Infrastructure and cross-border meetings in Giurgiu – Ruse. View from the bridge

Smaranda Șchiopu, Antropedia, 12 September 2024

A weekend stroll in the north-eastern Bulgarian Danube port of Ruse, either in the center or along the Danube on the concrete embankment, recently landscaped with EU funds, will bring out couples, groups of friends or families, with or without children, loudly speaking in Romanian, visibly outnumbering the local population. They stroll up and down the pedestrian streets in the city center, take photos in front of the Monument of Liberty or in front of the pastel pink or green art nouveau buildings on Alexandrovska Street, buy ice cream, stand in line at their favorite restaurants, Happy or Chiflika, go in and out of shops. Visitors come from the neighboring town of Giurgiu and the surrounding villages. It takes them less than an hour to get here, and about an hour back. Outside the summer season, it’s easier to get here than Bucharest, and once they arrive, they’re welcomed as tourists, unlike their provincial neighbors. It’s not very expensive to do a day trip to Ruse, but you need to have a car, or at least a motorbike or a bicycle as there is no public transportation.

To get here, walkers (and everyone else transiting the Balkans for various reasons) have to cross the Danube, the natural border between Bulgaria and Romania, on the imposing Danube Bridge, better known as the Friendship Bridge. On its 70th anniversary in 2024, the bridge is outdated, overcrowded and in need of frequent repairs. Until ten years ago, it was the only bridge between Bulgaria and Romania along the Danube, separating them for more than 600 km. Situated near the border towns of Giurgiu in Romania and Ruse in Bulgaria, the bridge dominates the Danube landscape in the area and is a link between southern and western Europe. 

For my dissertation to complete a Master’s degree in Anthropology, I asked myself how this connection translates into the reality of the people on the border. Armed with readings in the theory of infrastructural anthropology, I spent a few weeks in Giurgiu and Ruse to try to understand how the intentions with which an infrastructure project is built intersect with the reality in which it ends up operating. If the purpose of a bridge is to connect, what effects does this connection produce and how is it imagined and materialized? What practices of connection have the people living near the Friendship Bridge created? And why do we call it that, what is friendship about?

A state-of-the-art structure from the 1950s, the bridge has two levels: the upper level serves automobile traffic and the lower level serves the rail network. From end to end, it measures just over two kilometers of steel, stone and a lot of manpower. It was the first modern bridge across the Lower Danube between Bulgaria and Romania, two countries often rivals during their formation as sovereign states and during the two world wars. The first diplomatic talks about a bridge between them came shortly before, however, when the Ottoman Empire was contemplating building railways to central and western Europe as a modernization necessity. For that, it would have needed a bridge across the Danube. But it wasn’t to be. Not until the second half of the 20th century.

After the Second World War, both Bulgaria and Romania found themselves in a socialist camp under the supervision of the Soviet Union. The ideological and economic patron, the Soviet Union, provided financial assistance and technical expertise to strengthen harmonious relations between its satellites, and its contributions to major infrastructure projects are not to be neglected. By pooling additional financial aid and technological support from all its satellite states, the USSR has built networks of protection and loyalty throughout the Eastern region. The idea of building a bridge across the Danube between the two newly-communist states was back on the negotiating table. The bridge would have enhanced economic collaboration between the two countries and would have allowed Bulgaria in particular to trade and communicate more easily with the USSR, as well as with the Eastern bloc beyond Romania.

Several agreements between Bulgaria, Romania and the USSR, through the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance, a financial support mechanism for the socialist states, formed the ideological foundation of the Danube Bridge. Construction began in 1952 and was completed ahead of schedule in 1954, but not without extensive human cost on both sides. In Romania, the communist party seized the opportunity to exemplify its policy of social and ideological re-organization through infrastructure: it decreed the evacuation of undesirable communities, i.e. landowners and small traders, from the area to other parts of the country, and brought in the workers, technicians, engineers, who built the bridge, changing the demography of the region altogether.

