Snipers and watermelons

this post is not about what you think it's about - or is it?

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I’m continuing to write small pieces of stories for no particular reason other than to practice writing stuff down. This is why it’s called Work in Progress.

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A small village called Cioburciu, on the banks of river Dniester, in the Soviet Republic of Moldova was where I spent every childhood summer until I was 11 years old, all three glorious months it, from early June to the end of August.

We would stuff boxes and suitcases with three month’s worth of supplies onto a train that took two days and two nights to reach our destination. I loved those long lazy days in the top bunk, reading books, watching the world go by, and falling asleep to the quiet rhythmic rumbling of the train.

The train stopped at Tiraspol, the regional centre, at 5am in the morning, and we only had two minutes to unload what felt like a thousand boxes of clothes and canned food onto the platform before the train departed again. Then, it was a car ride to the village, and a first taste of village life with cows, turkeys, geese and stray dogs greeting us as we went.

On my very first visit, I am told, still a pre-schooler, I leaned out of the window and kept shouting, excitedly: “Look, cows! Look, geese!” like I’d seen them for the very first time (I think that was probably the case). A local driver, dumbfounded, asked: “Where on earth did you come from?!”.

We would rent a small annex in an old couple’s house near the river, and by the end of every summer my pale Northern vitamin- and sun-deprived body was recharged and ready for another winter back home in Leningrad, with its low hanging clouds, four hours of daylight and perpetual shortage of fresh fruit and veg. 

My parents would ship me over there with my grandparents - well, mostly with my grandmother, as granddad still worked and only came to settle us in and then to help us get back. So while most of my friends spent their summers in the so-called “pioneer camps”, residential summer camps for the Soviet youth, I don’t remember ever setting foot in one. I don’t think I would have coped, and I think my parents knew that.

So Moldova with my grandmother it was.

Village life was different to the city, with neighbourhood kids freely flowing from one house to another, from the dam to the river, running barefoot in the streets with no cars, drinking fresh warm milk from the cows, eating peaches and apples right off the trees (my grandmother chasing after me, trying to shove slices of fruit into my mouth so I’d get my vitamin’s fill), and competing in how many potato beetles we could step on, their never ending moving trails lining the village dirt roads.

I don’t have any photographs from that time but these visions of my childhood summers are clear as day in my mind.

Our summer visits to Moldova stopped when the Soviet Union collapsed. I was 11 then. Moldova became a separate country, and Transnistria was a - supposedly - dangerous breakaway region with - as my grandfather, informed by the propaganda machine coming off the television set, put it - “militant snipers shooting at you from across the river”.

Despite my grandfather’s warnings, we did visit Moldova one more time, a few years later, and stayed in the same house we always had, although our original hosts have since passed away, and it was their children who greeted us as old friends.

Once more we swam across the familiar river my grandfather warned us against, to find friendly people with deliciously juicy watermelons who shared their picnic with us. There were no snipers.

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P.S. While searching for images from Transnistria, I found several photo essays about the region that I enjoyed looking at:

A Transnistrian photographer Anton Polyakov has several projects focusing on his homeland.

A project by Emile Ducke photographed in 2016.

In 2006 Jonas Bendiksen published a book called Satellites which is out of print and now I desperately want a copy (but not desperately enough to pay £300 for it on eBay).

Photographer Ramin Mazur documents his life as a half Ukrainian, half Afghan Moldovan.

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