The Jiu Valley is probably the most beautiful part of Romania, at least in my estimation (Sinaia’s a close second). The mountains are beautiful and almost surprising, especially when you first see them from across the countryside, driving back from somewhere like Cluj-Napoca. They spring out of the flat land unexpectedly, and before you know it you’re among them, driving on a narrow, winding road between them, entirely forgetful of the fact that you were, previously, somewhere else.
In some ways, that description is accurate for the whole of the Jiu Valley, not just for its mountains. After a few months here, I sometimes forget entirely about the world outside. When we visited Cluj, I felt like a little kid again—the wide-eyed girl from Iowa, who can’t help but gape and stare when she visits malls in big cities. Compared to Lupeni, Cluj was not only enormous, but shiny. Seriously.
Everything in the Jiu Valley is gray, worn dirty by years of smoke and coal and dust. The dogs are everywhere—literally everywhere—and though by now I’ve grown somewhat fond of them, they’re still somewhat-ominous indicators of neglect. Lupeni is a tattered city. Garbage overflows from dumpsters onto the ground, where dogs (and sometimes people) pick through it, looking for a prize. The buildings are crumbling at the edges; holes remain in the metal doors of apartment blocks where people once pried their way in to pop the lock. You don’t see that in other places in Romania. Even other small towns we’ve visited—Sighet, for example—were better-maintained and less destroyed than Lupeni. Some of the difference is the result of history: coal mining is a rough industry; it destroys places just as it destroys people’s bodies. The Jiu Valley bears the scars of that industry. Some of it is due to corruption—it’s so rampant here, so ingrained in this valley's culture, that the lost resources, the failed projects, the half-finished buildings, and the destroyed infrastructure simply sit there. People are angry about it, but they've mostly given up on finding a systemic solution. There are no institutions to appeal to here, not really. Not in the same way that there are in bigger cities, where the influence of foreign direct investment and big-city, internationally-minded culture helps hold governments accountable. It’s different in the Jiu Valley. Here, when communism collapsed, all that was left were a bunch of pissed-off miners, who worked out their frustration in sometimes-violent marches towards Bucharest (see Gallagher, “Theft of a Nation”) and by drinking a lot of alcohol.
That’s a sweeping and unfair generalization, of course, but like Gallagher wrote, communism’s downfall left “an ‘institutional abyss’ being ‘the legacy of a leviathan Soviet state which, when it collapsed, left behind only administrative and economic rubble devoid of the judicial, accounting and police procedures necessary for a modern society’.” Unlike in the bigger cities of Romania, or even in the small towns in other regions which were less stripped-to-the-bone physically and economically, the Jiu Valley never found the resources to rebuild itself entirely. Development’s beginning to come, but only in bits and pieces. As I walked through Lupeni tonight, I kept smiling at the strange conglomerate that exists here: sleek, modern cell phones sit on top of rotting wooden crates on my host family’s farm; TV antennas poke out of broken glass windows in the back neighborhoods; teenagers walk the streets in more fashionable clothes than most American kids but return to a block apartment where the stairway reeks of mold and they share a room with their parents. Modernization and globalization have come to the Jiu Valley, but in fits and starts. That’s how it is across most of Romania, of course—just here, it’s further behind.
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