I’m at the central market of Chişinău – the Rynok, as they call it here. A rough, authentic name that carries the scent of times past. I walk among the stalls with the same reverence one might show in a popular cathedral. Markets always give me a sense of joy: life pulses here, mingles, is exchanged. It’s not like supermarkets, where everything is ordered and cold. Here, among voices, colors, and smells, humanity is encountered.
At this time of year, almost everyone sells the same things: strawberries, tomatoes, apples, pears. Turkish citrus fruits. The strawberries – perhaps greenhouse-grown – seem to promise summer. And I already know I’ll give in to temptation: I’ll buy a basket for breakfast, maybe for dinner. There’s something comforting in that gesture. Just like in life, I’m looking for something I haven’t found yet. A fruit, a dream. Perhaps it will come in June, who knows. Mulberries – Sholkovitsa, here – those fragile fruits that stain your fingers and your memory.
But it’s not the full, abundant stalls that strike me. It’s rather the improvised ones, outside the market boundaries. Makeshift tables, street corners, where an old babushka sells three jars of honey, a few bundles of herbs – perhaps all she owns. Not to earn, but to survive. To supplement a pension barely enough to breathe. Behind those weathered faces lie stories no longer told. A world that no longer interests anyone.
Today, Chişinău shines with a new, Western-style opulence. Large SUVs, elegant cafés, boutiques. But the contrast with these marginal figures is violent, almost cruel. They are the forgotten of history. People swept away by a revolution they didn’t choose. They endured the change but reaped none of its rewards. They remained, stuck in a time that no longer exists. They live in a memory with no citizenship. A memory that walks slowly, hunched over, with a bag of onions or a pouch of walnuts.
So many silent victims, so many lives sacrificed behind the promises of wealth and wellbeing. I don’t just feel sympathy for them: I feel a deep kinship. Right now, I feel close to them, as if I too were one of those forgotten by history.
Not because of material poverty, but because of exclusion. Because they too, like me, have been left behind by a story that no longer names them. A story that once spoke of family, that once spoke of fathers. A story now written in my absence. And I, like them, remain on the margins: not defeated, but forgotten.
And that is how I feel less alone: part of a humanity that, despite everything, still breathes.