Domnița Bălașa Church, part one

From home to the shrine, a pseudo-historical trot

Seven days in a row toiling on an inept document aiming at defending a lost penal case took a heavy toll on my aching back and wobbled my already shaky physical-cum-mental resilience. Honestly, I was progressively bored into nothingness. Because nobody had asked me to forward the worthless document which was the by-product of an outbreak of sympathy for a charming lady friend, my superego took advantage, to flog me with strings of vicious and, alas, well-deserved deprecatory remarks. I always wondered if there isn’t coiled in any more or less decent male fellow a well-programmed composite of Perseus cum Holy George, a potential savior of endangered virgin damsels?  When I finally completed this self-punishing chore, I crawled out into the open on my knees, determined to breathe pure, fresh air and to encounter a thing of beauty or perish. I chose to stay alive still. Of course, the outdoors was only moderately fresh and windy, 3° C and 17k/h, at the moment that a sound Antarctic cocktail, of some 25° C under zero and a gale to capsize the ice floe was what I needed.  However, wisely happy with what I got I bravely walked on  January 2^nd, 2024   from my Bucharest abode near Cişmigiu Garden towards the Palace of Justice in whose neighborhood  I was hoping to find open some religious shrines I had never visited.

Delighted to find that I can still walk I emerged through a short but stiff slope into Calea Victoriei Avenue. This north-to-south oriented, not very long boulevard was for the last two hundred years the landmark of an irregular, sometimes chaotic,

often successful effort to replace the mushy Balkanic-Ottoman outlook of Bucharest with a slightly pompous European capital setting. Under another name, Calea Victoriei was opened in 1692 by the then-Wallachian prince Constantin Brâncoveanu.  As we will see later he continued to maintain a strong religious and political presence, quasi-immanent, especially after he became first a martyr and then a saint[1], in the city’s center until nowadays.  Its purpose was to permit the easiest connection from his  Mogosoaia Palace on the city’s outskirts, to the Curtea Domneasca (Old Court), the ruler’s abode in Bucharest. Calea Victoriei is an architectonic potpourri that doesn’t lack charm, firstly because of the width of the avenue, secondly because it has some interesting buildings and views, and thirdly, mostly because the time’s patina conveys aesthetic value to well-preserved old buildings. Not only black but also old can be beautiful especially when about edifices and artifacts.

Further on the Calea Victoriei, at the southern corner of the huge Romanian National History Museum, (once the Romanian Palace of the Posts), while I was taking a sharp left turn to delve into the core of the Old Center (Centru Vechi) I remembered with pleasure my visits to this ungainly and fascinating institution. For those who have an irresistible desire to understand and feel the essence of the narrative art of yore, the origin of today’s comics and manga books, and even the source of the awful socialist realism style of yesterday the National History Museum is the ultimate address. It houses, the casts of the 123 high-relief panels of the Trajan Column in Rome and permits through the unique, side-by-side, and successive, presentation of scenes a keen understanding of ancient warfare and nation-building. Because of the monument’s height, the original panels weren’t, and are not visible in situ. Also, and off the record, it is stupid to get torticollis trying to look at the two thousand years old, and worn by time and smog,  illustrations of wars between Romans and the Dacians, the ancient habitants of Romania, when we have nice ongoing conflicts with modern tools and plethoric, non-stop visual and verbal feeding.   In conclusion, buy a cheap ticket and consider some first-quality genuine casts so close to genuine art that nobody, except some pedants or experts of sorts can see the difference. Feel free to appreciate the quality of the naturalist storytelling style, (neither broken lines nor blotches of color), the magnitude of the personality cult (here Emperor Trajan), and realize how militarist Rome led to the creation of a nation after having ruthlessly and cunningly (and shamefully I will murmur) erased any tracks of the native local culture.

