--- title: "#AboutBotoshine" --- # #AboutBotoshine ## The border that told us everything from the beginning **Initial title: From Primăverii to the Theatre, with Four Children and a Notebook of Grievances** *A July walk through a small Romanian city, or on how a town deflates beneath the feet of its own children* --- [![The border that told us everything from the beginning](https://cojocarupetru.info/images/AI-o-unealta/piste-bici2.jpg "The border that told us everything from the beginning")](https://cojocarupetru.info/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=467:the-border-from-the-beginning&catid=9:aboutbotoshine&lang=en-GB&Itemid=122)We set off at about half past five in the afternoon. The hour was chosen because, in July, Botoșani[^1] has two faces and neither belongs to it: at midday the tarmac breathes like a frying pan left on a switched-off hob, while late in the evening, around nine, a false quiet settles in, of the sort in which every car that passes down Strada Primăverii seems to be crossing your sitting room. Half past five was, as my father used to put it, the hour at which "the sun packs up its tools". He spoke of the sun as though of a workshop colleague finishing his shift, and those words come back to me every time I decide to leave the house in summer. My father was a car mechanic and he had his own way of measuring the world: in spanners, in stroke, in millimetres of play. A great many fragments of this vocabulary have dissolved into the way I look at cities. The millimetres I sometimes look for in the kerbs of Botoșani's cycle infrastructure. I don't find them, but that's a separate conversation, and one I'll come to soon enough. We had agreed to start out from my flat on Strada Primăverii and walk, at a Sunday-afternoon pace, to the Mihai Eminescu Theatre.[^2] It wasn't Sunday; it was a plain Wednesday. But we each had one reason more to go, and several reasons fewer. The one reason more was a play we wanted to reach early, to secure good seats on the left of the auditorium where the acoustics swallow less. The reasons fewer were, in turn, the fatigue, the humidity in the air, a piece of political news that had spoilt the morning for all of us, and, further down, a refusal to take the car once more for less than two kilometres. That, I think, was the initial decision from which the rest flowed: a small form of resistance, in which I did not want to contribute yet another vehicle to the already thick air of the town. The friends arrived one by one. Andrei with Ilinca, his daughter of eleven, holding a skateboard she is not allowed to ride in the places she would like to ride it. Mihai with Tudor, a tall boy of thirteen, already almost one metre seventy, with an adolescent's stride. And Cristi with Sara, ten years old, her hair caught up in a high ponytail, on a folding bicycle she guards as she would an exotic object. The fourth pair was me and V., my son, sixteen years old, who over the last month has grown again so that his trousers now sit short on his ankles. I saw him each evening at supper, and yet that growth I only registered on stepping out into the street, when I looked at him properly and was startled, as though only now was I seeing him as he was. Four men between forty and fifty, four children between ten and sixteen, eight pairs of shoes of eight different kinds and eight different walking rhythms. These were, in short, the conditions of an urban design experiment which no designer in Botoșani appeared to have anticipated. [Lees meer...](https://cojocarupetru.info/aboutbotoshine/the-border-from-the-beginning.md) ## A Study in Style — Permission to Decide, or: The Lingering Scar That Doesn't Show > This is not a good piece of reportage, nor a successful literary essay. It is a stylistic exercise that takes a banal local news item — revealing precisely because of its simplicity — and smothers it under layers of literature. Rather than letting the facts and the quotation speak for themselves, the author intervenes obsessively with his own voice, his own metaphors. The result is a text that takes itself very seriously but, on cool analysis, looks more like a selfie than a genuine contribution to understanding Romanian public administration. The conference room of the Botoșani County Council smells of cold coffee and air conditioning. The natural-wood chairs are upholstered in blue velvet with small stars; the edges are not worn, they look cared for. On the table, a few glasses of water that nobody has touched. Outside, on Cuza Vodă Street, an overloaded lorry rumbles past unlawfully and makes the windows tremble. Valeriu Iftime is speaking. His statements often seem improvised, assembled more loosely than the standard official communiqué. He circles back to ideas, introduces additional explanation, and talks in a way that feels close to ordinary conversation. He speaks less like a traditional politician