o’clock we went out through the gate of the house with my father and mother and set off. The sun had barely risen, and the fresh morning air filled our lungs, making us feel alive and energetic. The road promised to be lined with deciduous forests on which the colours of autumn had left their mark.
To reach the lake from Steierdorf, we started our hike in the direction of Bozovici, as far as the historic Sigismund cemetery. From the cemetery we changed direction and, after another 3 km, reached a clearing where Miners’ Day festivities were organized every year. As we climbed the narrow mountain paths, I felt that each step brought us closer to something mysterious and unknown. After another 4 km we reached the dam of Lake Buhui. Lake Buhui is the first reservoir in Romania built on limestone.
Guided by our passions as explorers, we descended toward the stream that was allowed to flow out through the dam and reached the entrance of the Buhui Cave. The place seemed so mysterious that we preferred to stand for a moment in front of it, admiring its dark and silent entrance, after which we decided to return to the lake above.
Lake Buhui, at the end of a picturesque route, was surrounded by forests and, here and there, limestone spurs; it seemed an oasis of peace. From the crest of the dam one could begin the circuit of the lake, several more kilometres. Along this circuit, from a fork in the road, one could reach the forestry station and Buhui Cabin on the lake shore.
As midday approached, we stopped at Buhui Cabin to eat, after which we could rest on the benches in front of the cabin, wonderfully integrated between water and forest. The waters of the lake shone greenish in the rays of the sun; the forest of green firs and beeches, with leaves ranging from intense red to brilliant yellow, rustled, and the cold morning air had now grown warmer. The place is ideal for rest, sunbathing, fishing or even water sports. There were camping possibilities in the area, a children’s playground and a sports field. I stepped out onto the pontoon in front of the cabin and found myself surrounded by the shining waters of the lake. Had it not been October, a swim in the lake would have been welcome.
It seemed to me a wonderful place, where nature had outdone itself in beauty: an oasis of greenery and silence. Around the lake, nature seemed unchanged by time and by people. There, in that incomprehensible silence, I felt as if I had entered another universe, far from the noise of the world.
From the discussions I heard in the cabin between my father and the locals, I learned that Lake Buhui had been one of King Ferdinand’s favourite destinations. Accompanied by Queen Marie and Princess Ileana, King Ferdinand came to Anina in 1926 to visit the mine that then bore his name. On that occasion he visited Buhui and was delighted by the beauty of the area.
Our trip ended when one of the site trucks reached us to take us back. My mother settled in the driver’s cab, while my father and I sat on the benches installed on the truck platform. There was nothing more pleasant than letting ourselves be carried along the mountain roads, feeling the cold wind on our faces, and allowing the charm of the place to envelop us. It was a feeling of freedom, a break from the everyday, as if we were part of an old tale in which nature and people lived in harmony. The site truck in which we were travelling, with its hoarse engine and wheels grinding the dust of the mountain road, seemed to be the only vehicle capable of reaching that place, crossing the narrow, sloping tracks. My father held me close to his chest with one hand and with the other held onto the heavy chain stretched across the platform. Meanwhile he complained about the state of the road, but he was visibly delighted by the adventure.
As we approached Steierdorf, the hills around us gradually darkened, and the truck turned on its headlights. As evening drew near, I tried to recapitulate the day I had experienced as a small adventure.