Özen and Laurentiu

by Ioana Moldovan

The first time Laurentiu saw Özen was in her office, when she called him to clarify some details details regarding his employment contract. Özen worked in Human Resources and Laurentiu had just joined the company. She noticed he had long fingers.

They chatted on the company’s messenger, first about administrative stuff, like her needing an ID copy, then about other things. “Slowly, I got him to invite me to lunch,” Özen laughs. 

Their first date was at lunchtime, at the canteen next to their office in Pipera.

“He struck me as a guy not interested in the material things, with sound principles and a bit old-fashioned,” Özen says of her first impression of Laurentiu.

She pictured him driving a Dacia 1300. To him, Özen was “an exotic and cheerful presence”. He wanted to get to know her better. “I was 33 at the time, at a stage in life where I was neither looking for a serious relationship nor just a fling. I simply wanted to get to know her, to see what happens,” says Laurentiu.

In the summer of 2014, a year after they met, the two had already moved in together and decided to stay a couple and have a baby. Or more. Laurentiu wanted three, Özen was happy with just one. In the spring of 2015, the elder of their two children was born.

They got married a week before she was due. They had only a civil ceremony. “The marriage was an administrative thing, so that we would bear the same name, for the baby,” says Laurentiu. They did not succeed in having a religious ceremony as well, at church, something he and his parents really wished for. Laurentiu comes from Fagaras and from a religious orthodox family. Özen is of Turkish-Tatar ethnicity, Muslim, but non-practicing.

“In the Orthodox church, the priests demand for the wife to be baptised, they don’t do mixed marriages,” says Laurentiu with sadness. He would have had the wedding in both religions.

“I’m not a religious person,” says Özen, “and I wasn’t really interested in what it would infer in my religion.” Her ties to religion broke early on. She saw her grandmother and other older women reading the Koran literally, without understanding it. “They were reading the letters, the words, without understanding anything,” she recalls. “It seemed like nonsense to me and I said no.” It probably helped that her father was an atheist and her mother was not practicing either.

For Laurentiu’s mother, them living unmarried is still a thorn in her side.

He replies to his mom. Otherwise, his parents never had a problem with Özen not being Christian, nor have they ever pressured her to convert.

“I didn’t want to go that far, I believe it’s not a thing you can force upon someone. It has to be a spiritual thing that comes from one’s soul,” says Laurentiu.

“Personally, my only desire was to baptise my children as Christians, that was what I wanted.” Özen remembers a joke, though, in which he and some friends proposed to throw her into a pool and quickly call for the priest. 

“I think if we pushed this further, we could find a way to make everyone happy,” Özen says. “Altogether, I wanted my own parents to be happy, which is mostly why I never had a relationship with a Romanian.” Growing up in a Turkish-Tatar community in Tulcea, Özen was told since an early age that she should marry “one of their own”. She always felt revolted by this and found it unfair. “Not being a religious person, and with many Turks and Tatars in my generation not speaking Turkish anymore, I didn’t see anything in common with them,” she says.

In the end, she did as she saw fit. Her mother didn’t get to see her married, but Özen is convinced that she would have loved Laurentiu. Speaking about her father, she says he was glad his daughter finally had someone, and that, although he’s the kind of guy who’s used to being the boss and a bit arrogant at times, he always respected Laurentiu. 

They named their son, Petru Kaan, with both a Romanian and a Turkish name. For the little girl, they chose Lara, a name both Romanian and Turkish.

“I wanted to name him simply Petru Musat,” Laurentiu admits, “to have a Romanian name and a prince’s name, but…”. “I stepped in”, Özen finishes his sentence.

She has always said that if she were to have a son, she would name him Kaan. “It means khan, after Genghis Khan, I somehow wanted the name to have a history behind it,” she says. 

“But, certainly, if the mother goes to the child’s kindergarten or his school and says Kaan, Kaan, now everyone calls him Kaan, and my Petru…” complains Laurentiu.

In Lara’s case, it was easier, it being a universal name, and everyone was at peace.

Laurentiu says that on the lists of colleagues from kindergarten or school, there are only few Romanian names now. They are all called Ricardo, Denis, Ianis. He believes that if you are Romanian, you should choose Romanian names, unless you are of another ethnicity. “It seems to me that we are somehow erasing our identity. Next generation, if there are no more Romanian names, everyone is called only Ianis, Ianis, when someone looks at civil records, they will wonder what happened to this country?“

In the idea of preserving identity, Özen’s mother-in-law encourages her to talk more to her children in Turkish and teach them things. “I’d like for it to live on, I mean there are some things that need to be kept, passed on,” Özen says. “It’s good for them to learn a language, to learn my language too. It’s good to know the songs too.” She believes that come future they will fade away, but that they shouldn’t.

“Let there be the Romanian language, and the Turkish language, and these songs and those songs, let’s not let them disappear, let’s not erase them. Let them all exist, let them all be allowed and not exclude one another,” Özen says.

Özen’s father told her that back when he was a child, school and kindergarten were taught in his mother tongue. “My father, living in Romania, did kindergarten and school in Tatar. And he recalls that, at some point, there was this assimilation tendency and they were forced to speak another language, to be taught in another language, that was neither Romanian nor Tatar, the language of Tatarstan.” When Özen was in school, shortly after the 1989 revolution, Turkish language classes were introduced in several schools from Dobrogea. They were financed by the Turkish state. “I dropped out because I spoke Turkish much better than the teacher in question and therefore, there was no point in me attending those classes.”

After her mother’s passing and the death of an uncle she still visited, Özen didn’t celebrate Muslim holidays much. Sometimes, she still goes to visit on weekends, greeting relatives on the phone, but many of the family she used to visit are gone.

Now she celebrates holidays with Laurentiu and the children. One Christmas, she made her coming out, when they caught her in the pantry, eating cracklings. “That’s when they found out I, too, eat pork,” Özen laughs, “and I got some cracklings to go.”

“We blend,” she says. “There is this resistance, at some point, for groups to keep their identity, but as long as you live among other communities, as long as you live among other people, you can’t help but blend in. It’s not like the poles of a magnet, to say they repel each other, there are other deeper compatibility things that bring you together anyway.”

“That’s why I say, ethnicity and religion. I have been to the country where they speak my intimate language, the one I spoke during Ceausescu’s time only with my mother and father, where they practiced the religion I was born into,” Özen continues. She talks about the four years she spent in Turkey for her master’s degree. “But if I was born and raised here, among Romanians, and I didn’t adapt there, what am I supposed to do?”

“What I mean is I have more in common with Lau than I had with any Turkish guy. I made all the effort, I went there to find the one that’s one hundred percent, one thousand percent Turkish. I couldn’t. So what?”

“Beyond religions and cultural differences, we are human and we both have sound principles.” Laurentiu saw in Özen a level-headed woman who values home and family, and Özen saw in him a very deep guy, passionate about what he does and a person willing to make the effort and compromises necessary to move forward together. 

“And there is something else,” Özen says, “This need of ours, both of us, for affection or tenderness. I feel the need to give, to caress, to cuddle. At first, I didn’t know how he would perceive that, him being a man. But I saw that he feels the same way.”

“I think we somehow satisfy that need of both of us to nestle at all time,” she says, smiling.