KRONSTADT: TEARS OF TIME

Photographs & text by Gene de Paule

A photographic autumn promenade across the historic center of Braşov, Romania — the ancient walled city of Kronstadt. Without knowing the cause, at a time, I was beginning to experience malaise associated with a tick-borne disease, recently acquired on the East Coast of the US.

Zo and I had just arrived from the East Coast of the U.S., for us to retreat into writing the first draft of our book Facing East in an easeful Eastern European town, among mountains.

We had our plan, and it was a wondrous plan. Yet, without apparent cause, I began falling ill.

Zo and I had recently been in upstate New York, where I’d spent time photographing out in nature. There, I noticed that I’d been bitten by some unknown insect on the back of my thigh. I never saw the insect, but assumed there had been one as I developed a curious skin reaction: a small reddish oval that expanded for a few days, turning dark blue, and then disappeared, just as quickly and mysteriously as it had first appeared.

Once we settled in the picturesque Transilvanian town of Braşov, Romania, I became driven to walking in the dusk. While Zo and I continued to work on our writing, despite my developing ailments (exhaustion, a frail knee, relentless back pain, and a growing restlessness), whenever possible, I went outside to walk and photograph the streets of the walled town of Kronstadt, the historic center of modern day Braşov.

As I strolled around the old town, I was captivated by its ancient, scarred face, which hinted at a slowly evolving, convoluted, and often challenging history.

and the ensuing fall of the Byzantine Empire — the Hungarian Kingdom welcomed Saxon settlers to its Transylvanian territories, to develop agriculture and mining. For their protection, around the year 1211, by order of King Andrew II, the Teutonic Knights built three fortified settlements along the Carpathian route to Constantinople. The main one was named Corona, or Kronstadt in Germanic, meaning the Crown’s City.

Benefiting from its location along the trade route between Western Europe and the Near East, the city’s wealth and architecture flourished. Amid the splendid Transylvanian forest, Kronstadt’s streets, homes, schools, public buildings, churches, and fortifications rose and mounted, expanded and gradually aged, for hundreds of years.

I first visited this place a few years before, in 2014, inspired by chance. In the spring of that year, I had taken an all-night train from Budapest, Hungary, to Bucharest, Romania — a route that crosses through the Carpathian range.

After an uncomfortably long, almost sleepless night in a run-down, seating-only, second-class train car, the morning’s first light revealed an unexpected, mesmerizing sight: the horizontal and vertical expanses of the Carpathian Mountains. I was so overtaken by the view that I decided to return to this area during my summer vacation in 2014 — and yet again in 2018, and now in 2019.

At times magical, at times dirty and broken down, cuddled by clouds and mountains, the old town of Kronstadt lives on as the heart of Braşov, amid the constant tears of time.

Zo eventually completed her work on the manuscript draft and went back to the U.S. I stayed behind in the old town, watching rapidly changing seasons. 

One day, I began feeling intoxicated and soon developed rashes from my leg to my elbow, on the right side of my body, the side of the original insect bite. Could it be something I ate? I cut down on anything that could be causing an allergic reaction, but no amount of abstention seemed to help. 

It would take a year for me to realize that I carried a deadly serious intruder in my body and mind. For months, alI I knew was that, for no reason, I was growing sleepless and exhausted, but in the depths of my being, a ferocious fight was already taking place. 

Attempting to solve the mystery, I pondered what could be the cause of my terrible malaise. The bite, back in July, in upstate New York: that must be it! I concluded that, three months ago, I must had been bitten by a kind of spider and that my body was still clearing the remnant toxin and that I was experiencing an allergic reaction to it. An antihistamine should help, I thought to myself. A daily dose worked against the rash, but not the exhaustion. Yet, the antihistamine got me through my last month in Romania. 

Night after night, day after day, I was feeling, gradually, more and more debilitated. Unbeknownst to me, in the darkness, a microscopic monster, Borrelia burgdorferi, was casting a whole world for itself inside me.

It was already November, when I met with a friend of mine who lived in town and who told me about a dream she had recently had. She was terrified by an apocalyptic nightmare. A forbidding omen, she said.

In her nightmare, during the course of terrible events, she kept hearing the word four. She thought that the world would end in four days, months, or years. Trying to comfort her and lighten the mood, I said: “You know, ‘four’ could also have another meaning. It could stand for: one, ‘four-titude,’ two, ‘four-sight,’ three, ‘four-ce,’ and ‘four…’”

Before I could say the fourth “four,” she interjected: “No, you don’t understand. I heard the word for the number four in Romanian and the sound is: patru.”