A memory from 1972–1973 about my first encounter with Schitu, the peasant village near Costinești, the beach below the high cliff, and the way in which a place discovered almost by chance became, through repeated returns, part of the intimate geography of my life.
At first, Schitu was an improvised holiday for me. I had left a sweltering Bucharest without any precise plan, drawn more by the promise of escape than by a particular destination. I reached it through a friend and through my meeting with a French family staying in Romania. Later, I would return to Schitu for many years: first alone, then with my future wife, later with my wife, and finally with our child. The episode of that first summer cannot therefore be told merely as a youthful adventure. Above all, it was the beginning of a fidelity to a place.
Some names have been changed or blurred. I shall call Mara the colleague who put me in touch with the French family, while the French family appears under the conventional name the Faurel family. A young woman I met that summer will be called Ina. She belongs to the memory of the first summer, but other summers followed: at their centre stands Schitu, the place that remained the same.
One summer at the beginning of that decade settled in my memory like a trembling streak of light on water. After a demanding academic year, with classes, obligations and daily journeys, I wanted nothing but a break. The courses were over, the students’ examinations had passed, even my treatment at Olănești had ended, and Bucharest seemed too hot, too dusty, too empty. I had come from the cool air of Olănești, where my days had been regulated by the mineral-water cure and walks to the springs. Returning to the city felt oppressive.
The thought of going to the seaside or the mountains attracted me, but I did not want an ordinary holiday. Repeating the stays of earlier years held no appeal. My last serious relationship had ended because of irreconcilable differences. My friends had scattered in every direction, while I remained in a city that seemed to have lost every promise of a fortunate event. With nothing else to do, I tried to contact several colleagues from the department. Among those still in Bucharest was Mara, who was preparing to leave for England on a one-year scholarship. We agreed to meet at the confectionery in the Tower Block, where it was cooler, to have coffee and exchange a few words.
During our conversation, Mara told me about a French family then in Romania who planned to spend two weeks at the seaside with their three children. She knew Bernard Faurel from the programming courses organised at Moisil’s Computing Centre, where he was then responsible for maintaining the IBM computer acquired in 1968. Mara had remained in contact with Bernard after the courses ended. She also knew his wife, Claire, an open and friendly woman who had fallen in love with Romania. That year, too, the French family had rented rooms in a village near Costinești, where they returned for the quiet, the beach and the feeling of freedom they had found there.
The idea attracted me immediately. I knew Costinești from my student years. I had been there twice, the first time on a stay offered by BTT because we were rehearsing for the 23 August parade. We had slept in large blue military tents, and the evenings ended on the terrace called “La Ciupercă”, where people danced to the popular songs of the time. It was there that I made my first attempts at dancing, patiently helped by several girls who were more generous than my lack of talent deserved.
Mara suggested that I go to the seaside with the Faurel family. I could help them with the language and with minor local difficulties, while I would have the chance to practise my French and escape the torpor of the city. Plans immediately began to take shape in my mind. It was not only the curiosity of meeting interesting foreigners. I also wanted to see familiar places through their eyes. Sometimes another person can lend you a new pair of eyes.
I made up my mind quickly. Mara told the French family that one of her colleagues might join them at the seaside. I packed a few essentials, took the first train towards the coast and, after several hours of travel, changing at Constanța for the train to Mangalia, arrived at Costinești station in the afternoon. The address I had been given was not in Costinești, however, but in Schitu, a small village only a stone’s throw away.
From the station I set off on foot towards the village. The fork separating the two settlements was not far. Once I had left the paved road and entered the hard-packed dirt street, everything changed. The village seemed severed from time, suspended in a light that fell gently over the villagers’ yards. On either side stood low, whitewashed houses, orchards, simple fences and the smell of dry grass. It was a world far removed from the seaside resorts.
I identified the house where the French family were to stay and began asking nearby, from house to house, whether a room was free. The village was full and the answer kept repeating itself: every room was occupied. After several attempts, towards evening I found a modest room in a small mud-brick house. I needed nothing more. What mattered was that I had found a foothold in an unknown village before night descended upon it.