 Old Center likely a remnant of the first Neolithic settlement on the shore of the Dâmbovița River, gradually became the core of Bucharest and the stronghold of the ruling class. There is always a ruling class in Cuba, Korea,  Monaco, or elsewhere. It was there that in 1490, the famous and much appreciated by both tourists and locals Vlad III Dracula nicknamed, for obvious reasons, Vlad the Impaler raised his palace –known today as the Old Court (Curtea Domneasca).  Since the fire in 1718, when the rulers departed for a better place, the borough became a TRADING POST, a market to which chariots loaded with merchandise were arriving from abroad. The market fostered the building of several huge guest houses called hans, and the settling of a large professional population on the streets that astonishingly enough (by lack of imagination or else) were bearing the name of the trade the inhabitants practiced. During the Marxist communist regime considering the property a theft and the trade a crime the entire area, once a mercantile and crafts hub,  sunk into a rotten, dilapidated state. It changed again after the revolution. Curtea Domneasca, Vlad’s palace had become a museum according to the rule that hospitals, museums, cemeteries, and the universe are in the continuous expanse. Around it,  bustling with life the borough metamorphosed again into a giant eatery for people who like to gorge shoulder to shoulder, energetically socialize, and fancy heavy metal music.

CLASSIFIED INFORMATION OF GENERAL INTEREST

I feel sorry to cut into the natural flow of my post, but a weird occurrence compels me to share it immediately with the reader, a rare event that could jeopardize my mental equilibrium and, God forbid,  the termination of my blogger ambitions. While I was desperately plodding forward with my report upon the visit to Domnița Balaşa Church, which I hoped with God’s help to achieve once, I felt that  I needed a break from my useless creative activity.  For this purpose, I visited my neighbor Thomas, a self-thought genius physicist and outstanding madman, without anticipating the weird experience I would have. Unexpectedly, after listening to my pseudo-historical ambling among the shadows and the relics of Bucharest’s past he alleged with some irritating Chinese-like nasal resonance: You cannot simply talk of bricks, stone, and plaster for so long. A story needs some skin, sweat, and blood,  a whiff of a human dream  – he pontified. You have to speak about people. I am doing, I replicated fairly offended, in the last two episodes. It is not enough they should appear all over he argued and continued to bluntly interrogate me about the quality of my visual information regarding the living characters that I intend to evoke. Alas, I told him, not only the quality but also the quantity is close to null and except for an epoch engraving of Constantin Brancoveanu, and a fine portrait of Safta,  I haven’t gotten anything else allowing me to place a mug on a name. But that is too little he grunts with non-concealed despise. And your arena, isn’t the city? What about the founder of the town? What about Bucur Ciobanul (Bucur the Sheepherder)? Bucur? I murmured, without sparing him a superior sneer. He is a legendary character, he never existed. We can check he said, suddenly deadly calm and cool, fiendishly raising the right eyebrow. How? It’s better not to argue with people like him. You know he asked the phenomenon of entanglement of subatomic particles? I do, I said. Very well, I discovered that not only can two particles be connected across time and space, but huge sequences of particles can combine for a while in a configuration that could be or represent a person, an object, or a natural phenomenon. I looked to see if I was close to the door to dart at need, but my propensity to argue about this and that took the better of me and I heard myself hoarsely croaking. These configurations do not fall apart after a while?! Yes, he said with a cold smile, but they left some ghost images behind like the erased documents on a hard disk. I made a new genial invention, a Nobel prize brand, with tons of cash for sure in view. I know how to call back these shadows.  God, they are spending billions on trifles, and the hotels for the insane are closed all over the world, I wailed in the privacy of my head. I was too scared to use the outer space. What do you say? Let’s see Bucur Ciobanul some 300 years ahead of Vlad, around 1200 C.E, and Curtea Domneasca 44.4301° N, 26.1013°E place on the map should provide enough data for a quick checking he mumbled. How for God’s sake did he know the figures by heart?  Without paying the slightest attention to the curious extent of his knowledge and skills, Thomas bounced on his laptop hitting the keys with the disgusting energy of a Jerry Lee Lewis, rock pianist, and monster womanizer nicknamed the Killer. After a short while, with an absent look, he handed me a photo and muttered: What a funny guy Bucur, You know? A predestinated name, not!  Bucuria (joy in Romanian), and Bucharest, the little Paris, and then he laughed heartedly and creepily. I took the slightly, wet and burning photo with shaking fingers. While I was staring for a couple of seconds into nothingness at my turn, I heard someone roaring, it was me, “late to the dentist” and dashed through the door. After calming down with some difficulty at home, I dared to look again at the photo. It portrayed a shepherd, of course, a kind of rough character devoid of the slightest marks of joy or intelligence. A city founder? Maybe Thomas pulled on me a fast one? The scoundrel! And then I remembered Adam Riess who with two fellows got a Nobel prize in 2011 for discovering Dark Energy that since was never identified and very much questioned. Then, Thomas, right or wrong, can also fetch the Swedish glory and make a laughing stock of me for many. Even the sheepman could be real after all. The city’s founders do not automatically resemble Dalai Lama! If physics nowadays is based on unprovable assumptions everything is possible. Please keep this incident secret, avoid mentioning it, and do not refer to me.

