Bucharest pricks you. Its sting burns and hurts, almost always leaving a mark, while its bitter poppy seed venom hooks you for life. A city akin to Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s Scorpion King: an unreal, kitschy, jumbled mess from which you cannot look away. 

Awe-inspiring in its contradictions, jaw-dropping in its banality, borderline heartwarming in its quaintness. One can exclaim, as Patrick Keiller’s unnamed narrator does in London (1992): Dirty old Bucharest, “undereducated, economically backward, bizarre. A catalogue of modern miseries with its fake traditions, […] its hatred of intellectuals, its ill health and bad food, its sexual repression, its hypocrisy and racism, and its indolence. It’s so exotic, so home-made”. In Mateiu Caragiale’s posthumous notes, it’s a sweet-scented slum-town, ultimately damned to hell; in Max Blecher’s dream journal, its buildings and avenues appear blood red; in Radu Petrescu’s daily notes, it seems almost crystaline, the sky mingled with its houses; in Mircea Ciobanu’s Histories, it’s a wintry, wolfpack ridden, desolate hellscape, a place where the living unwillingly mix with the dead; in Cristian Popescu’s poems, it is comprised solely of trams, parks, graffiti covered portaloos, cheap pubs, and cemeteries; and in the climax of Mircea Cărtărescu’s Solenoid, it simply floats away, leaving in its wake a gaping pustulent wound on the face of the earth. 

It is the smell of this wound that I most clearly associate with Bucharest. Strangely enough, it appears differently to each one of us. For me, it was the strange fragrance of what seemed to be putrefied dill emanating from a manhole cover near Basarab Station. Every time I walked past that particular spot, the atmosphere would be filled with the obnoxious odour. Why dill? I still don’t know what ghastly circumstances gave rise to a compound with this smell (and I don’t want to know). This surreal encounter jump-started my interest in the city’s contradictions and idiosyncrasies. So I started exploring.

And in my walks, I came across many things: architectural fictions, ghosts, odd markings, codes, and orphaned histories, which were otherwise hidden in plain sight. I trampled through the marshes to secure safe passage to (as yet) unnamed islands, scoured the abandoned industrial complexes for killer plants and signs of UFOs, aimlessly wandered through the suburbs searching for kiosks and other remnants of bygone eras, combed through pulp literature, force-press articles, abandoned forum threads, and expired video links. This journey led me to secluded mosaic-covered warehouses, along abandoned railways, through dilapidated tunnels, trash-filled spillways, and malware-ridden websites. My notes became increasingly chaotic as time went on; filled to the brim with observations, pictures, videos and GPS coordinates. But, like Marshall Teller in Eerie, Indiana, I too found out that “when you scrape away the surface weirdness, what you find is more weirdness”. And even after years of digging, I still feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface.

An unexpected plus side of this long dérive was that, along the way, I came across other bucharestologists, fellow stalkers of this unruly zone. And although their tracks are in many ways different from my own, our goals seem to converge and complement one another strangely. In preparing this issue, i. e. graphing together the various results of our bucharestological investigations, we hope to paint a clearer picture of this strange attractor.

But work is far from finished.

Cristian Drăgan

Editor