and more like an entrepreneur. His sentences are plain, free of bureaucratic padding. He has, in general, no taste for the technical or the academic. He prefers to carry ideas through experience and common sense. In his public remarks you also notice references to people, to community, to responsibility. This vocabulary belongs more to management than to traditional political rhetoric. If his style could be summed up in a phrase, Valeriu Iftime's manner of speaking might be described as: direct, conversational, pragmatic, results-oriented, shaped strongly by management culture, and relatively light on formal political language. He is not, as a rule, a solemn or ceremonious speaker. He tries to come across as approachable and genuine, even if the expression is sometimes less than rigorous by the standards of rhetoric. He has been speaking for a while. His is the voice of a man accustomed to occupying a room's acoustic space, to furnishing it with words until silence becomes impossible. The journalists are making notes. Some are filming. Others listen with that particular variety of professional attention that resembles sleeping with one's eyes open. And then he says something. He says something that makes one person in the room smile, then another, and suddenly the whole room vibrates with that suppressed, discreet laughter — the kind that anyone who has ever lived inside a system and dared to think for themselves will instantly recognise. Iftime is telling a story about Cristian Nistor. [Lees meer...](https://cojocarupetru.info/aboutbotoshine/permission-to-decide.md) ## Why Do Politicians Need Advertising? **A Global Reckoning With the Industry of Political Image-Making** --- There is a question that the Romanian writer Cristian Stăncescu poses three times in a single short text, each repetition heavier than the last: *Why do politicians need advertising?* He does not ask it once in order to receive an answer. He asks it three times in order to force the reader to feel the full weight of the absurdity. The first iteration is almost naïve — a genuine query about democratic logic. The second is ironic. The third is an accusation. And by the time we reach the end of his text, we understand that the question was never looking for an answer. It was the answer. [![Why Do Politicians Need Advertising?](https://cojocarupetru.info/images/Botosani-sound/nimic-en.jpg "Why Do Politicians Need Advertising?")](https://cojocarupetru.info/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=436:politicians-advertising&catid=44:aboutbotoshine&lang=en-GB&Itemid=528)That text, born in the context of Botoșani — a city in north-eastern Romania, population roughly 100,000, blessed with history and burdened by the familiar provincial neglect of post-communist governance — turns out to be something far larger than a local editorial grievance. It is a prism. What it refracts, once you hold it up to the light, is a global crisis of democratic legitimacy that researchers, regulators, philosophers and ordinary citizens are wrestling with from Washington to Warsaw, from São Paulo to Seoul. This essay attempts that refraction. Starting from a local provocation, I want to trace the global architecture of political advertising — what it has become, how much it costs, who benefits, what it conceals, and why, in every democracy that has allowed it to metastasise unchecked, it has done the same damage to the same things: trust, accountability, and the basic social contract between those who govern and those who are governed. --- **The Democratic Premise and Its Perversion** Representative democracy operates on an elegant and morally satisfying logic: citizens delegate authority to elected representatives, those representatives govern on their behalf, and at the end of a defined term, citizens evaluate the results and decide whether to renew or revoke the mandate. The whole architecture of democratic accountability rests on this feedback loop. Political advertising, in its modern form, is an instrument designed to interrupt, distort and ultimately short-circuit that loop. It does so not by lying outright — though it certainly does that — but by replacing the substance of governance with the performance of governance. What matters is no longer what has been built, reformed or protected, but whether the impression of having built, reformed or protected something can be sustained long enough to survive the next electoral cycle. The image supplants the deed. The brand displaces the record. [Lees meer...](https://cojocarupetru.info/aboutbotoshine/politicians-advertising.md) ## They waited for the event to pass—for time itself to pass without being consumed by them A stop at the end of June, ten in the evening. [![Project The Last Bus](https://cojocarupetru.info/images/Botosani-sound/station-bus2.jpg "Project The Last Bus")](https://cojocarupetru.info/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=438:project-the-last-bus&catid=44:aboutbotoshine&lang=en-GB&Itemid=528) --- **I hear them before I see them.