That evening, although tired, I walked to Costinești, curious to revisit the places I knew. I found the terrace, the canteen and the seafront again, but not the same world as in my student days. The resort had grown; countless little cabins had appeared. In the distance I saw a brightly lit area from which many voices could be heard. I approached and discovered a new amphitheatre, crowded with people, where a film of Italian neorealism was being screened. Costinești had meanwhile become a small summer town.
I returned to Schitu with a new sense of peace. If crowds had conquered the shore frequented by tourists, it seemed that true solitude had moved higher, to the top of the cliff, where the sea shimmered at night without asking for applause.
Schitu was not a large village, but it had a special charm. In those years it did not resemble a resort at all; Costinești, by contrast, was increasingly becoming a small town. Schitu had none of Costinești’s tourist geometry, none of the din of its terraces, the bustle of its paths, or the feeling that everything had been designed for the seasonal visitor. It was still a village, with dirt roads, low wooden fences, yards containing fruit trees, chicken coops, sheds, unpretentious flowers and simple one-storey houses, painted white or pale blue, roofed with tiles and set almost level with the dust of the road. This simplicity was precisely its charm. Behind the yard, beyond the summer kitchen and the outhouse, lay a large vegetable and maize garden, big enough for you to pick ripe tomatoes fresh from the vine.
The yards were large and very long. Tents could be pitched there; a car or caravan could be parked if necessary; and in the evenings long tables could be set out, gathering the families of the household and their guests. Parties sometimes lasted late into the night, generously washed down with white wine from Ostrov or Murfatlar, bought at the grocery shop in Costinești. It was precisely this atmosphere that regularly attracted foreign families such as the Faurels, who chose Schitu rather than Mamaia. As an outsider, you did not enter a tourist setting, but a world continuing its own simple life and temporarily accepting you at its edge.
The first house where I stayed was modest, almost poor, but memorable for that very reason (Fig. 1). My room had nothing superfluous: a bed, a little table, several chairs and a wardrobe. The walls retained the coolness of the day, and in the evening, when darkness fell, the sounds of the village could be heard: dogs, footsteps on the path in front of the house, a creaking door, lowered voices, then the silence over which the sea was barely audible. The house remained for me not merely the setting of a memorable encounter; it remained my first address in Schitu, the first shelter through which the village received me.
The Faurel house was different: larger, livelier and more open; with the car and caravan in the yard, children and luggage, it had the atmosphere of a domestic camp (Fig. 2). There, in the evening, the stories of the day came together, plans were made for the next day, and great and small matters were discussed: the sea, Romania, computers, the ports Bernard had visited, the differences between East and West, food, prices, roads and the small complications of a holiday in a country that was still closed.
The next day, the Faurel family arrived around noon. Bernard was driving a dusty red Simca that towed a caravan. Claire and the children, although tired, were delighted to return to the village they knew from previous years. I waited eagerly for them in the yard of the peasant from whom they had rented the house.
Bernard was a tall, slender man of about forty, with the air of an explorer and an infectious smile. Claire had a discreet charm, very expressive eyes and a delicacy that did not exclude determination. The children were cheerful, sociable and full of energy. I quickly felt that I would get along well with them.
From their stories I understood that, before joining IBM, Bernard had been an engineer in the merchant navy. He had met Claire during a port call; they had lived through a brief love affair, and then he had sailed away. Claire, pregnant, searched for him stubbornly through the shipping companies until she managed to send him the news. Bernard returned, accepted responsibility for his family and abandoned, at least for a while, his seafaring adventures. At IBM he was responsible for installing, maintaining and troubleshooting large computers, a technical world that directly interested me.
After they had settled into the house, which the owner had given over entirely to them while retreating to a room at the back, they invited us to a frugal lunch prepared by the hostess. When the meal was over, Bernard suggested that we go to the beach later in the afternoon, once the heat had subsided. “You must see this place,” he told me. “It is absolutely fantastic, isolated and quiet, exactly what we are looking for.”
Afterwards, the Faurel family withdrew to rest in the cool rooms, smelling of fresh limewash and basil, while I took a roundabout route home in order to explore the village.
