Bordering On Obsession – Curtici Railway Station: Further Down The Line (Rendezvous With An Obscure Destiny #28)

The day I first set foot in Eastern Europe opened up a whole new world of possibilities to me. Ten years ago, when the aircraft for my flight from Paris to Sofia, Bulgaria landed, a mental barrier had been breached. Suddenly anywhere in the Balkans was within reach. On this same trip, I made my first foray into Hungary. This allowed me a window into the world of East-Central Europe. Suddenly, traveling around the entire region offered an endless array of opportunities. A decade later, those opportunities continue to present themselves. Even when I am thousands of kilometers and an ocean away, new places are still to be discovered.

Lines On A Map – The Great Divide

Sometimes discovery comes in the form of an image. A photo and a few descriptive words are enough to set me on a mental journey, long before an actual physical one takes place. This was the case with a Romanian railway station just over the border from Hungary. I captured my first glimpse of it on page 161 of Patrick Leigh Fermor: Noble Encounters Between Budapest and Transylvania by Michael O’Sullivan. A photo showed the outside waiting area of a large railway station. This was the place where passengers wait for trains to arrive. I noticed that the station looked much larger than what might be expected at a relatively remote border crossing. But this was no ordinary station. As O’Sullivan says, “it is still an important railway junction between Central Europe and the western part of Romania and a major crossing point between Budapest and Bucharest.”

One could make the case that the railway station at Curtici, Romania lie on one of those geopolitical fault lines between the eastern and western halves of Europe. Depending on a traveler’s direction, they are either arriving or departing from the eastern world. It depends less upon perspective and more about direction. The Austrian diplomat, Prince Klemens Von Metternich once said that the Orient begins at the end of the Ringstrasse. Meaning that anything east of Vienna (aka Hungary) was the wild east. Well for me, the Orient begins just over the Hungary-Romania border at Curtici. This border was imposed upon the map by diplomats and bureaucrats in smoke filled rooms at a post-World War I peace conference long ago. So long in fact, that everyone who was in those rooms is now dead, but the lines they drew remain. In essence, they created facts on the ground which have proven largely unalterable. Visiting the station at Curtici would be a reminder that borders can be the makers and breakers places.

Curtici takes on an outsized importance because it is located at a major railway junction. A midpoint, straddling the divide between East and West. Other similar places in Europe have disappeared. For instance, the city of Berlin, where east and west really did meet for close to thirty years. The sides have now been unified into a larger whole. The same goes for many areas along the old Iron Curtain. One day the differences between the eastern and western halves of Berlin might become imperceptible. There is little chance of this happening at Curtici. Romania and Hungary are likely to keep each other at a distance. This ensures that Curtici will continue to be part of a frontier. As for the railway station, it will serve as a reminder of Curtici’s importance as a first and last stop. A meeting point, as well as one of divergence. It acts as a portal to the past, an arbiter of the present and harbinger of the future. A place that I must visit, even though I have already been there.

The First & Last Stop- Curtici Railway Station

Sozzled Slumber – Someone Else’s Problem

I never saw Curtici’s Railway Station during an initial visit. At that time, I failed to realize that me and my wife were passing by the railway station. The oversight was for good reason because we had other, more pressing concerns. While traveling on a night train from Budapest to Brasov we left Hungary at Lokoshaza. The Hungarian border officials who boarded our train carriage had a heated conversation with a man in the berth beside us. From what we could understand, the man was extremely inebriated, to the point where he became uncooperative with the officials. He had trouble producing his passport or communicating in anything other than drunken words. I felt for sure that he might get taken off the train, but the officials decided to let the man become someone else’s problem.

That someone else turned out to be the Romanian border officials at Curtici. Rather than belligerence, the Romanians were met with loud music. The man refused to open the door of his berth. Whether he was ignoring them or could not hear their full throated demands to open the door, I have no idea. There was a good chance that he had passed out. Border personnel were eventually able to access the berth, but only after a great deal of rancor. The increasingly noisy activity did not bode well for getting a good night’s rest. Rather than looking out the window as I usually do during border stops, I was consumed by the drama occurring in the berth beside of ours. The Romanian officers demanded that the man, who turned out to be Ukrainian, produce his passport. From what I could ascertain, this was impossible since he had passed out.

After several minutes marked by a series of increasingly firm demands, the passenger was awakened from his sozzled slumber. He was in no shape to be cooperative or coherent. At this point the officials began to bark orders at him. This dressing down went on for quite some time and was punctuated by one official shouting, “You don’t come into Romania drunk.” This did not elicit a reply, perhaps because the passenger was already in Romania and would likely be there for some time in one state or another. Not that he had any idea where he was. From what I could understand, the officials finally procured and stamped the man’s passport. After they left, the man must have fallen back into a dead drunk sleep. Never to be heard or seen from again, at least not by us.

The First & Last Stop- Curtici Railway Station

Back To The Future – A Return to Curtici

It was a strangely unsettling experience, one that kept us from realizing we were in Curtici. I never saw the railway station or even knew it existed until reading about it in O’Sullivan’s work. Only then did I realize that I had been within a stone’s throw of it for over an hour. Of course, on that occasion I was deeply distracted. This makes me want to revisit Curtici railway station during the light of day and better understand its role in facilitating travel across borders. I want to wander around the station and soak in the atmosphere of a place that acts as a dividing line between east and west, countries and cultures, history and mystery.