The bridge brought many firsts in the construction industry of the two countries: the mechanization of work, the construction of a concrete factory, the development of the machine-building industry, as well as the rapid qualification of further specialization of workers under the instruction of Soviet engineers, achievements praised in the newspaper Scînteia on the day of the bridge’s inauguration. 

On June 20, 1954, delegates from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and the USSR, together with Romanian and Bulgarian officials, celebrated the new construction for a whole day with pomp and speeches. The Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, praised the hard work and expertise of the teams of workers from both countries, the desire to contribute to the higher goal of strengthening the socialist movement, and made no less than ten references to the Romanian-Bulgarian friendship and brotherhood. From the outset, the Danube Bridge was mythologized as a facilitator of economic and cultural exchanges, though details of what these exchanges would look like in practice were lacking. Only Bulgarian Communist Party leader Valko Chervenkov’s speech in passing mentioned the bridge’s potential to facilitate not only trade, but also people’s travel by rail or car. The main purpose of the bridge, judging by the policy envisaged at the time, was to be a bearer of friendship and peacemaker, a symbol uniting not only Bulgaria and Romania, but the entire socialist bloc. By virtue of its body, a collection of materials from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and the USSR, the bridge became the concrete archetype of socialist Europe, which was making its place on the international stage as an example of harmonious ‘multilateral cooperation’, aspiring to economic development and peace-building, against the ‘capitalist world torn by deep contradictions’, ruthlessly driven by American interests towards armament and exploitation.

The Soviet Union’s oversight and influence was both material and symbolic, and the bridge became an expression of the political thinking of the time. As well as contributing to the development of the socialist countries’ industries, the bridge was also a guarantee of respect for state borders and symbolically embodied the cooperation of the two countries, which pledged to put behind them any territorial or other disputes they might have had in the past. By adorning the bridge in the garb of friendship, the two countries agreed that their entire border was secure.

The politics of friendship thus established through the Danube bridge were meant to flow from the top down, from high-level collaborative policies to everyday life. However, it took two decades for the first cross-border collaborative project that the two countries undertook together: joint industrial equipment factories were to be set up in Giurgiu and Ruse in 1977, based on a jointly developed manufacturing process, which would produce drilling and mining, metallurgical and petrochemical plants, all essential to the industrialization processes of both countries. In the late 1980s, however, it was also a factory that was to shake up inter-state friendship. A chemical plant built near Giurgiu began emitting chlorine toxins and, due to the direction of the wind, the noxious gases traveled south, crossed the Danube and settled in Ruse.

My interlocutors from Ruse, still remember the time when Giurgiu “poisoned Ruse” (VA). They also remembered that, as children at that time, their parents forced them to wear protective masks, which they saw yellow with toxins when they took them off. But my interviewees also recalled that the poison gas also provoked the first protests against the city authorities, who ignored people’s complaints. Some of my interlocutors saw in these protests the maturing of a civil society that was trying to demonstrate against the authoritarian communist regime. After the collapse of the regime in 1989 in both countries, the protests in Ruse even reached the Danube bridge.

But the connection provided by the bridge was more disrupted, especially in the 1980s, when border crossings were heavily monitored and controlled by the authorities. Residents within a 30km radius of the border could travel to neighboring countries with a special ticket, as AP, VM and AV remember their parents doing before 1989.

The border opened up with the fall of communism in socialist countries, making it easier not only to travel, but also to migrate to southern or western Europe, sometimes even to the neighboring country. AV’s family, for example, moved from Ruse to Bucharest for a few years when his father found a job there. During those years he built strong ties with Romania, learned the language, later became a translator and married a Romanian citizen with whom he now lives in Ruse. In 2007, with the accession of Bulgaria and Romania to the European Union, the border was opened a second time to include all ID card holders, no passports were needed. What’s more, the right to work and settle in any EU country that came with membership encouraged many Bulgarians and Romanians to emigrate. Otopeni airport thus became a transit hub for Bulgarians from north-eastern Bulgaria, being so close.