** Two male voices, that particular tone of men discussing something important out of doors, at the hour when the city cools and conversation becomes wider than the day has permitted. One of them is gesticulating — I can see him now, they have reached a street lamp — his right hand tracing something in the air, an arc, perhaps the route of a bus, perhaps the surface of a solar panel, perhaps simply the magnitude of a number. Sixty-four, I hear distinctly. Sixty-four electric buses. This is the project. I have heard it mentioned before — in local news, in the council's Facebook posts, in the queue at the chemist's. A European project, non-reimbursable funds, charging infrastructure, real-time information panels, emissions reduction, complete modernisation of urban transport. The figures are large and round and luminous. Sixty-four. The two men have stopped exactly beside the shelter, two metres from the concrete plinth with its cable wrapped in black insulating tape. They do not see it, or if they see it, they do not look at it. They look at each other and talk about the future, which in their imagination is already the present: silent buses gliding through streets, passengers with the app on their phones knowing to the second when the next service comes, cleaner air, a more vibrant city. One of them — the one gesticulating — is a man of perhaps fifty, jacket thrown over his shoulder in the evening heat, tie loosened. He speaks with the conviction of someone who has read the documents, who may even have attended a meeting. The other listens, agrees, asks short questions. Both smile slightly, with the smile of people sharing good news. [Lees meer...](https://cojocarupetru.info/aboutbotoshine/project-the-last-bus.md) ## I prefer shorter summaries The cold comes first. Before you see anything, before you read the station's name on the freshly painted sign, the cold finds you — a May evening cold, not the brutal, declarative cold of January, but something more insidious: the cold of a night that has not yet decided whether to become summer. It seeps through the new glass of the waiting room, through the renovated walls still smelling of emulsion paint and institutional ambition. I pull my jacket tighter and watch. The platform is empty. Not the emptiness of a station between trains — something more absolute, more settled. The emptiness of a terminus. This is the end of the line, in the most literal administrative sense: a provincial town in the north of Moldova, a town whose railway exists because someone, decades ago, signed a decree. The track stops here. Beyond the buffers, there is only field and the darkening sky above the plain. The station has been renovated. This must be said, because in Romania it is not a trivial matter. The walls are the colour of a governmental idea about cheerfulness — pale yellow, the yellow of cheap margarine. The floor tiles are large and white and still clean, which means the renovation is recent. The ceiling lights are LED, and they hum slightly, that modern hum which is not quite sound and not quite silence but which occupies the room like a low-grade anxiety. There is NO mural painted on the eastern wall: a locomotive, hills, and something meant to be optimistic, rendered in the municipality's colors. It's not ugly. Effort DOES move you, if you let it. I sit on a bench and wait for something to happen. [Lees meer...](https://cojocarupetru.info/aboutbotoshine/i-prefer-shorter-summaries.md) ## On selective modernisation, uninstalled bus shelters, and the citizen as spectator of their own governance. Citizens and... Others! *"A city's infrastructure is not a technical problem. It is a statement of intent towards its citizens."* — Street observation, Botoșani, 2026 --- > **Citizens and... Others!** Yesterday, the mayor of Botoșani municipality, whilst unveiling the new electric buses[![On selective modernisation, uninstalled bus shelters, and the citizen as spectator of their own governance.](https://cojocarupetru.info/images/AI-o-unealta/resized_autobuze-electrice2.jpg "On selective modernisation, uninstalled bus shelters, and the citizen as spectator of their own governance.")](https://cojocarupetru.info/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=456:selective-modernisation&catid=44:aboutbotoshine&lang=en-GB&Itemid=528) on which the dear citizens of Botoșani will henceforth be able to travel — on routes 101 and 102 only — announced that development is continuing! Routes 101 and 102 were perfectly adequate before, between ourselves! I spent the whole night on tenterhooks [*translator's note: the Romanian idiom is "ca pe ace" — literally "as if on needles," equivalent to "on tenterhooks" or "on pins and needles"*], kept awake by the World Cup matches, thinking about the journey I