Chișinău - A City on a Human Scale

Although this is my third visit to Chișinău, it is the first in which I’ve really had a chance to explore the city. At some point, someone told me that I wasn’t missing much, but my experience the past few days tells me that they were wrong. Perhaps it is my nostalgic feelings about Soviet architecture or my love for well used green space, but I actually have found Chișinău to be a quite lovely city on a very reasonably paced human scale. 

Chișinău has been a capital city for only a short time. Before that, it was a provincial center in the Soviet Union, Greater Romania, the Russian Empire, and the Ottoman Empire. The combined effects of an earthquake in the 1940s and the destruction of World War II destroyed much of the pre-1945 city, although a number of public buildings and homes survive in pockets. 

Like most Soviet cities, Chișinău has a great “prospect,” once Prospekt Lenina, now named Bulevardul Ștefan cel Mare și Sfînt (The Boulevard of Steven the Great and Holy). It cuts a wide swath through the central city, lined with a who’s-who of East European architectural styles -- early 20^th century Romanesque commercial buildings, old mansions, Stalinist apartment blocks, hulks of the Brezhnev era, and boxy modern towers. Although I’ve walked it only in the evening, the boulevard is remarkable for its relative lack of traffic, making a pedestrian’s life much easier than in many other cities of the region. The street is lined with shops of every type and size, from tiny used bookstores to the United Colors of Benetton. 

The Orthodox Cathedral and its bell-tower seem to constitute the centerpiece of the city. An unremarkable building of the early nineteenth century, the cathedral reminded me a bit of the Alexander Nevskii monastery in St. Petersburg, with a bit less ornamentation. The scene was made beautiful, however, by the abundant green space, dozens of benches, and sidewalk cafes. People of every age and background milled about, enjoying the beautiful spring weather. 

Perhaps the most interesting site was a beautiful green park just off the main boulevard. The park’s broad paths all converged on a giant nineteenth-century fountain. The paths spreading down the middle of the park were lined with dozens of statues of great Romanian artists, writers, and statesmen, the largest dedicated to the poet Mihai Eminescu. The overall path was dominated, however, by a monument to the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, erected in the 1880s.

In many ways, walking the streets of Chișinău seemed remarkably like stepping back in time. So many things that have disappeared in other cities of the region -- old-fashioned trolleybuses, ornate sprawling wooden park benches, slightly grubby yet interesting stores – are still to be found in Chișinău. While the city is unlikely to become the world’s next tourist hot-spot, it is a remarkably peaceful city and a reminder that urban living need not be fast paced. 

Bucharest

This is my third visit to Romania and my second visit to Bucharest. The last visit (2002) was long enough ago that memories are very fuzzy. It is surprising to me how things as simple as a sign or a street-scape or an intersection lurk somewhere in the recesses of my mind, unconjured for years on end, only to suddenly appear so very familiar. Bucharest has changed in ten years. While there used to be several kilometers of empty road en route from the city to the airport, office towers now crowd the intersection just before. Traffic is more snarled than before, although that I’m told that the city has added a couple hundred thousand people and a few hundred thousand cars in the past decade. In general, the whole place feels a bit more “European” than it did a decade ago, with more signs of globalization.

Bucharest is not a pretty city in the sense of “the pretty sister of Eastern Europe. Such an honor would go to Prague (the beautiful but vapid sister whose beauty fades quickly), Budapest (the stately, beautiful sister with high cheekbones) or Krakow (the really cute sister). Bucharest is the rather homely sister whose company you really enjoy. The whole place seems a sort of hodge podge of Moldavian turrets, ancient stone churches, art deco, classical revival, and Victorian brick-a-brack. Individual pieces are lovely. Some of the turn-of-the-last-century architecture rivals anything Vienna, Budapest, or Prague have to offer. The churches and turrets add an ancient touch. And the art deco is a dash of pepper. Somehow it works. Somehow it is fun and draws you back for more.

In the midst of it all stands possibly the world’s greatest monument to megalomania – Ceaușescu’s Boulevard of Unity and the Palace of the Parliament – the biggest building in Europe sitting at the end of an avenue wider and longer than the Champs Elysées (with a bit of North Korean charm thrown in, to use the words of my Romanian colleague earlier today). While post-revolutionary Romania has done their best to make use of this colossal building and to make the area beautiful, it remains gargantuan and someone supra-human, a testament if there ever was one to man’s inability to perfect the world.

It’s been one of those days and one of those trips that reminds me why I enjoy this part of the world so much, from the wonderful breads, soups (and food in general) to the aesthetic carefulness evident in everything from book covers to street signs to the thoughtful people.

Romania has definitely moved up my list of countries where I’d like to spend some more time (with a less packed agenda!)

 the square where Ceaușescu's fall began - with monument to revolution

Sadness

A few months ago, when I was visiting Khartoum, Sudan, I wrote the following:

“Today was a very full day that included more heart-wrenching stories about the deconstruction of a country, the results of economic turmoil that makes anything we experience in America pale by comparison, and a visit to the library of a theological school that included a multi-volume set of Bobsy Twins books, a run of Good Housekeeping from the 1990s and some used coloring books (alongside a smattering of commentaries and theological readers). Although I can’t help laughing to myself as I write that, I don’t say it to be funny. It’s actually a very poignant reminder of how dedicated and talented people struggle to do good work in exceedingly trying and under resourced circumstances. I have an even deeper respect for the Sudanese today.”

