“Everyone here will always reach for the knife in his pocket.”

November 19, 2015 8:30 AM

The murderers next door. [The Guardian] In a remote corner of Romania, neighbours kill each other over tiny strips of land. Betrayed by their rulers, these rural communities have resorted to violent assertion of their rights.

In the poor and remote province of Maramureş in the northern Carpathians, cut off by bad mountain roads from the rest of Romania to the south, the ancient body measures persist. Anything approaching six feet long – a plank of wood or a table – is a râf, the span of a man’s arms; a cot is a cubit, from elbow to fingertip; a ţol – about an inch – is the length of the last joint of the thumb; and a palmă is a hand’s breadth, the distance between the outstretched tips of the thumb and fingers of one hand.

Every year in Maramureş neighbours kill each other for these contested slips of territory. At times there have been 40 such violent attacks in 12 months, and week after week, much as road accidents are described in other parts of the world, the local press reports another man – always a man – killed for a hand’s breadth of land.

posted by Fizz (14 comments total)

This is an edited extract of The Hand’s Breadth Murders, from the current issue of Granta #133.
posted by Fizz at 8:44 AM on November 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

Property is a funny thing in Romania.

On July 4th a few years back, my wife (sporadic MeFi user Comrade Doll) explained why we will never ever go to live in her home country. During the monarchy, a handful of rich families owned everything. It wasn't even enough that they had fantastic homes while their neighbors were poor. There were also consular houses: large, grand buildings in other cities where the elite could stay when they traveled or went on holiday. When the Communists came, they seized these buildings and turned them into apartments for working people. Then, when the Revolution came, the new government sold these apartments as condos to raise funds. Comrade Doll's family bought one. Over time, the real estate value of the building that contained their centrally located two bedroom home skyrocketed. It rose to such an extent that the descendants of the wealthy people who'd owned the buildings generations ago hired lawyers to sue and get them back. The residents countersued. This lasted years and went through many courts, with the Romanian government declaring in the end that the residents had been sold their homes "in bad faith"...by the Romanian government. The homes were seized. Families who'd lived in these apartments for generations, whose entire family fortunes were tied up in these rooms were told they'd have to leave and offered rental units in shabby communist-era high rises on the other side of town. They would receive no compensation of any kind. The residents sued in the International Court in the Hague and won the right to a pittance, around 10% the estimated value of their homes. Obfuscation and bureaucratic malfeasance whittled that away by another half.

"And do you know why we will stay Americans?" she asked. "Not because I don't think this could happen here, although I hope it wouldn't. Not because I think that if it did, we could sue and win, although I like to think we would. Not because I think that if we lost, we could go to the press and there would be outrage on our behalf, though I hope and suspect there would be. It is because in Romania, when this happens to you and you explain to someone what happened they shrug. Because that is just how things are there and everyone knows it."

My mother-in-law has moved twice since this happened. She had a little money and was luckier than most of her neighbors. But I fully believe she will be suing, countersuing, appealing, etc. about this until the day she dies.

So yes, property is a funny thing in Romania.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 8:55 AM on November 19, 2015 [39 favorites]

I remember reading about some extremely shady negotiations around private land with great natural resources. There was an attempt to tie the ownership of the land to a British peer/royal who would then hand the land over to the company poised to exploit the resources best. I'll see if I can find the story.
posted by longbaugh at 9:14 AM on November 19, 2015

This reminds me of "The Interlopers."
posted by katie at 9:20 AM on November 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

DirtyOldTown's comment makes me a little sick to my stomach about how Cuba appears to be normalizing relations with the United States. If the Communists ever fall, I bet the entire island is going to immediately be swarmed by shitty little aristos from Miami trying to steal every scrap of land and property they can get their hands on.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 10:02 AM on November 19, 2015 [17 favorites]

If the Communists ever fall, I bet the entire island is going to immediately be swarmed by shitty little aristos from Miami trying to steal every scrap of land and property they can get their hands on.