This permeabilization of the border not only increased migration, but also led to the emergence of day-trips and day-trips to the neighbouring country, as well as cheaper shopping across the border. My friends’ weekend trips to Ruse were the order of the day, the sushi at the Happy restaurant had spread the word at a time when there were still not many restaurants in Bucharest serving “exotic” food.

In the literature, border studies note that shopping in the neighboring country is often one of the most common experiences that characterize living near a border, and travel directions are often in search of lower prices or a wider variety of products. Many of my Romanian interlocutors from Giurgiu mentioned in our conversations that they went to Ruse every week for cheaper products (cigarettes, cleaning products, food). For some of them, even the trip to the gas station immediately after the Bulgarian border controls to buy cheaper bulk tobacco is worth the drive, the bridge toll and the identity checks both ways. But don’t just go shopping. Ruse also offers more entertainment options: opera, movie theaters and live music venues.

By comparison, cultural life in Giurgiu is limited to a theater, which is quite active, and a few restaurants and bars. There is no movie theater in the city, and some young people complain that there is no bar with decent music (i.e. rock music).

In general, people in Giurgiu hold local and national officials responsible for the dilapidated state of their city, all the more so when they know that the EU funds they receive, whether for regional or cross-border development, do not seem to affect their well-being much. When asked about cross-border cooperation, residents of both cities are quick to note its absence. They point to two basic ways for improvement, which can also contribute to regional development: the abolition of the bridge toll of about three euros per crossing for residents of both cities/counties and public transportation between Giurgiu and Ruse; neither of these is on the political horizon.

Despite the frequent trips across the bridge to and from the neighboring country, and the frequent visits Romanians make to Ruse, or vice versa, relations between Bulgarians and Romanians in the border areas rarely go beyond the transactional. Geographical proximity in this case leaves no room for cultural proximity. Although Romanians in Ruse are often greeted with menus and sentences in Romanian, the reverse situation is much less common, despite the memories of the eighteenth century when those living near the border “caught Bulgarians” on TV and managed to catch and remember a few words. Today, English is the language of the day in these places where alphabets divide deeper than the Danube itself. Although it is a common platform for communication, the use of English also emphasizes the cultural distance that comes with shrinking geographical distances. For the first time, I felt acutely aware and ashamed that I was using a ‘distant’ language to communicate with my southern neighbors.

Frequent trips to the neighboring country continue, however, and with them, short-term interactions with neighbors have brought the practice of constant comparison between “us” and “them”. Bulgarians are envious of Romania’s economic development; Romanians flock to Bulgarian seaside resorts, impressed and somewhat disbelieving that their neighbors have managed to bring the tourist industry to higher standards. Conversations about who has done better or worse in international rankings of any kind are common in both countries, as is the relief when one is ahead of the other. AV’s impression of these constant comparisons stayed with me:

“You know, it’s nice to have something to aspire to. I think both Bulgarians and Romanians, when they look at each other, have something to aspire to. Romanians say about Bulgarians, ‘their coastline is so beautiful’ and we say ‘Romania is so developed now’ – and it’s all like a mystification, like a veil or a fog that you don’t want to shake. You don’t want to see others who are as weak as you are. You would feel very lost if you saw that.”

On its own, instead of being a tool to strengthen cross-border relations, the bridge ends up supporting practices that end up further emphasizing differences by keeping citizens of both countries in a constant state of comparison: we are here, they are there. The over-glorified friendship of the day the bridge opened has turned into a competition, who does better or worse at the imposed benchmarks. The permeability of the border and the existence of the infrastructure that secures it have thus created an imaginary hierarchical ladder, subject to dynamic benchmarks, depending on which metric the comparisons are aimed at. People find ways of looking in the mirror that is the other country, comparing themselves with others and thus using them as barometers for their own place in the world.

Photo: The Danube Bridge – view from the port of Giurgiu (source: Smaranda Șchiopu)

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