This week, I received the following news from Sudan:

“Hi brothers and friends in Christ!
Thank you for your constant prayers for the church of God in Sudan.
What you have heard … is true but it is not the full news.
What happen to the whole land (Bible School + three Church buildings + primary school) is unbelievable!
The Muslims destroyed every thing and burned out the must of them beside taking many properties to their own use. They destroyed the Bible School completely!!! 
They burned out all the offices, dormitories. stores, library, trees, Holy Bibles and others.
This not only the very sad event in Sudan, but the Islamic Crusades against Christians and churches by now is covering the whole country.
 For our side our reaction is going in full control and we do not have any desire to revenge or to act like them.
We pray that God may forgive them and show them the truth.”

The school mentioned is the one I mentioned in passing above. While this is far from the first time that I have received word of some kind of violence somewhere in the world, this is the first time that a place where I sat and walked just three months ago has been destroyed. Thankfully, it seems that there were no injuries. I cannot help but remember a woman with small children, living in the student housing, who invited my colleague and me into her small two-room apartment. I have to wonder now where she and her family have gone. 

There are two elements in this very sad and distressing story that are nonetheless encouraging. First, the non-violent response of the Christians above. Second, the reports from a different source of the outpouring of support from many individual Muslims from the community around the school after this attack. One of the worst mistakes we can make is to assume that all Muslims associate with the kinds of actions that took place here. As this outpouring of support shows, there are many who desire to live in peace with their Christian neighbors.

My heart is heavy.  But my respect and care for those who continue to work in these circumstances is even greater.

Every five years...

My passport has gathered a bit of dust over the past few months as I've changed jobs, made a valiant attempt at living in two states at once, and negotiated the turmoil of selling real estate in these interesting times. Life has certainly not been boring.

This is changing as I prepare to board an Amsterdam-bound plane for a trip that will ultimately take me to Chisinau, the capital of Moldova, a nation of about four million sandwiched both physically and culturally between Romania and Ukraine.

I realized that I've visited Chisinau and Moldova every five years -- 2002, 2007, and now 2012.

In many ways, Moldova and what I experienced there in 2002 had a sizable impact on my life. I went to Chisinau the first time expecting to visit a school training Moldovans for Moldova. I certainly found that in great measure. What truly surprised me was a large number of people from various Central Asian nations. This visit was influential in my dedication of a good bit of my graduate work at Indiana University to the study of Central Asia and the ethnic diversity of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and contemporary Eurasia.

In the coming days, I’ll be meeting with quite a number of people with an interest in that part of the world. Some of them are new acquaintances. Some are old friends. I’ll mostly be listening and learning.

Travel is a good reminder of the complexity of our world. In Indianapolis, an Ethiopian or Eritrean lady checked me in for my Delta flights. The flight attendants on my KLM flight from Amsterdam to Bucharest included people of Dutch, African, and Asian ethnic backgrounds. Globalization is everywhere, yet I continue to wonder how deep it really goes.

Such globalization is not new or novel. I’ve recently finished Charles Mann’s 1493:  Uncovering the World Columbus Created. I picked up the audio book to fill the time driving between Indianapolis and Grand Rapids and honestly didn’t expect much. What I found was extremely thought provoking, as Hall explored the ways in which the “Columbian Exchange” launched a force of globalization that continues to this day. Such interactions went far beyond the carriage of maize, sweet potatoes and other crops from the Americas to Europe, Africa, and Asia or the cataclysmic importation of European diseases to North America. They involved fundamental economic exchanges (such as the transport of Bolivian silver to Mexico, from whence it traveled via galleons to Spanish Manila and eventually China, in return from Chinese goods that reshaped the economies of Europe and the Americas). This trade, among other things, allowed sixteenth and seventeenth century Mexico City to become what Hall calls the world’s first cosmopolitan metropolis, with its teeming American, Asian, and African populations living in complex relationship one with another.

Mann is a journalist rather than an academic historian (although he draws on a broad reading of historical literature and presents an historically credible argument). His writing, however, accomplishes something that is all too rare – what I can only call sweeping vision. Having read and digested huge amounts of historical materials diverse in their geography and language, he presents a rare, global, and multidisciplinary view that begins to show the interconnectedness of things. Certainly, such a task would be impossible without finely researched and narrowly focused history on points as fine as the demographics of sixteenth century central Mexico or the economics of silver in late Ming China.

As I think about leadership development and education and as I travel about this mixed up, intertwined world we live in, I can’t help but wonder how it might be possible to form more people with such sweeping visions, with an ability to see interconnectedness across disciplines, across languages, across cultures. Certainly such work depends on abundant, narrow expertise and research – on those who delve deeply. But it’s my sense that we aren’t lacking in that area. How are those who can see the whole formed? How can such learning and research be encouraged? Such are the types of questions that animate my work, that leaven my conversations as I travel. I’m fortunate to know many people who fit the description of “connectors” with sweeping vision.  

Who knows what this third visit to Moldova will bring. More to come…