Life in Curtea de Arges- Cornelia Toderita

Cornelia Toderita just came home from her afternoon of swimming and is ready to head out to meet with some of her friends. She is a woman in her late sixties, who is currently a loan officer. Now living in Burbank, California, she spends her days going swimming or working and always finds time to be able to be with her close friends that are like family to her. She spent most of her life traveling to different cities. She even lived in Africa for ten months with her father and brother. However, one of her fondest memories was when she lived in a small town in Romania called, Curtea de Arges, with her uncle, aunt, and younger brother. She misses the nature and just being a child, she told me, loving to put her feet in the cold river that she would pass by, everything to her was just beautiful.

The small town where I grew up was called Curtea de Arges. It was a very nice town in the mountains with a very low population; which now is not the same, it became almost a city. I lived there before I went to school. For about four years from the age of three to seven. I was fortunate to live with my uncle who was a priest, in Curtea de Arges, so everyone knew him. So you can say that everything was around one person. He was a pope and he was the one that participated to all of the events of the little town. Like marriage, birth, christening, and death burials.

There were some strange individuals that, unfortunately for them, it was not their fault, it was just the way they were born; They had some birth defects, and everyone used to laugh at them. I was really the star of the little town because I was coming from Bucharest, which was the capital and it was considered that everything that was coming from the big city was something very important and was needed to be treated differently, with more respect.

 At that time, the information came by the radio and the newspaper. A newspaper was published every day. There was always gossip. I cannot really remember because I was too small to be interested in the gossip, but I’m sure there was gossip.

There was a very important event, the celebration of the year when the big monastery was built and there was even a legend related to the monastery about the guy who built the church. Everything he was doing during the day was coming down during the night, and each morning when he was going back to the construction site nothing was there and he was desperate because he had a certain amount of time to build that church and if not, the king at that time was supposed to kill him if it was not ready. So one night, before going to bed, he asked god to give him a dream about what he can do to succeed the construction of that church and he dreamt that he will have to burry in the walls in the church the first women that will come to the site with food for him or for one of the workers there.

So the next day he went to the construction site, and he was hoping to see one of him workers wives coming but in the long distance he saw his pregnant wife coming to bring them food and he was trying to stop her. He was imploring all the forces of nature: the wind, the sun, the rain, to make her stop, but she would not stop. She kept going ahead even if it was pouring rain. So when she arrived there, and because he had promised god to do what he was supposed to do, although he was suffering because she was his wife, he buried her in the walls and that’s how the church was raised and it didn’t go down anymore in the night time.

There is a fountain next to the church and it says that that fountain was there from all the tears from his wife’s eyes when she was built in the wall. That is the main thing that Curtea de Arges is known for. Also they have a beautiful factory of ceramics and they are still well known in Romania.

The notion of fun was much different from what you have in mind when you think about fun. Our fun was helping with the work in the fields, like picking up fruits, help plant the potatoes, or help my aunt around the kitchen with the food for the workers. That was our fun. And from time to time my aunt would give us a little bit more fun, so she will send us to the forest to pick up wood for the fire. That was very fun. It’s a way of working and enjoying nature. Because no one was coming with us, and no one was behind us when we were going in the forest.

Everyone had the same religion. There was no different religion. The diversity in nationalities were only Romanians. There are always people in a small town people that have more knowledge because there were doctors, and we had a pope.

A pope, in order to preach, had to go to the Theological University, and study. There were also teachers. So of course there was difference in culture. There was an elementary school, and there was a Jr. High, and a high school. But there was only one school for each; there weren’t three or four high schools. 

The wealthiest person in the small town was my uncle because he was a pope. Everyone were either working in a little enterprises style, not factories, but something equal to a factory, but smaller, or working the field. Most of them were working the fields.

I miss the nature and being a child with no worries. I miss the forest, the river, there was a beautiful river where I was going to pick up the wood and berries in the forest.  Right now I would rather choose to live here because now I’m too much used to the life of the city and I cannot live in the country side anymore. I learned the value of enjoying everything, and the value of praising everything that was given to me.

 Interviewed by Samantha Cismas