“My wife’s grandfather when he caught a sturgeon and managed to come home with some caviar put a bowl on the table and said “eat now, ‘cause there will be a time when you won’t be able to eat this anymore”. And he was right, those times have already come,” he told BIRN while sitting with guests in his large house in Sfantu Gheorghe.
Sfantu Gheorghe residents. Photo: Courtesy of Natalia Ivanov
The Romanian caviar and the sturgeons caught in the Black Sea are nowadays just memories of a lost glory. Due to overfishing and lack of proper environmental management policies sturgeon in the Danube has become rare, some species are already extinct, and the Romanian government imposed a fishing ban that has lasted for already 15 years, leaving the community in Sfantu Gheorghe to find new ways to survive.
While foreign travelers speak of the meal of the billionaires and the exquisite taste of the delicacy put on the menu of royal weddings and banquets, the beluga and its black caviar has been Sfantu Gheorghe’s blood diamond. While the beluga black caviar from the tiny village in the Danube Delta sold for $75 an ounce in a select restaurant in New York in the 1990s, the fishermen in the small isolated village at the mouth of the Danube struggled for survival.
“Little Venice”
Before World War II, it was Valcov, a town on the northern branch of the Danube, Chilia, the only place in Europe that produced black caviar. The town was first mentioned in documents in 1746, when a group of Lipovans of Russian ethnic origin settled in a deserted village on the Danube bank. In 1812, after the Peace of Bucharest that put an end to a six-year war between the Russian and Ottoman Empires, Russia took over Bessarabia (today’s Moldova) and Valcov with it. It was under Romanian rule during 1918-1940 and 1941-1944, while it was deemed by National ‘s Dorothy Hosmer “the Venice of the Delta”. After World War II, Bessarabia was integrated in the Soviet Union and so was the town on the northern bank of the river branch.
According to several memoirs of Romanian nobility, the local royalty and high society liked caviar on blini, a fluffy pancake made of wheat or buckwheat flour. They were on the menu of the July 1931 wedding of Princess Ileana of Romania with Archduke Anton of Austria. Caviar was also on the menu of several high-end restaurants in Bucharest and surrounding cities.
During his stay in Romania in the mid-1930w, Patrick Leigh Fermor, one of Britain’s most acclaimed travel writers of the 20th century, was amazed to have been served a plate of caviar directly on his knees “slammed with a spoon as if it was mashed potatoes”.
But caviar was not a daily meal for the fishermen and their families; it was more of a special treat they saved for the children so they would not starve when the fish was scarce.
“In fact, during the interwar period, all merchants, who were Greek, took the fish and the caviar,” Efimov explains. “Only the head and the guts remained for the fishermen. You might think “yuk, guts!”. But lamb guts are used for soup, for instance. Well, the sturgeon intestines are really really good. They can be as thick as 2 cm. They’re our delicacy. They used to make soup out of them, the so-called fishermen’s borscht, pies and stews and stuffed bell peppers.”
Fish egg politics
Retired engineer Nichita Timofei, who also served as the head of the sturgeon fishing company for two years after 1990, said that Ukranians brought sturgeon fishing to Sfantu Gheorghe and this has been the main job in the village since the 1700s. “Before their arrival there were only shepherds and sheep here. Fishing was just for household consumption, but never industrial or commercial,” he explains.
Until the communist government turned the village in the center of Romania’s caviar export, the fishermen in the village sold their catch in the fish market in Galati, a harbor up the Danube.
“Money was never valued in these parts. They used to take the fish to the fish market and barter for flour, vegetables, potatoes and other things,” Timofei says. “Well, imagine that with the products a fisherman used to get for a beluga in Galati, a family of four people would live comfortable for a whole winter.”
The Romanian center of caviar production moved to the small village of Sfantu Gheorghe, where, for decades, the local fishery collected the fish and the eggs, packed them and exported most to Western Europe under Soviet label.
The locals survived on pollock and other fish, while in winter they raised cattle.
After 1989, when the country shook the communist regime, the private company that took over the production sold it to a company in Hamburg.
“They took it and packed it and sold it under their label. They took it to Hamburg where the company was and they said it was Iranian caviar from the Caspian Sea,” said Natalia Ivanov, a retired lab worker who prepared the caviar for shipping explained, as she sat in her home in Sfantu Gheorghe looking through old photographs.
Nostalgia of abundance
However, caviar was present on the domestic market during the consumption boom Romania experienced in the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s.
As anthropologist Jill Massino writes in a chapter of Communism Unwrapped: Consumption in Cold War Eastern Europe dedicated to the so-called abundance period in Communist Romania, in the collective memory of Romanians caviar became a symbol of the abundance they had experienced as opposed to the penury of the 1980s.
“In 1963, or whenever [communist leader Nicolae] Ceausescu came to power, until 1970–72, it was a time of blossoming. One began to find everything. One even found black caviar in the grocery stores. You found it by the kilogram,” a Romanian told Massino during her research.
Timofei says that the caviar sold on the domestic market was, however, only “leftovers”.
“Only part of the caviar was sold on the domestic market, the lower quality one, Quality III. Also, the head of the fish was sold domestically. The rest was all sent abroad,” Timofei remembers.
Sfantu Gheorghe residents. Photo: Courtesy of Natalia Ivanov
He also says that caviar and sturgeon was part of the favorite meal of the Communist Party apparatchiks who came to visit the Danube Delta. “When we had these high-ranking guests and we could not serve sturgeon for lunch they said “come on, man1 we did not come here for the flat-fish!”. I don’t think people like that will ever starve for goodies on their table,” he points out.
“I’ve eaten myself sturgeon from a fish farm. I was curious. Cotton! No taste, no God! You chew and you can’t swallow,” he insists. “Until I was 15, even 19, I used to eat myself the caviar with a spoon from a rather large bowl. Not on that tiny blini with butter and other stupid things!”
Dumitrita Holdis and Mira Balan contributed to this story.
This article is the result of “Black Waters – A collaborative investigative journalism project into corruption and the environment” implemented by Balkan Investigative Reporting Network in partnership with Atlatszo and the Center for Media, Data and Society (CMDS), Central European University (CEU) and supported by Open Society Foundation