On my return, finding my host at the gate, I asked permission to pick several fruits from the old apple tree in the yard, whose glossy red apples hung above the window of my room. With an apple in my hand, I withdrew into my cool little room, opened the book I had brought from Bucharest and fell asleep after reading a few pages.
The road to the beach was perhaps the most poetic part of Schitu, an initiatory journey, a crossing through almost sacred spaces. Leaving the village, we did not simply descend to the sea along a path lined with kiosks and parasols, as in an ordinary resort. From the world of the village’s low houses, tree-filled yards and dust from the unpaved road, we crossed the Constanța–Mangalia railway, an invisible line separating everyday life from another reality, one of light and silence. We then entered a transitional space: a broad, slightly raised plain stretching as far as the eye could see, which seemed to keep the sea hidden until the last moment.
The road disappeared into yellow fields of wheat, crossed here and there, like little veins, by darker paths. I walked beside Bernard and Claire, while the children ran through the endless yellow, delighted by the freedom of the landscape. I felt my worries and anxieties slowly scattering like chaff blown from a sieve by a gentle wind.
From one year to another, I noticed that this plain changed colour. Sometimes we crossed fields of wheat, with golden-yellow ears rustling dryly in the sea wind. At other times we found fields of flax, whose fragile blue looked like rippling water spread over the land. In other years, alfalfa covered the plain with a denser, more vegetal greenish-yellow. It was the same road and yet never identical. The village receded behind us, with its low sounds, while the sea could be heard faintly without yet revealing itself.
After several minutes, the plain suddenly broke off before our feet and the sea appeared below, broad and glittering in the fierce sunlight. We had reached a high cliff suspended above the water, from which one could see a golden beach below, spread out like a crescent and washed by gentle waves. Its silence gave it a hieratic calm. What a revelation...
I immediately had another surprise. The beach was almost empty, with only a few sheets scattered far apart. Straining my eyes, I noticed that everyone on the beach was completely naked. Lying on sheets or standing with their feet in the water, women and men remained there without inhibition. The discovery filled me with a mixture of astonishment and liberation.
I had, of course, heard of nudists, but had never experienced such a natural, mixed and unostentatious freedom. There was nothing provocative about that nakedness; on the contrary, it seemed to reconcile the body with light, water and air. It was as though the path through the fields had led us not only from the village to the sea, but also from a world of clothes, conventions and cautious glances into one in which the body became part of nature again. It was a world I had only heard about in passing, a freedom that made no display of itself, in which body and spirit were reconciled in silence and harmony.
Bernard smiled encouragingly when he saw the surprise on my face. “There is nothing to hide here,” he said, laughing. “You leave your clothes and your worries on the shore. It will be just you and the sea.”
We descended the steep slope in single file along a path whose steps had been roughly carved into the reddish clay. Once on the beach, we looked for a place close to the cliff, where it would shelter us both from the sun and from the curled sea breeze, should it become troublesome.
“It is beautiful here. The beach is almost empty; I think that gives it a special charm. I never imagined I would find such a quiet place,” I told Bernard.
“I discovered it on another trip to Romania and decided it was perfect for a relaxing family holiday. I still have not found anything like it in France,” Bernard said as he undressed.
“I am glad you included me. For me this is an extraordinary change of scenery and experience,” I answered. After a brief hesitation, looking around at the peaceful landscape and at everyone else’s lack of inhibition — including Claire and the children — I decided to join them and let my clothes fall onto the sheet, underpants included.
The salty breeze touching the normally covered parts of my naked skin gave me a feeling of release unlike anything I had experienced before. Enthusiastically I ran towards the sea and plunged in without hesitation. The water, with its small waves, received me coolly, seeming to whisper: “How long I have waited for you. I have remained the same; you are always someone new. Be blessed as you are!”
Back on the beach, I saw the children running to and fro, Claire at the water’s edge with her feet in the sea, enjoying the quiet atmosphere, and Bernard lying on the sheet reading a large, thick book — actually a bound collection of Vaillant and Pif magazines, which, Claire later told me, he adored.
That afternoon on the beach was short but full of sensations: freedom, peace, a flight towards the self hidden beneath worries and conventions. The return home was spectacular. The sun was setting behind the village, beyond the wheat fields, setting them ablaze in blood-red, with a solemnity that only nature can give.
