Apartment Block Archives
My grandmother's cooking always tasted like tobacco. Her kitchen was so small it barely fit two adults, and each time I would visit her apartment, she would sit across from me, watching my reaction to her soups or desserts while hotboxing the space. She was a full-time grandmother, but one I mainly saw online, and these moments were important as they were few and far between.
As a child, I came to know Romania through the apartment blocks. My introduction to the country’s mountains and touristy areas came later in life. When we would visit, it was for the people—our grandparents, extended family, and my parents’ childhood friends. During these visits, their domestic spaces became the settings in which I built my understanding of their worlds, and eventually, my grandmother’s kitchen became a representation of the way I would come to see the country. It was sitting across from someone you loved while feeling too nauseous to eat. Loving and a little unpleasant, all at once.
For the international community, the apartment blocks are often referenced when imagining a post-communist aesthetic, the mention of them triggering images of grey brutalist buildings, built row after row, in varying states of decay. For some people, they are a point of fascination. For others, they are introduced as a warning: “Romania is a beautiful country, but the apartment blocks are ugly.” For those familiar with them, they are something else entirely.
My grandparents' apartment was in one of these blocks. I remember it as always being sticky with heat, shaded by yellowing lace curtains, and clouded with a thin layer of smoke. The flat, a classic one-bedroom unit, the same as so many others in their small city, was filled with their possessions—my grandmother's books and art, my grandfather's music records, and, importantly, photos of my sister and me, their only grandchildren, on every wall. When we would visit in the summer, we would spend day after day in that apartment, escaping the heat as my grandmother would watch her telenovelas, and my grandfather would make us Sudoku games by hand.
As a child growing up in Canadian suburbs, I was used to newness—homes which looked the same and had no real past. In the blocks though, time collapsed. They were filled with our family’s history in photos, furniture, and books, a personal archive waiting to be explored by children and grandchildren, returning home to remember once more. My memories from when I was young and these buildings felt big and full of life, co-existed with the lives of my parents, and their parents. They were where my sister and I ate midnight cabbage rolls as teenagers after a sweaty night of dancing. They were where my father used to sit by his radio and illegally listen to the top ten songs in Western Europe each week. They were where my grandmother had eaten polenta every day during the months she was pregnant with my mother. All our lives intersected at the blocks, each of us coming and going throughout the decades. In a world of newness, the blocks became my anchor.
When we would visit in the summer, we would spend day after day in that apartment, escaping the heat as my grandmother would watch her telenovelas, and my grandfather would make us Sudoku games by hand.
I recognize it is cruel to romanticize a product created from a time of so much suffering. Nostalgia, no matter how enticing, can also be dangerous. Pain and melancholy are inseparable from the apartment blocks, a legacy which echoes no matter how much time moves forward. These structures have been political since their creation. That is still felt.
During the communist period, hundreds of historical buildings were torn down to make room for others which better reflected the values of an emerging new world. In their place, the classic apartment blocks were built, representing uniformity and efficiency, all while making space, and attracting new people to the cities. Systematization, a technical, theoretical term on its own, was a key tenant of the communist urbanism philosophy. The goal of systematization was to modernize Romanian society, by reducing the number of rural villages and bringing people to the cities—to make New Towns for the New Man.
A report by the World Monuments Fund titled “The Razing of Romania’s Past” maps the loss that resulted from systematization across rural and urban architectural heritage, destruction, and resettlement. Towns across the country were targets of large-scale demolitions, including the capital of Bucharest, in which the historic centre of the city was replaced with standardized apartment blocks. Among the destroyed were synagogues and Jewish temples, Orthodox churches, and Protestant churches. Some villages were turned into agricultural industrial towns, while others were completely abandoned. As the masses migrated from rural towns into city centres, new infrastructure was needed to house them—and so came to be the apartment blocks.
All our lives intersected at the blocks, each of us coming and going throughout the decades. In a world of newness, the blocks became my anchor.
While the visual aesthetics of these buildings reflected one ideology, they also served as spaces for other types of political activities. As homes, they provided a needed privacy during the communist era, a period characterized by surveillance and paranoia. People would gather to organize or listen to the illegal Free Europe radio stations in their homes. Other times, gestures were less overt, acts of small resistances like listening to the illegally smuggled music records of Fleetwood Mac or Madonna.
Now, though, the apartment complexes have aged. In one Bucharest Airbnb I stay in for work, I hear cockroaches skittering in between the walls. In another, strong synthetic perfumes are used to cover up the inescapable smell of mold. All built at once, they are now also degenerating at once, a housing crisis inching forward, day by day. While data is sparse, as of 2009, more than 70 percent of Romania’s urban populations lived in the apartment blocks, despite their deteriorating nature. It is something my North American colleagues are both confused and quietly repulsed by, barely surviving the handful of days required to sleep in the apartment blocks during our work trips.