Now, it is time to return to the main even if it can be sometimes tricky and stormy  With a trot that nervously became a canter, I dashed through the Şelari street, where a hundred years ago lived, and rode high the saddles’ makers, it was horse time, towards the Dambovita river famous in the past for carrying sweet waters. For some mysterious reasons, its waters are so poisonous today that I will not advise for consumption to my worst enemies. The Palace of Justice’s monumental presence on the opposite bank (achieved in 1895) made me reflect on the insane chance of the offenders, great crooks, or petty criminals, it doesn’t matter, to be summoned,  judged,  and even sentenced on such prestigious premises. I paid particular attention to the free-standing pinion housing a large clock flanked by two female characters personifying the Force and the Prudence.  They were too remote for my feeble sight to distinguish the features. The camera did a little bit better.  Eventual readers may eventually recognize who is what and get an idea of how Carol Storck the son of leading sculptor of then times, Karl Storck, managed to embody psychological features. Forget the Force who is not more at all popular today when even a toothbrush should be Soft, but please consider the noli me tangere glance that Prudence lets filter through her modestly lowered eyelids. 

When I realized I was late and making royalty, the Balasa princess, waiting, I rushed full gas away from the Justice Palace towards a kind of esplanade allowing the passage from the left to the right shore of the Dâmbovița river. The concrete-imprisoned stream was lazy rippling under the intense watch of a small company of desperate fishermen.  While squinting upon the river’s murky waters spotted by a few villain ducks and some small floating islands of domestic refuse I realized that some three hundred years ago the passage from shore to shore was made possible by the since longly vanished wooden

  Bridge of Misers, (Podul Calicilor). The misers were waiting for silver change thrown at their intention from the windows of luxurious boyar carriages crossing the bridge. Deeply touched by this example of direct charity contrasting with the suspect ONG distribution of money and goods that they didn’t produce and that they vigorously skim into their extravagant wages I took a sharp turn left and marched slightly haggard into the Street of the Holly Apostles (Strada Sfintii Apostoli).  The Principal pitied my wandering and let me discover after barely ten meters a glorious fossil inserted like a shining carbuncle into a ring of ponderous, would-be-modular, off-white, towering, and somehow asinine, ex-communist residential blocks. It was the neo-Byzantine Domnița Balaşa church. 

[1] I am fascinated by the transformation of a regular Homo sapiens sapiens (the modern man) from an ambiguous character (a mixture of Eros and Thanatos) into a saint. For the moment, I have identified two recurrent features of this extreme mutation.  Firstly, royal families, when compared to the rest of the population, have furnished an astonishing number of saints. The intriguing fact that they also counted a striking number of vicious villains, I suggest, is beyond the point. Secondly, there is the fantastic role played by a traitor who does anything to harm the just without doubting that he is carrying him to eternal glory. I don’t want to sound irreverent, but one might say that without his cousin Stefan’ schemes, Constantin would never have received the nod, the nimbus! Do you agree?