Swimming in the sea had at Schitu a ritual intensity I have never found anywhere else. There were no lifeguards to whistle if you went too far from shore, no restrictive lanes, buoys or repeated instructions. Each person knew his own limits, and the sea was taken seriously precisely because nobody managed it on our behalf. We entered the water without clothes and without demonstrative gestures, as though continuing the path through the light.
One of my greatest pleasures was to swim far out to sea. I moved away slowly, changing strokes, leaving behind the beach and the cadence of waves breaking on the shore, until only my breathing, the rhythm of my arms and the glide of the water over my whole body remained. Nudity there had nothing theatrical about it; it intensified the sensation of release. The water no longer felt like an external, opposing agent, but like a continuous, even caress covering shoulders, back, chest and legs, without the barrier of a swimsuit.
On my way back to shore I often swam butterfly. It was a way of testing myself against the water, but also of celebrating the energy I had regained. At times I entered the sea tired, burdened by heat or thoughts, and returned with the feeling that my batteries had been recharged. My body emerged lighter, my mind clearer, and the village world waiting beyond the cliff seemed even more welcoming. Between the peasant yard and the free sea, a daily circuit had thus taken shape: you descended from the village to the water, lost yourself offshore for a while, then climbed back through the fields, restored to yourself.
The holiday days passed at a slow, almost liturgical pace. Mornings began early, with the walk to the beach. Claire prepared simple sandwiches, which we took with us and ate by the sea, in the partial shade offered by the cliff. We also spent lunchtime on the beach, eating around noon two more sandwiches from the bag Claire had prepared.
“City life cannot compare with this,” Bernard told me one hot midday as he looked at the horizon. “Time moves differently here, without haste, without weighing on you.” “I wish I could take it with me in my breast pocket,” I answered.
At about three in the afternoon, tired by the sun and swimming, we returned to the village for a restorative sleep.
In the evening we gathered in the Faurels’ yard, around the large table, with simple food, stories and red wine brought from France. Bernard spoke about his travels, ports, ships and computers. Claire commented on life in Romania with the affectionate curiosity of someone who did not confuse the poverty of a world with an absence of beauty. My conversations with them were a form of discovery: not only of another world, but also of my own, reflected in the eyes of well-disposed foreigners.
I was pleased that I could speak French with sufficient ease. All the lessons of childhood and secondary school seemed finally rewarded. They were tolerant of my mistakes, while I felt appreciated for my discreet usefulness. I was guide, interlocutor, translator and holiday friend, but at the same time a young man discovering himself in a better light than that of everyday life.
One evening we all went to the amphitheatre in Costinești to see an Italian film. The resort’s bohemian atmosphere impressed the French family, and I enjoyed rediscovering the place through their eyes. I found several familiar images again: the canteen, the terrace, the seafront. Others were gone. In their place had appeared the cabins, the amphitheatre and the white symbol on the beach.
Costinești remained dear to me, but Schitu had become something else: not a resort, but a refuge. Between the two settlements lay not only a physical distance, but a difference in breathing.
I later learned that the crescent of sand beneath the high cliff was called the Frenchmen’s Bay. The name probably came from French visitors who had frequented it earlier, or from the fact that other foreigners such as the Faurel family had made it, in the eyes of the villagers, a place apart. For us, however, the name mattered less than the way the bay functioned. It was a small summer republic, without fences or administration, yet with an order of its own.
The beach was reached almost exclusively by the paths cut into the clay of the cliff. The other route, coming from Costinești along the water’s edge, was much more difficult. One had to pass the Forum Hotel, itself perched on a rock, and then jump from stone to stone in order to get around a spur jutting into the sea. For ordinary tourists this was more an adventure than an access route. Those who did manage to arrive suddenly discovered a world they had not expected.
The reactions were predictable. Some people remained fascinated by the freedom of naked bodies and tried to take photographs secretly. The response of those on the beach was immediate. Not from prudery, but in defence of an essential rule: the freedom of the place required discretion. Others turned back towards Costinești in embarrassment, as though they had entered a stranger’s house uninvited. Few returned. Even fewer accepted the community’s simple rule: if you wanted to stay, you gave up not only your clothes, but also the tourist’s gaze.