would make the following morning. Half past seven. The stop at "La Cornișa" [*"The Cornice" — a local landmark name attached to a Chinese goods shop, itself a small marker of post-communist provincial commerce*]. A green bus was just pulling away. Smart. New! I decided to take the Number 3 instead. Red. Dusty. It draws up. I climb aboard: the door tied shut with a piece of string, inside — an oven! The ticket: four lei [*approximately 80 pence or one US dollar at current exchange rates*]. — "Could you put the air conditioning on?" I venture. The driver presses something. The window on the right goes down a little. Inside... a picture of misery! I alight at the "End of Line 1" stop — a thoroughly modern stop, as can be seen from the photograph. A few steps further along, another stop, equally "modernised." "We continue... the non-installation!" That is what the campaign ought to be called. Ahh, if only they'd had a majority on the Local Council [*translator's note: the "Consiliul Local" is the municipal deliberative body, directly elected, with authority over service contracts and public expenditure*] — what oversight they would have exercised, what penalties they would have written into the service contract, which runs until 2028, what... anything! Forgive me! *They do* have the majority on the Local Council! Well, they won't be invited to the businessmen's galas! Citizens? Some are pleased (on routes 101 and 102), others...! We continue the non-installation! — *Cristian Stăncescu* --- [Lees meer...](https://cojocarupetru.info/aboutbotoshine/selective-modernisation.md) ## On yield, public ownership, and the art of caring for what is not yours. The Building Stirs. Management Sleeps. *"Men care less for what they hold in common with others than for their own concerns."* — Aristotle, *Politics*, Book II --- > **Yield.** "This building isn't performing! We should sell it!" Wrong.[![On yield, public ownership, and the art of caring for what is not yours.](https://cojocarupetru.info/images/AI-o-unealta/resized_cladire-valoare2a.jpg "On yield, public ownership, and the art of caring for what is not yours.")](https://cojocarupetru.info/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=458:what-is-not-yours&catid=44:aboutbotoshine&lang=en-GB&Itemid=528) It is your management of this building — and of other buildings in the municipality and across the county — that is not performing. You and those you work with, your so-called "team", are either incompetent or acting in bad faith. The building stirs. It is waiting to be brought to life, to receive working people, to shelter them — warmth in winter, cool in summer, protection from wind and rain. What must decision-makers do? It is simple: think about every action concerning public assets and liabilities as though those assets belonged to you personally — cherish them, develop them. What stops them? Pride, self-interest, friendships and the party. No — not the party! The party never takes responsibility. — *Cristian Stăncescu* **[Translator's note — the source text]***Cristian Stăncescu is a Romanian civil society commentator who publishes short, polemical observations on public administration, political culture and civic life — typically under 200 words, in the tradition of the Romanian journalistic "notă" (brief note). "Randament" — the Romanian word used as the title of the original piece — translates literally as "yield" or "return on investment", but carries a specific administrative register in Romanian: it is the language used by public managers when they declare assets unproductive and recommend disposal. Stăncescu turns the word back on the managers themselves.* --- **The concrete scene: a building and an inverted diagnosis.** Sometimes a short sentence cuts deeper than a hundred-page report. Stăncescu is not writing a case study. He is writing a correction — rapid, clear, almost violent in its precision. The first word of his response is decisive: *Wrong.* Not a qualification, not a polite amendment, but a complete reversal of the diagnosis. The problem is not the building. The problem is the person who framed the problem. [Lees meer...](https://cojocarupetru.info/aboutbotoshine/what-is-not-yours.md) ## Who choose to leave the house - Oh, there's nothing to do in this Botoșani of ours! [![Provincial towns, and who choose to leave the house - Oh, there's nothing to do in this Botoșani of ours!](https://cojocarupetru.info/images/AI-o-unealta/nu-ai-ce-face2.jpg "Provincial towns, and who choose to leave the house - Oh, there's nothing to do in this Botoșani of ours!")](https://cojocarupetru.info/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=462:nothing-to-do-in-this&catid=44:aboutbotoshine&lang=en-GB&Itemid=528)From the Armchair to the Hour of Magic: Habit as a Form of Knowing. *An essay on attention, provincial towns, and the people who choose to leave the house.