For those more familiar with them, like for my parents and others from that generation, the blocks are unremarkable—something more neutral. For myself, and other children of the diaspora, they are sites for exploration, spaces where I can piece together snippets of my family’s past through what feels like years of undercover ethnographic work. While they are a generation who through immigration are in the constant practice of forgetting, I am in a constant practice of remembering.
One summer, I found myself in my grandmother's apartment for a month, alone. She was in Toronto, recovering from a last-minute surgery, and was unable to join me. With non-refundable tickets, I went and spent the final weeks of summer finishing my thesis in her house. I hadn’t been to her apartment in years, but the smell of her building was distinct and familiar, smelling of mothballs, dried lavender, and old newspapers. When I opened her front door, a dead, upside-down cockroach greeted me on her doormat. On the kitchen table, my aunt had left me fresh apricots as a welcome gift. It was loving, and a little unpleasant, all at once.
During that first month alone, I came to understand the blocks as an extension of my family, a skin my parents had once been familiar with, had since shed, but which still held their shape. Parsing through their old things alone in their homes felt like a conversation. It was easier to talk to them in this way, gentler, as I slowly discovered elements of their past life.
“This isn’t important,” I’d imagine my mom telling me.
But the blocks would whisper back “Yes, it is.”
That summer, alone in her old apartment, I rifled through her things, finding heavily annotated books, photos with scribbles in the margins, old clothes, and forgotten cassettes, a proof of life from a past which my mother often struggled to talk about. A past which now felt concrete, buzzing, and alive. A past which I only became connected to through the blocks.
The first time I saw my dad with a beard was in the months following my grandfather's death. My dad is neat, sporting a five o'clock shadow at most, but the beard was new, unsettling, and like the sun, I couldn't look at it too long. In Romanian culture, it is tradition to grow your beard when you are grieving, a sign of respect, an overt, physical manifestation of pain, shown to be proven real. At night, I would sit with his suffering in my stomach and imagine ways to ease it, braiding flowers in his beard like my grandfather did with my hair when I was little. His death only strengthened my desire to return to their home, to comb through their things and learn of the stories buried within them.
When we eventually came back to the apartment, we found dozens of photo albums with pictures of my sister and I, printed from Facebook. I imagined my grandfather scrolling diligently on his computer, saving photos to print at the local shop each time one appeared on his screen. The photobooks served as a re-creation of our lives across the ocean from the years they were missing, detective work to fill the gaps in between the Skype calls I would rarely answer during my teenage years. Images I had forgotten or deleted of old boyfriends and ex-best friends were all immortalized in old Chinese scrapbooks, our histories brought into the family’s archive. When I look at my grandparent’s photos now, trying to piece together their lives as they did with ours, I feel closer to them. I am continuing our family’s practice of preservation.
A few years later, my parents flew to Romania to be with my grandmother in her final days. Tucked away in the same apartment my sister and I had spent summers in, they waited for her to die. They would take shifts working in the small space, brushing her hair, and sitting with her as she would have a smoke in bed and sip shots of Jägermeister. They found cockroaches in the apartment and welts on her back, her suffering permeating the spaces we couldn't see through a small screen.
In her final days, they called to tell me they were preparing to sell her apartment.
It felt like a severing.
I begged them to bring what they could back, wrecked by what felt like the dismantling of our family history. If they would let me, I could put together their things and make a Frankenstein version of who my grandparents once were. I could take on the role of our family’s archivist, no matter how ill-prepared I felt.
They returned with a box of photo albums and dropped off a luggage of my grandmother’s books at a friend’s house. Everything else was donated, and the apartment was stripped down and remodelled. Now with it gone, all that exists are memories.
If they would let me, I could put together their things and make a Frankenstein version of who my grandparents once were. I could take on the role of our family’s archivist, no matter how ill-prepared I felt.
As time marches forward, my family members in Romania continue to upgrade their spaces, living in apartments which look like mine, geographically ambiguous, built of sleek materials and greige laminate floors. But in other ways, Romania is slower than the rest of the world. I still find ways to remember, whether it be through the people, the landscape, or the blocks that remain.
I continue to go back, to try to understand, to remember a past which is my family’s, and in some ways also my own. I’m reminded of my grandmother’s cooking while I eat with other bunicilor, serving me with too-sweet desserts in their cramped, smoked-filled homes. But I’m also scared of what happens when we don’t have a physical space to return to remember.
Now, driving on Romania’s new cross-country highways, I often spot the blocks looming in the distance, their ugly shapes contrasting with the landscape around them. They are the enduring legacy of the communist period, and while the regime has since gone, they have remained. Their cement structures, like the roots of trees, still burrow deep in the soil. They remind us that we are not rootless, and they ask us to remember. Remembering is all I can do for now, and how lucky am I to at least have something to remember.