In the early years of Costinești as a resort, at the beginning of the 1960s, there had still been small areas of nudism even on the main beach. Then, as the resort became more crowded and institutionalised, nudism retreated towards Schitu, to this less accessible beach. The retreat was not merely geographical. It was also a form of self-defence. Beneath its clay cliff, the Frenchmen’s Bay preserved a remnant of freedom that the official beach could no longer tolerate.
Every informal community needs a guardian figure, and at Schitu that role was played by the lawyer Coropal. He was an elderly man, short, bald, his body burned by the sun to an almost black colour, with a large mouth full of white teeth which, when he smiled, gave him the appearance of a comic mask. He was neither handsome nor imposing in the usual sense, but impossible to ignore. He had the presence of a popular actor, the spirit of the place, an old satyr who knew that the beach recognised him as one of its own.
People said that he came to Schitu in the first days of May and remained until early October. He always lodged with the same fisherman, living almost wretchedly, although he paid for the whole season. During those long months he tanned completely, without leaving any part of his body untouched by the sun, until he seemed to merge with the dark earth of the cliff. Only his teeth remained bright in his silhouette.
Coropal also performed a practical, self-appointed social function, not merely a theatrical one. Each year, as soon as he reached Schitu, he began digging the steps of the paths descending to the beach. The clay cliff was unstable; from one season to another, rain erased the steps and made the descent dangerous. The old man patiently began the work again with simple tools, as though restoring access to a secret stage. Without his labour the beach would have been harder to reach; without his presence it would also have been poorer in legend.
He was also the one who welcomed newcomers, especially new women, with little bouquets of blue flowers picked from the slope of the cliff. The scene was, of course, slightly burlesque: a naked, fully tanned old man emerging from the light of the beach with a fragile bunch of flowers in his hand. Yet precisely this mixture of grotesque, tenderness and ceremony formed part of the place’s charm. Coropal was not merely a picturesque character. He turned arrival on the beach into a ritual of entry into a community.
Costinești remained close, yet seemed to belong to another world. One could walk there for an evening film, a meal, a performance or simply out of curiosity to see the crowds. But every time I returned, I felt that I was crossing a boundary. Costinești was a resort, with schedules, terraces, an amphitheatre and crowds. Schitu was a retreat: village, yard, fields, high cliff and hidden beach.
In the early years of Costinești, before the discos and entertainment venues of later decades existed, the favourite evening destination was “La Ciupercă”, also called “the Canopy”: a place protected from rain and sun by a modern blue plastic pergola near the student camp. Students, tourists and young local people came there in the evening to dance. The main dances were rock-and-roll, then twist, tango and sometimes a little cha-cha-cha. The music was brought and selected by the students, who played the most fashionable songs of the time.
From 1968 onwards, Costinești and Schitu had a new visual landmark: the wreck of the Evanghelia, stranded close to the shore, with its bow raised towards the land and its rusting silhouette. By the summer of 1969, the scenery of the resort had already changed for tourists. The ship had become a landmark, almost an unofficial coat of arms. Seen from afar, it resembled a stranded sea creature, too large to be absorbed by the landscape and yet gradually becoming part of it.
All sorts of stories circulated around the wreck. Villagers said that, in the autumn of the shipwreck, crates of oranges had reached the shore, to the delight of the village. It was also said that the vessel had mistaken the Tuzla lights for those of Constanța, or that the grounding was connected with insurance fraud. I do not know how much truth there was in each version. For us then, more important than the explanation was the wreck’s presence: a sinister and fascinating mass of rusted iron which sometimes produced strange sounds, amplified by air currents in its empty belly.
Approaching the wreck seemed easy because it lay close to shore, but the waves and currents made it dangerous. From a distance it had the appearance of an accessible adventure; up close it became an unsettling film set, with metal plates, openings, ladders, doors slammed by the wind and shadows that the imagination immediately filled. Alongside its student cheerfulness, Costinești thus also possessed this note of maritime mystery.