* --- > *"Ernu excavated the everyday, Teodorescu articulated the province, Lungu ironised inertia, Braniște photographed the interior void. Neill maintained a habit, Collins measured a flywheel, Clear mapped a mechanism, Sullivan observed a shift in attention. Each saw the same thing through a different window."* --- **Where This Begins — Or: How a Man in an Armchair Wrote a Manifesto Without Meaning To** Before I write anything of my own, I need to give the floor to someone else. Cristian Stăncescu published a short text on cojocarupetru.info — something between a Friday evening diary entry and an inadvertent provocation. It carries no philosophical pretensions. It cites no one. It is simply the account of a man who went out and found something there. I reproduce it here in translation, because it is the foundation on which everything that follows rests. --- > *"Oh, there's nothing to do in this Botoșani of ours!" — How many times have you heard that? Do you say it yourself? Let me ask in return: what are you doing to have something to do in Botoșani? Sitting in the armchair, watching your favourite series, waiting for something to happen — a miracle, perhaps — that's unlikely to work. You searched online for something you were interested in, didn't find it, and gave up, didn't you?* > > *Go out. Walk around. Step into a café. Find the shade of a terrace. Socialise. You'll discover there's a public speaking and leadership club — Toastmasters Botoșani. You'll find that people gather at the "La Mâțe" café to discuss ideas and meditate, not merely to order coffee. You'll learn you can play backgammon and chess in the park, that you can learn to dance and feel the rhythm of Latin American music in your body, that you can learn to paint, to sing, to sew, to... Everything begins with wanting to step outside your little box.* > > *Today I accepted an invitation. At 18:45, I was at the place where the Piața Volantă — the Flying Market — takes place every Sunday. Irina Ghilian welcomed me and led me into a beautiful, warm, welcoming room. Some of the exhibits sat quietly in their places, ready to be admired and tried. Others were still finding their spot on the tables. Everything was arranged thoughtfully, by category.* > > *The presentation began, and for me, the hour of magic began. Amway products, marketing programmes, water purification systems, supplements, vitamins... "I've shed fifteen years off myself!" I closed my eyes. What would it be like to shed fifteen years off myself? I became more attentive.* > > *— How do you wash your fruit and vegetables? What products do you use?* > > *— What water do you drink?* > > *The demonstrations and explanations began. Did you know there are varieties of cherry grown exclusively for their vitamin C content? Acerola cherries! I felt like I was watching Teleenciclopedia. You know that feeling — when you don't want it to end?* > > *I looked around the room and asked myself: where are all the people from Botoșani who say there's nothing to do here?*" > > **— Cristian Stăncescu** --- That is Stăncescu's. From here, the text is mine. Not because he gets anything wrong — quite the opposite. But good texts do what good doors do: they open and stop at the threshold. What follows is an attempt to step through. [Lees meer...](https://cojocarupetru.info/aboutbotoshine/nothing-to-do-in-this.md) ## On the need to be useful and respected within one's own community If Nobody Says Good Morning to You *Translated and adapted from the Romanian by the author. Cultural notes appear inline where necessary for an international reader.* --- **The Scene[![On the need to be useful and respected within one's own community](https://cojocarupetru.info/images/AI-o-unealta/util-si-respectat2.jpg "On the need to be useful and respected within one's own community")](https://cojocarupetru.info/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=464:need-to-be-useful&catid=44:aboutbotoshine&lang=en-GB&Itemid=528)** It was March 1965, the Great Lent was under way, and Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej had died.[^1] Lică[^2] was eleven years old and had come home from school in tears. Not genuine tears — he was crying from fear, from imitation, from the dull pressure a regime exerts on children through teachers and classmates and the general atmosphere of a day that demanded grief. At home, his father — a man with calloused hands and the word-economy characteristic of his generation — looked at him for a moment and slapped him. Not hard. But precisely. "Don't cry for nothing. That man never wept with us over our dead on the bier."[^3] Then he set him to work making small baskets. Little things, woven from thin scalded reed, with a single handle — nothing more. Their size was calculated for the food carried to church to be blessed on the eve of a feast.