E Romanian Seaside Until the 20Th Century

Marginalia. Architectures of Uncertain Margins 83 Reclaiming a Land of Overlapping Frontiers: e Romanian Seaside until the 20th Century Irina Băncescu PhD, Assistant Professor, “Ion Mincu” University of Architecture and Urbanism, Bucharest, Romania [email protected] KEYWORDS: Romanian seaside; tourism; balneotherapy; Constanța; waterfront; collective imaginary; city image is research focuses on the marginal condition of the north-west Black Sea coast, until the beginning of the 20th century. Remote and uncertain, this piece of land was located at the extremities of dominant empires and frequently at the centre of political disputes. Bordering a stormy sea that could bring both friends and enemies into its poorly defended harbours, completely isolated from the mainland by the Danube and by the hostile and deserted Dobrudja steppe, this strip of coast struggled to confront its inherent liminal condition. All these overlapping frontiers and social textures slowly determined a hybrid cultural identity, giving it layered meanings, among which its marine condition stood out as a dening feature. What was the role of the sea in shaping the symbolic identity of Constanța? Does its imaginary have any consequences on the urban fabric? Even if, as Charles King says,1 the images and their mental associations might not be that obvious, they do exist and this article tries to highlight the importance of the sea as a dening agent of local history, synthetically exposing the story of the becoming of the coastal landscape. By framing a cultural perspective on this borderland, the study retraces the gradual processes of discovery, construction and identication with the seascape, highlighting social, cultural, economic and politic eects. By alternating objective analysis with subjective views such as testimonials from travellers and locals with various professional backgrounds, the text proposes a concise critical reading of both the physical context of the seaside and the cultural imaginary that impregnated it, from distant contemplation to the pragmatic invention of beach practices. A series of economic and political events during the second half of the 19th century turned the Romanians’ face towards the sea: Dobrudja and the Black Sea ocially attracted the attention of authorities, elites and the entire society. e text focuses on this temporal interval when signicant changes took place on the Black Sea shore, and follows its transformation until the beginning of World War I. e case study is Constanța,2 as it successfully embodied all the contrasts and changes taking place during this period. On the idea of limit between sea and land e strip between sea and land has always been a frontier. An insecure and hybrid place, a eld belonging either to the sea, or to the land, this collision area is usually dynamic and tense. For maritime cities, this boundary represents the symbolic place of origin of the idea of urban limit, a place where the city interrogates its form and its relationship with the territory.3 e waterfront is a mutable landscape, indicating the extent to which the city–water interface is the meeting place of permanence and indeniteness, of articial and natural, of man and nature – a symbolic 1 Charles King, Marea Neagră. O istorie [The Black Sea. A History] (Timişoara: Brumar, 2005), 24. 2 Depending on the context of the reference, various names of the city will be used throughout the text: Constanța, Custendje, Chiustenge, Küstendge, etc. 3 Alessandra Forino, Paesaggi sull’acqua [Water Landscapes] (Florence: Alinea, 2003), 11. 84 studies in History & Theory of Architecture articulation between two worlds.4 But, as Rosario Assunto asserts, the waterfront is “a limit that rather unites than separates.”5 Initially, cities related to the water only in technological and functional terms, by building bridges, piers, equipments, reinforcements of the banks; the waterfront had not yet become an element for dening the urban form. During the 18th century, the limit towards the water started to become “critical for the urban embellishment, on a symbolic, representative and political level.”6 e aesthetic characterisation of the waterfront was the sign of a gradual urban opening towards the natural landscape by articulating the territory to the scale of the city through architecture. e disappearance of the defensive requirements and the rectication and regularisation of waterways transformed the walls or the embankments into an urban façade that visually dominated the natural territory. e character of the coastal landscape is ambivalent: its physical features prevent it from oering a clear unequivocal image, because it is an element that fulls two opposite purposes – limit and connection. It is a material limit between two incompatible domains, but also a central element that expresses its articulation role. e coastline may be read in two manners: horizontally, parallel with the shore, it oers a subtle image that is impossible to control; vertically, perpendicular to the shore, it oers an immediate, concrete and diverse image. During history, this