Gentilia and Catalin
by Ioana Moldovan
In one of the Atomium’s spheres, above a superb view of Brussels at night, Catalin proposed to Gentilia. That morning, he left their hotel room under the pretext of going for a walk. He secretly took one of Gentilia’s rings and went straight to the jewellery shops. On his return, he found her looking for her “missing” ring. He quickly took it out of his pocket and pretended to find it under the bed. He hid the new one well.
Up there, above Brussels, I got a big YES from Gentilia.
Says Catalin about “the best moment of his life”. They celebrated with champagne and photos.
The two met five years earlier, on a summer day in 2012, on a terrace in Jurilovca. Through mutual friends, they found themselves sitting at the same table. Catalin, born and raised in Bucharest, had moved to the village in 2005, and in 2007 he set up a fishermen’s association with the help of his uncle from Visina – a neighbouring village -, an old fisherman and friend of the locals. Catalin’s mother is also from Visina and he used to go there on holidays back when he was a child. Gentilia was visiting home from Iasi, where she had moved for university and stayed. At the end of the evening, they exchanged phone numbers. They continued to see each other. At first, together with other friends, sometimes on boat outings, sometimes at Cape Dolosman, sometimes at the pool. Then, just the two of them.
“I would invite her to romantic dinners at my house and cook fish specialties for her,” Catalin recalls with a laugh.
A large number of Russian Lipovans live in Jurilovca. Before the 1989 revolution, it was a more closed community and marriages between Lipovans and Romanians or other ethnic groups were rarely accepted. Archaic Russian was spoken more often, and traditions and religion played a very important role in everyday life. So did fishing. There were certain religious holidays that marked the beginning of the fishing seasons. In 1990, the Piscicola state-owned company in Jurilovca provided 1,000 jobs, 500 of them for fishermen. “As you can imagine, it’s hard to get into a community like that if you don’t know Russian, you don’t know Lipovan,” says Catalin.
These days, things have changed. Romanian is the predominant language, and most fishermen have moved to other countries. What has been preserved with sanctity is the Orthodox confession of the Old Rite and the respect for the traditions of the great Christian holidays, offset by 13 days, by the Julian calendar. In the Lipovan villages, the churches’ patron saint days are an opportunity for Lipovans from all over the country and even from abroad to meet.
I somehow managed to get accepted into their community because I helped them a lot.
“After I started the fishermen’s association in 2007 and got involved, people started to accept me, to be much more open, to trust me. Then, I took part in all sorts of deltaic events, dedicated to communities, customs, gastronomy, all sorts of beautiful things,” says Catalin.
The summer they met, Gentilia didn’t stay long at her parents’ home in Jurilovca. But they kept in touch by phone.
“I was still living in Iasi, it seemed unlikely that our relationship would develop as it did,” says Gentilia.
But a few months went by and she got a job offer, as an adviser to the town hall in Jurilovca. She wanted to return to the region. That, and her relationship with Catalin, made her accept the position. In the spring of 2013, Gentilia was home again. “That’s how our relationship started to move forward,” says Catalin.
They got married in Tulcea, at a New Rite orthodox church. “The priests here in Jurilovca imposed certain conditions. I didn’t agree to them, and Gentilia understood me,” he explains. It was a more complicated situation: not only he was Romanian, New Rite Orthodox, and Gentilia was Lipovan, but the godparents were also a mixed couple, and the godmother’s parents were Adventists. They didn’t want to push things.
“Besides, my parents said: we are coming to church, but we’d like to understand something, because here they only sermon in Slavonic,” says Catalin.
His family is also religious, his mother used to go to church, “but not to the extent the Lipovans are.”
“The wedding ceremony is still a precious moment for me,” says Gentilia. “Then Catalin switched to the Old Rite, so that our two children would be baptised as Russian Lipovans.” They have a girl and a boy, and their baptism names are Filip and Zenaida, taken from the Old Rite Orthodox calendar. Catalin always says that Filip decided upon his own name by choosing the day he was born. “While Clara received the second name as a gift,” adds Gentilia.
“Our identity marks are somewhat different,” says Gentilia.
“But in Dobrogea, this identity difference is nothing more than a state of fact. You can always expect the person next to you to be of a different ethnicity: Ukrainian, Russian, Bulgarian, Turkish, Tatar, Greek. This reconciliation has come natural here, for as long as anyone can remember, so it’s something natural in our family too.”
She believes that coming from such different backgrounds has ultimately helped them to better understand and complement each other. “For example, we’ve learned to celebrate our holidays twice – both by the old and new rite – it’s a basic form of respect that we find extremely natural,” says Gentilia. “Yes, they [Gentilia and her mother] now celebrate on the new rite as well because I’m part of the family,” says Catalin. “I say, look, it’s Saint Dumitru’s day, we don’t do laundry, we don’t do stuff like that.”
The basis of our relationship is mutual respect, beyond any other principle. That means embracing who we are, each of us, while keeping our minds and hearts open to all that is different.
Not long ago, Catalin found out that his great-grandparents, whom he knew to be from Oltenia, had lived for a while in Bulgaria. In 1940, after Southern Dobruja (Quadrilateral) was lost to Romania for good, when the exchange of population took place, they arrived in Dobrogea, in the village of Pasacasla, which is now Visina.
“This story – new to him and one he still marvels at – shows us that our personal history is continuously being written and rewritten, both to the future and from the past, and is yet another proof that there are always unexplored territories in each of us.”
Gentilia and Catalin believe that the identity/cultural baggage that each brings, enriches them both as individuals, but also the partnership between them, on which they founded their family.
He says that living and working in a Russian-Lipovan community – since 2005, years before he met Gentilia – has taught him to respect the cultural differences between himself and anyone he interacts with: friends, colleagues, co-workers. He has never perceived these differences as separating them in any way, but has always maintained a certain curiosity and desire to get to know each other better.
“Being part of the community gave me great satisfaction at the time,” says Catalin.
Coming from Bucharest, “the best feeling here, in the area, which I really like, is that, being a small community, everyone knows everyone,” says Catalin. “And that friendliness, hello, hello, everyone greets each other. Feels like something much more open compared to the big cities. In Bucharest, we only interacted with a few neighbours and that was it, but here you bump into people from all walks of life. And it’s nice!”
The sense of belonging to the community is important to both of them. They are involved in promoting the Russian-Lipovan community. “She’s a very good communicator, and all the time, when we have something to do, I ask her for advice, and she asks for my advice,” says Catalin. “We enjoy these things, the community itself, the people, the customs. We participate in all kinds of community events, we love it.”
When it comes to what keeps them together, Catalin says it’s not community that comes first, but love. “It’s the joy of liking each other, the way we liked each other from the beginning. That’s how we feel every moment, nothing has eroded with the passage of time. Gentilia and I complement each other very well.”
“I think that we, talking about roots, no longer refer to a specific geographical space, place or community, although they play an important role on our emotional map,” she says.
Our roots are more in our family, in our parents’ and grandparents’ stories of their journeys through the world and through life, in search of purpose and a better life.
Next:
Cristina and Mohamad