During that first holiday, Ina, Mara’s younger sister, also appeared for several days. She had not reserved a room, the village was full, and circumstances caused her to join our group. She was young, self-assured, athletic and direct, with a sense of humour that immediately changed the atmosphere around her. She entered our little holiday community effortlessly, as though the place had been waiting for her.
My meeting with her had the brief intensity of those episodes that youth lives through without being able fully to explain either their beginning or their end. Perhaps I shall tell it elsewhere and at another time, as an indiscreet confession. What matters here is something else: the atmosphere of Schitu, the freedom of the beach, the discretion of our French friends and the suspension of ordinary habits made possible a closeness that Bucharest could not have produced in the same way.
When Ina left, I felt that not only a brief story had ended, but also a form of the place’s enchantment. After returning to Bucharest I tried to recover the same naturalness, but the city, the apartment, its conventions and its noise dispersed everything that had seemed natural at Schitu. I then understood that some encounters belong to a particular time and place. Taken out of that setting, they lose their light.
Seen from a distance, that event was a parenthesis, perhaps necessary for the young man I was then, but it does not explain why I continued to return to Schitu. On the contrary, what truly remained, beyond the fever of that sentimental episode, was Schitu itself: the discovery of a place where life could be simpler, freer and closer to its elementary rhythms.
In the following years I returned to Schitu many times. At first I returned alone, drawn by the same promise of silence, sea and secluded beach. I knew the road from the station, the fork, the low houses, the dust of the road, and the field leading to the high cliff. It was enough to see those places again for the holiday to begin before I had reached the water.
Then I came with my future wife and, after our marriage, with my wife. Schitu ceased to be merely the setting of a youthful adventure and became the place of a shared life. The same beach, the same road through the fields and the same descent towards the sand acquired another meaning. It was no longer a matter of discovering freedom in an exalted way, but of settling into a calm intimacy, a holiday for two, in a space that allowed us to be ourselves without ceremony.
Later we came with our child. Schitu changed once again. The place I had known as a solitary young man and then as a husband became a family place. The road to the beach was no longer mine alone; it was walked at a child’s pace, with pauses, questions, curiosities and small discoveries. The sea was no longer only a space of personal freedom, but also a spectacle offered to the little one: waves, shells, hot sand, seagulls, mornings in which everything seemed new.
In this way, Schitu passed through several ages of my life. It was first a place of escape, then of initiation, then of happy habit and finally of family continuity. Few places have this capacity: not to remain fixed within a single memory, but to receive, over the years, successive meanings.
Returning to Schitu with my future wife discreetly changed the meaning of the place. The first discovery had been dominated by surprise, the sudden freedom of the beach and my meeting with the Faurel family. Schitu’s second age was quieter. I no longer came to discover a place, but to settle comfortably within it.
The house where we stayed then had, for me, an almost perfect arrangement. Not because of its comfort, which was modest, but because of the relationship between the living space and the yard. The building with its porch, the small hall, the two symmetrically placed rooms, the orchard, the table in the shade and the L-shaped bench created a summer scene that suited me. In the morning we went to the beach, in the afternoon we rested, and towards evening, when the light softened, I brought out my notebooks and books and sat down at the table.
“Doing my lessons” actually meant preparing my courses for the beginning of the academic year. I worked on their structure, examples, sequence of ideas and the way in which I could make abstract notions, theories, demonstrations or programming methods intelligible to students. It was serious work, but freed from the department’s immediate pressure. Beneath the trees in the Schitu yard, a course was no longer merely a professional obligation, but an object I could shape slowly, almost by hand.
This image (Fig. 16) — the young professor preparing his courses in a peasant yard between village and sea — now seems to me one of the most faithful images of my life at the time. I did not yet separate work from holiday, or study from the pleasure of the place. I mixed them naturally. In the morning the sea gave me the freedom of the body; in the afternoon the yard gave me the freedom of the mind.
