Words: Anca Dumitrescu
Photos: Alice Voinea
August 2024
Each summer brings with it a ritual I’ve faithfully performed in the past eight years. For me, the annual journey to Sfântu Gheorghe in the Danube Delta takes place in August – a week of films, sea, fish, and figs. The Anonimul Film Festival is the reason I first arrived in this village eight years ago, a place where time does what it knows best: lazily lounges under the summer shade.
VENI, VIDI, AMAVI – that’s how I can summarize my first encounter with this place. Love at first sight, a feeling that, over time, has taken possession of me, transforming into an annual need to be here, to become one with it, to nourish myself with its energy, light, and tranquility.
Everyone has their own piece of paradise, I like to say. This is mine, this village where the Danube kisses the sea. Light outlines every detail, giving it life and form. Growing up in a village near the Danube, I was raised amidst a similar landscape to Sfântu. Perhaps that’s why when I’m here, I feel like I’ve stepped into a time machine and returned to those days with the scent of manure and freshly harvested wheat, those days with the taste of steaming polenta and freshly milked milk by my grandmother, which I would drink from a red enamel mug with chipped spots.
As soon as you step off the boat and see the reed-thatched roofs, you know you’ve arrived in the right place: first, it’s the green of the reed beds, that raw green that invades your retina. Then there’s the light, that light sent from the heavens so that we are not alone. And then there’s the water. The Danube flows gently, no longer hurrying, for soon it finds its end. The sea calls it, lures it, embraces it, and envelops it in a tender, almost familial gesture. A boat ride to the spot where the Sfântu Gheorghe arm flows into the Black Sea is mandatory, and if you’re lucky, you might even see dolphins.
Sfântu Gheorghe is quiet. A tranquility that settles in you as soon as you arrive and accompanies you throughout your stay. Here, you don’t hear cars with roaring engines, honking horns of agitated drivers, or ambulance sirens. At Sfântu, the air is filled with the chirping of swallows that wake you up in the morning. You hear them fluttering on the electric wires, crowded together, waiting for the days to pass, for darkness to take the place of light, and so on, without any pressure of time passing.
Days are easy at Sfântu, how could they be otherwise? In the morning, you wake up to the chirping of swallows, walk barefoot on the dry soil, steal a few figs from the trees along the street and your steps take you to that place in the village where most of the tourists gather in the morning: Delta Cafe, the specialty coffee van opened by a coffee lover right in his grandmother’s courtyard.
After coffee, you walk 20 minutes to the beach. The beach there is among the few in the country where your ears are not “violated” by loud music, where you can still lay your towel on the sand (who invented sunbeds?!), and where there’s room for everyone, whether you wear a swimsuit or not.
At lunchtime, fish prepared in all its forms is the ultimate delight for your taste buds. The daily menu always includes storceag, a fish soup made according to a Lipovan recipe from Sfântu Gheorghe. You can’t say no to the best fish meatballs, pike or carp caviar with toasted bread, a glass of cold white wine, and, of course, another bowl of freshly picked figs.
In the evening, you look up, and the starry sky falls upon you. I’ve never seen a sky such as the one in Sfântu. And if you go during the Anonimul Film Festival, at night you can enjoy a star performance in the sky and an open-air movie marathon, so what more could you ask for from a vacation?
Don’t miss a boat ride on the canals at sunset. Or maybe a kayak tour, anything to keep your eyes on the sunset, to fill yourself with all its light. Rarely do you get to see a ball of fire like that slowly going behind the reeds to find its rest until the next day.