[^4] The work was not difficult, but it required attention: the reed had to be scalded for exactly the right amount of time, or it would snap when bent; the handle had to be firm without being inelegant. It was craft, not chore. Lică's father did not explain further. He said one sentence: *"Be useful, so the village knows you."* And that was the whole philosophy of the day. I have thought of that scene every time I heard the saying that Lică remembered from a great-great-grandparent — a man whose name even Lică could no longer recall precisely: *"If you set out in the morning and nobody says Good Morning to you, you might as well not have woken up."* It is not an aphorism. It is not a school maxim. It is an observation pulled directly from the texture of rural communal life, without philosophical pretension, yet with a precision that any philosopher might envy. [^1]: **Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej** (1901–1965) was the Communist leader of Romania from 1947 until his death. His passing on 19 March 1965 was the occasion for state-mandated public mourning — schools, workplaces, and public institutions were expected to perform visible grief. He was succeeded by Nicolae Ceaușescu, under whose dictatorship Romania remained until 1989. [^2]: **Lică** is an informal Romanian diminutive of the name Lica or Vasile, common in rural northern Moldova (the historical region in north-eastern Romania, not to be confused with the neighbouring Republic of Moldova). It signals affection and familiarity. [^3]: **"Dead on the bier"** (*morții de pe năsălie*): the bier is the wooden frame on which a coffin is carried to church and to the cemetery. In Romanian Orthodox village tradition, the community gathers for the entire funeral process, which can last several days. The father's point is stark: the party leader had never shared in their real losses, so no real tears were owed. [^4]: **Food blessed at church** (*mâncare de ajun dusă la sfințit*): in Romanian Orthodox practice, certain feast days — particularly those during the Great Lent and around Christmas and Easter — involve bringing food to church for a blessing before it is eaten. The baskets carrying this food are small, carefully made objects that pass through a ritual circuit: from home, to the altar, back to the table. They are simultaneously practical and sacred. [Lees meer...](https://cojocarupetru.info/aboutbotoshine/need-to-be-useful.md) ## Let's celebrate the visible investments and ignore the absence of the invisible ones — the railway, the expressway, real digital connectivity **End of the Line: How a Romanian Town Lost Two Trade Routes and Gained a Railway Station. [![Let's celebrate the visible investments and ignore the absence of the invisible ones — the railway, the expressway, real digital connectivity](https://cojocarupetru.info/images/Botosani-sound/nationala-bt2.jpg "Let's celebrate the visible investments and ignore the absence of the invisible ones — the railway, the expressway, real digital connectivity")](https://cojocarupetru.info/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=466:the-railway-the-expressway&catid=44:aboutbotoshine&lang=en-GB&Itemid=528)***Being a chronicle of five centuries of commercial geography, one catastrophic infrastructure decision, and a tunnel that has never carried a single passenger* --- *Editor's note for international readers: Botoșani (pronounced approximately boh-toh-SHAN) is a city of roughly 80,000 to 90,000 people in north-eastern Romania, close to the borders with Ukraine and the Republic of Moldova. It sits in the historical region of Moldavia — not to be confused with the independent Republic of Moldova to its east. For most of the medieval period, it was one of the most important commercial hubs in south-eastern Europe. Most people outside Romania have never heard of it. This is, in part, what this article is about.* --- Begin with what is known. In November 1871, the railway arrives. It arrives and does not quite arrive. It reaches Leorda, hesitates, then pushes on to Botoșani. Forty-four kilometres of track from the junction at Verești. End of the line. The station building is designed by a local engineer named Elie Radu — a Botoșani man who had built bridges and roads across half the country. He designs his own city's station with his own hand. He builds, in other words, the architectural monument to its own marginalisation. Small irony. No moral attached. The town celebrates. Naturally. Only a certain Armenian merchant — call him Hagigian, for the name matters less than the gesture — a certain Armenian merchant with a cloth shop in the old commercial quarter stands in his doorway and watches the locomotive with an unease he cannot name. He is not against progress. He is not a fool. He is simply a man who knows that his goods arrive from one direction and depart in another, and that this locomotive does not serve either. [Lees meer...](https://cojocarupetru.info/aboutbotoshine/the-railway-the-expressway.md)