Yonderlands of Abandoned Dreams, Present-day Romanian Countryside (original) (raw)
This essay is referring to the Romanian countryside as the Yonderlands - ;a place regarded as a faraway land that is consistently within sight; both spatially in relationship to the city but also in relationship to its dwellers within the cultural, social and political perceptions of rurality. It aims to portray the contemporary direction of development of the rural space in Romania through understanding the underlying factors that shaped and redefined the countryside until today. The investigation follows the relationship between cultural consumption; particularly concerning the rural dwelling and the recent history of Romania’s political and social attitudes towards rurality along with, economic and cultural shifts that affected and reshaped the countryside both spatially and culturally; which in turn altered the local perceptions and approach towards the current state of development in the countryside. The main observation of this study revolves around the phenomena of “abandoned dreams” represented by the construction of large houses by migrants in the countryside that are left uninhabited under the false hopes of return. The research focuses on case studies in the Northern edge of Romania, Oas county where this phenomenon most likely started and is most prevalent. The case study is constructed mainly using direct observation, historical data and statistics, existing interviews and photojournalism research papers and videos, as well as visual data collected through Google Street View Maps. One in every six Romanians work abroad; the majority of which come from rural areas and the money sent back home has irreversibly changed their native villages. Not like in the city, transformations are greatly more visible in rural settlements, where the central street can easily become a platform for social competition. This new rural space is submerged in steel and concrete, the new realm is consuming the traditional timber houses and the few elderly left behind.
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