Contents

• Equalization through misery
• An epic of poverty
• The safety valve of dying capitalism
• The contrast between seller and buyer
• Conclusion

Under the communist order, the Talcioc—a term imported from Russian, tolciok—was a form of private trade watched over by the state and imported from the Soviet Union. In Bucharest, the flea market was at first in Colentina, at the end of some marginal streets, in an immense hollow, and was later moved to Dudești. The descent into the Colentina pit, down muddy or frozen slopes, suggests the social collapse of an entire class of “former people” into a Dantesque circle. The image of the barbed wire enclosing the yard turned the place from a market into a kind of camp of survival.

Extremely animated in the 1950s, this market was held only on Sundays and was frequented by cohorts of people getting off the tramcars at the terminal of tram line 1.

The Talcioc was not a simple place of exchange, but a destination for the “proscribed.” On Sunday mornings, tram 1 became a vehicle of contrasts: proud workers on their way to the parks mingled with the “former people” — aristocrats, intellectuals, bourgeois families — clutching parcels containing the last remnants of a refined life, wrapped in old newspapers.

If goods in the state shops were standardized and scarce, objects in the Talcioc were unique and had a biography. One could buy clothes and underwear “in bundles,” furniture, books, paintings, engravings, and countless objects, from shirt stays to stoves and cooking ranges. On sheets of newspaper spread over the muddy ground, next to a patched pair of long underpants, one might find a first edition of Baudelaire’s poems or a silver cigarette case with a coat of arms. Tube radios, bicycle parts or German cameras brought back as war booty were sold beside nails pulled from old planks and straightened with a hammer.

Some people went to the Talcioc to buy things which they then resold there at double or triple the price.

Equalization through misery

The Talcioc was the great equalizer. There, class barriers collapsed in the face of bargaining for a kilogram of maize meal or a piece of soap. Two aspects must be taken into consideration:

The degradation of the elites: the image of the university professor selling his library in order to survive, or of the boarding-school lady gradually dismantling her Meissen porcelain dinner service, plate by plate, is defining for those years.

The underworld and petty speculation: alongside the desperate, the Talcioc fed a new class of opportunists — small speculators who sensed the shortages of the market and sold, “under the counter,” safety pins, nylon stockings or chewing gum, under the tolerant, or complicit, gaze of the militia.

An epic of poverty

The Talcioc was an epic of poverty, constraint and despair. It never found the rhapsodist it deserved, although G. Călinescu’s novel Scrinul negru begins at the Talcioc, and the author devotes a sequence of pages to it, though in an “ironic” register. In Viața ca o pradă, Marin Preda recalls meeting a former Marxist ideologue, Jacob Popper, reduced to selling women’s underwear at the Talcioc.

We have a memorable description in the diary of the writer Pericle Martinescu: “Seen from above, from the bank, the market gives the impression of a camp into which tens of thousands of people have been crammed to the limit. The crowd is so dense that no movement can be observed and no particular noise can be distinguished, although the tens of thousands of people move back and forth and speak in all languages and about all things. Former capitalists, former landowners, former merchants, Jews, Gypsies, professors, artists, writers — all social categories are mixed here... Everything that human fantasy has created over the centuries is for sale, from Persian carpets to sewing thread, from radio sets to rusty nails, from bibelots and irrigators to underpants and pencils.”

The safety valve of dying capitalism

The Talcioc was a place of avoided glances. The shame of the seller met the greed or compassion of the buyer. The sellers did not shout as in traditional markets. It was a whispered, almost clandestine sale, marked by the fear of being accused of “speculation,” a serious offense in the penal code of the time.

G. Călinescu saw in the Talcioc a grotesque spectacle, full of “historical junk” that had to be liquidated to make room for the new man. For the rest of the population, however, it was the last safety valve of survival capitalism. The state tolerated it because the Talcioc solved a problem that the planned economy could not manage: the extreme scarcity of elementary consumer goods.

The contrast between seller and buyer

This was the most striking aspect of the landscape. There was a visual paradox: the sellers were overwhelmingly more distinguished than the buyers.

The sellers. Former capitalists, former landowners, former merchants, Jews, professors, artists, unread writers, representatives of the “former well-to-do bourgeoisie,” distinguished people in clothes of “excellent cut” but worn out. They were usually amateurs in the art of trade, blushing when they had to ask for a price.

The buyers. Of all kinds: “milkmen,” “peasants” or “horse dealers,” who displayed a “pitiless hardness” in bargaining. They were the small birds of prey. Then there were occasional buyers, who came out of curiosity or in search of particular objects.

Why did it gradually disappear?

As the communist economic system stabilized, the state pushed private trade toward mediated forms: the Consignația network, commission agents, controlled sales, thus reducing the role of “free” markets.

Ideologically, such flea markets contradicted the image of the “equalized” socialist society and of the new man, being associated with the “former people” and with speculation — therefore with undesirable residues of capitalism.

The actual closure

Sources evoke the relocation from the Colentina pit to other sites, such as Dudești, and then a gradual diminution until the disappearance of the classical form, but they do not indicate a single decision to “abolish the Talcioc” similar to a specific law or decree.

As a Bucharest reality, however, it continues to exist to this day in other neighborhoods, but since the “former people” are no longer there, sellers and buyers now belong to the same social category.

Conclusion

The Talcioc was more than a bazaar of old things; it was an open-air museum of pain, where history was sold piece by piece for survival. It reveals a fractured social landscape, in which the dignity of the “old world” melted into the mud of Colentina under the avid gaze of a society undergoing brutal transformation.

It represented, in essence, a forced transfer of patrimony: luxury objects — silverware, porcelain, furs — passed from the hands of those who understood their value into the hands of those who profited from their desperation.

The postwar Bucharest Talcioc is attested as extremely lively in the 1950s, functioning on Sundays, at the end of tram line 1, as a tolerated “survival” of private trade.

It was already perceived as an ideological anomaly in a regime that had abolished private commerce, and was tolerated precisely in order to solve the shortage of consumer goods and to “liquidate” the patrimony of the old classes.

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