Probably about the same time that Miami sinks under the waves.
posted by Halloween Jack at 10:43 AM on November 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

DirtyOldTown, that's quite the story. I'm sorry to hear that something so awful happened to your wife and family. That being said.

It is because in Romania, when this happens to you and you explain to someone what happened they shrug. Because that is just how things are there and everyone knows it.

Maybe I'm too much of a cynic, because I honestly think that this kind of mentality, with regard to government corruption, red tape, etc. that feeling of just "shrugging" in response to something so gross and unfair, I feel like that is happening more and more here in N. America. Only, now days its not governments, but corporations that enact this kind of injustice. And more and more, people have no choice but to kind of shrug and accept these things. It's a depressing response.
posted by Fizz at 10:46 AM on November 19, 2015 [8 favorites]

If the Communists ever fall, I bet the entire island is going to immediately be swarmed by shitty little aristos from Miami trying to steal every scrap of land and property they can get their hands on.

Even normalizing relations has the potential to open up all those old claims, 1961 was not long ago at all. The people who lost everything to Castro and their immediate family are still very much alive and waiting to sue.
posted by T.D. Strange at 10:57 AM on November 19, 2015 [3 favorites]

Only, now days its not governments, but corporations...

Oh, it's the government alright, it just 'happens' to benefit the corporations.
posted by Confess, Fletch at 11:06 AM on November 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

Confess, Fletch

The saddest part of that case is that even after winning, this is what happened to the land:

However, the private developer was unable to obtain financing and abandoned the redevelopment project, leaving the land as an undeveloped empty lot

Ugh.
posted by Fizz at 12:11 PM on November 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

DirtyOldTown's comment makes me a little sick to my stomach about how Cuba appears to be normalizing relations with the United States. If the Communists ever fall, I bet the entire island is going to immediately be swarmed by shitty little aristos from Miami trying to steal every scrap of land and property they can get their hands on.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 10:02 AM on November 19
[14 favorites −] Favorite added! [!]


If the Communists ever fall, I bet the entire island is going to immediately be swarmed by shitty little aristos from Miami trying to steal every scrap of land and property they can get their hands on.

Probably about the same time that Miami sinks under the waves.
posted by Halloween Jack at 10:43 AM on November 19
[1 favorite −] Favorite added! [!]

********
Miami and Cuba both are doomed if sea - levels rise.
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 1:01 PM on November 19, 2015

Miami and Cuba both are doomed if sea - levels rise.

Well, depending on what you mean by "doomed." If the sea rises by, say, 20 meters, there's still quite a lot of Cuba left, while Miami (and the southernmost third to half of the Florida peninsula) is underwater. (Going by this tool.)
posted by Halloween Jack at 1:22 PM on November 19, 2015

> This reminds me of "The Interlopers."

Excellent comparison! It reminds me of Pushkin’s Dubrovsky.
posted by languagehat at 1:42 PM on November 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

It's easy to see people given land by the communists as the right, good people - but you don't understand that the original land owners also have deep emotional connections to the land too. My family's land was seized by Sandinistas some decades ago. According to them, the land is no longer ours, and they of course used it to reward members of their faction, who split it up and broke pieces of it. My family, yes, fled elsewhere and set up living where they weren't going to get murdered and have their things seized.

But I have grown up on stories of the land. It is real to me because it has always been real to them - the beehives that my great-grandmother used to tend while smoking a cigar, because it was her land and she could do as she pleased, the little sections as each daughter or son got married, so that no one would ever have to leave. The area where the animals lived, the way the sidewalks were laid out, a certain tree on a hill you could sit under and see the lake and relax. Decades have gone by, yes, everyone lived in the city, yes, but when my grandmother was dying she asked us if we knew where the deed - the piece of paper with the ownership of the land was, because she could not die thinking we would never return.

Compensate people for buying land from a "government" of scoundrels, by all means, but this is by no means as clear cut as "those people abandoned the land." No one wanted to abandon the land. They left only to stay alive, and have not forgotten.
posted by corb at 7:07 PM on November 19, 2015 [3 favorites]