The White and the Blue

All villages have a story to tell, but every account will vary according to the tale teller. Each narrator will have a different perspective.  During our recent visit to the Danube Delta (see previous blog 165), we revelled in Romania’s wetland world, but we were also fascinated by the terrestrial environment of the village in which we stayed - Mila 23.  So please, bear with Terroir, while we attempt a brief and very personal account of one of the Danube Delta’s inhabited islands.

As we mentioned in our ‘Greek and Romanian Geography’ blog, Mila 23 was the name of a village located 23 nautical miles from the Black Sea port of Sulina, on the old shipping route from the sea to the river port of Tulcea. 

According to this aptly named website (https://www.discoverdanubedelta.com/mila23-village-in-the-middle-of-the-danube-delta/), 23 nautical miles was the distance which could be rowed in a day, thus making this location an obvious overnighting spot on this particular route through the delta. 

Archaeological evidence suggests that the delta had been inhabited since around 4,000 BCE by agricultural, pastoral and fishing populations. The Mila 23 area seems to have reached the start of the 20th century as a lose collection of hamlets, but the following decades saw considerable change.  The construction of the Sulina canal (carrying rather more mechanised forms of shipping by this time) bypassed Mila 23. Some delta drainage disrupted the pattern of fishing communities, and massive flooding in the 1970s resulted in some re-engineering of the main village. 

As a result, a number of hamlets and habitations were deserted and the population became more concentrated within the central village but, with no shipping to service, Mila 23 had to seek a new economic base.  One hopes that tourism, based largely on bird watching and fishing, is keeping the community alive. 

Left: housing old and new

The old Sulina waterway is still an obvious and dominant characteristic of this village, but there is another, more colourful component, which is equally important: the love of blue and white.  These are the colours of this Lipovan community, a Russian-origin people, who have clearly retained their traditions, including the Russian (rather than Romanian) Orthodox Church.    

The more we explored the Mila 23 island, the more we found traditional and modern intertwined.  We mentioned, in the last blog, the importance of the Delta reed harvest and the versatility of this crop. Thatching is an obvious use but thatch and tiles now combine in many combinations and also illustrate the variety of options for the use of the traditional blue and white colour scheme (see below). 

Exhibits in one of the local museums illustrate the blending of Russian flavours with a Romanian wetland environment.  It looks like the reeds (below left) are available as fuel and have clearly been used as building material (below centre). And are those samovars and Russian Orthodox religious icons (below right)?

Moving outside, we swap bread paddles for boat paddles.  Boats, fishing tackle and decorative wetland imagery must be as symptomatic of Mila 23 life as blue shutters and spinning wheels.

Boats are, obviously, essential to life on Mila 23, but the queen of them all is the – well here we bump into the vexed question of the difference between a canoe and a kayak.  Our guide informed us that Mila 23 was a very special place for kayaks and took us to a very special museum to tell the story of a very special local man.  We’ve checked and rechecked and we are pretty sure that our otherwise exceptional guide should have been talking about canoes! 

The very special man was Mila 23 born Ivan Patzaichin.  His father was a fisherman and his mother a dressmaker but it was his grandfather who encouraged him to try canoeing.  When two other local lads won the world canoe doubles title in 1966, Ivan decided to compete as well and just two years later, he and fellow Mila 23 born Serghei Covaliov won gold at the Mexico Olympics.  Patzaichin’s final medal tally was seven Olympic medals (four of which were gold) and 22 world championship medals (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Patzaichin).

Today, the Ivan Patzaichin Museum – Community Innovation Center stands tall on the Mila 23 water front and “ingeniously illustrates how natural materials traditionally used in construction, such as wood, reed, clay, and hemp, can be reinterpreted and integrated into a modern concept.” (https://muzeu.ivanpatzaichin.ro/en/museum/)

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Meanwhile, other athletic activities continue to celebrate Lipovan culture and their love of white and blue.