Our room was in a building with a porch. The porch opened into a small hall, and from the hall one entered two rooms, one on the left and one on the right. We stayed in the room on the left, facing the street. In the other room, in those years, stayed Leopoldina Bălănuță and Mitică Popescu. There was nothing spectacular about this quiet proximity, and precisely for that reason it remained in my memory. The actors’ presence in the room next door added a note of calm unreality to the place. It was not the world of the stage, with applause and frontal lighting, but its domestic reverse: people tired after the beach, talking on the porch, going in and out of the rooms, sharing the same yard, the same well and the same shade.
On the beach one sometimes also saw Sanda Toma, Olga Tudorache, Dumitru Rucăreanu and Dumitru Furdui. I do not want to turn this page into a register of names, but their presence says something about Schitu. There, famous actors no longer appeared as stage figures, but as holidaymakers, naturally mingled in a small, discreet and, in its own way, very free summer community. At Schitu, even celebrity stripped itself of ceremony.
The place attracted not only theatre people, but also intellectuals, artists, students, professors, foreigners who had wandered into Romania and villagers who had become accustomed to this unofficial summer colony. It was a world without an institution or a poster, but with unwritten rules, rituals, characters and a memory of its own.
In those years I also brought several of my students to Schitu — the best ones, with whom I had worked closely on their graduation projects and with whom I had remained in contact after they graduated. Sometimes they came alone, sometimes with their girlfriends. At first, the nudist beach intimidated them considerably. They descended the cliff with a certain declared boldness — “yes, yes, no problem at all” — and then froze halfway through the operation, examining the sandy horizon with increased attention. Yet the atmosphere of the place, where nobody paid anyone else particular attention, gradually loosened them up. Their courage came in waves, like the sea. In the end they undressed completely, sat down on the sand so as not to be in everyone else’s line of sight, and discovered that the world had not collapsed. Then they began to like it. Some returned in later summers — this time without any preparatory speech.
The austere professor in the nude was quite a “scoop” for them. They could hardly believe it, yet it also encouraged them to do the same. For my part, it was amusing to watch them from the position of a nudist professor who, several years earlier, had undergone the same baptism of freedom on the same beach. The difference was that I had had nobody watching me with a discreet smile. Or perhaps I had, without knowing it.
When I think of Schitu today, I do not first see one episode or another, but a landscape. I see the dirt road, the low houses, the railway, the broad plain, the changing fields — wheat, flax, alfalfa —, the steep cliff and the almost empty beach. I see the evening light over the fields and hear, in the background, the sea rising as far as the village like a breath.
The first holiday naturally had its own intensity. Youth looks for signs, encounters, confirmations and sudden freedoms. But time sifted the memory and left something else in the foreground: the fact that I had discovered a place in which, if only for several days, I could step out of my usual roles. The young professor, the man preoccupied with the department, projects and life in Bucharest, became there simply a man at the edge of the sea.
Schitu is therefore not for me merely an appendage of Costinești, nor simply the name of a beach of long ago. It is one of those places that show you, without speeches, that existence needs refuges. Some are inward, others geographical. For me, Schitu was a geographical refuge which, through repeated returns, also became an inner one.
If the episode of the first summer was a parenthesis, the returns were the long sentence that followed it. And this sentence, more discreet and less spectacular than the initial adventure, is perhaps the most important part of the memory. For it is not the intensity of a moment that makes a place endure, but its ability to receive us again and again in the successive forms of our lives.
Driven by nostalgia, I returned to Costinești and Schitu. Costinești was waiting for me, transformed. The beach was suffocated by bars, plastic sunbeds extending to the water, bad music coming simultaneously from every direction, kitsch and noise where a rare quiet had once existed. The buildings from the resort’s glory years, now degraded, stood silent beneath new layers of garish paint. Somewhere in the distance, the Evanghelia could still be seen, silent in nearly half a century of rust — a stronghold of nostalgia, more dignified in decay than everything surrounding it.
I turned back without stopping. I decided then that I would never return. The Schitu and Costinești I loved remain there, in the 1970s and 1980s, whole and unblemished, as the memory of a holiday time lived voraciously.
Instead of an image of present-day Schitu, I prefer to end with the blue flowers from the cliff, like those with which Coropal once welcomed new women to the Frenchmen’s Bay. Better than any photograph of today’s resort, they preserve the fragility and light of those summers.