ambiguity determined a landscape without a clear image that hardly found support in the social visions and the mental imaginary.7 e lure of the sea in Western imaginary. e evolution of the seaside landscape In his recount of the “invention of the sea,” Alain Corbin states that, ever since Antiquity, geometry was the rst tool used in the process of mastering the landscape, by tackling the very imprecision of the limit between land and water. Sacred texts usually depicted the water expanse as an image that inspires fear and repulsion: “there is no sea in the garden of Eden.”8 e symbolic interpretation of the limit between civilisation and wilderness, between the certain and the undened is to be found throughout classical culture: everything outside the limit concealed an unknown order, akin to chaos, incomprehensible and impossible to relate to the human scale. Later, the Enlightenment provided adequate instruments to measure and to represent this space, thus delivered from chaos and slowly becoming part of the real world. During the 19th century, the bourgeois modern society ocially opened the city towards the water, a process which was deemed representative for progress, modern communication and exchanges: water appeared as the unifying element of this newborn world. Moreover, in this period the panoramic perspective was favoured, because the space of the belvedere oered a total, synthetic image of the landscape that could be instantly seen and thus dominated: “the democratic bourgeois receives, as the king on its throne, the homage of the Nature gathered at his feet.”9 e waterfront dedicated to public promenade and panoramic contemplation became the privileged scene of both the natural territory and the social spectacle of modernity. 4 Ibid. 5 Rosario Assunto, Il paesaggio e l’estetica. Natura e storia [The Landscape and Esthetics] (Naples: Giannini, 1973), 34. 6 Renzo Dubbini, Geografie dello sguardo. Visione e paesaggio in età moderna [Geography of the Gaze: Urban and Rural Vision in Early Modern Europe] (Torino: Einaudi, 1994), 52. 7 Carmen Carbone, “L’analisi della costa come esperienza estetica” [Analysis of the Coast as an Esthetic Experience], in La riva perduta. Piano di monitoraggio e di riqualificazione delle fasce costiere italiane [The Lost Waterfront. Plan of Monitoring and Rehabilitation of the Italian Sea-Coast], ed. Ruberto De Rubertis (Rome: Officina, 2005), 41-50. 8 Alain Corbin, L’invenzione del mare. L’Occidente e il fascino della spiaggia 1750 – 1840 (Venice: Marsilio, 1990), 12; primary work: Le territorie du vide: L’Occident et le désir de rivage1750 – 1840 [The Territory of the Void: The Occident and the Lure of the Sea] (Paris: Flammarion, 1990). 9 André Corboz, Ordine sparso. Saggi sull’arte, il metodo, la città e il territorio [Sparse Order. Studies on Art, Method, City and Territory], ed. Paola Viganò (Milano: Urbanistica Franco Angeli, 1998), 187. Marginalia. Architectures of Uncertain Margins 85 e practice of visiting coastal areas for leisure originated sometime in the 18th century. e evolution of the image that the littoral landscape acquired in the Western world was interpreted as a “transition towards exoticism,”10 since previously the seaside was seen as an extreme place of passion and fear. Port cities evoked marine dangers and gathered strangers: “the sea was for centuries, in the collective imaginary, a space that escaped the human laws. Consequently, capable of arousing fears and symbolic suggestions that awaken fear and disorder […] the collective mentality frequently recognized a strong cultural link between sea and madness or sin.”11 Luginbühl gives three reasons for the reversal of this image: the public acceptance of the littoral followed the experience of leisure in rural areas, which was the rst step towards the discovery of the natural spectacle; the development of science; the exploratory journeys that improved maps and induced the gradual emergence of the desire for the “exotic.”12 e culture and philosophy of the time progressively led to the idea of contemplating innity, which was often epitomized by the sea. e seashore became a place of meditation on the romantic concept of the sublime. In this moment appeared what Corbin denes as “the lure of the sea,” associated with the romantic desire of self discovery.13 e new perspective of the littoral also stood out during the 18th century because of the English contributions regarding the establishment of the practice of sea bathing in a landscape that was appraised for its health benets. e spa fashion promoted the therapeutic purpose, but soon that aspect was overwhelmed by leisure. e sea rituals of Western aristocrats were to be soon emulated by the middle class bourgeoisie and later be diused in all other layers of society. e sea not as limit, but as a link to the world Historian Charles King proposes a general reading of the evolution of the Black Sea shore not from the land, but from the sea: his conclusion is that, until the second half of the 19th century, land administrative categories such as vilayet, region, nation etc.

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