The Pyramids of Skulls in Țiglina
By Ovi Catanescu, with memories contributed by my brother, Adi
The Owl Never Forgets.
There are things you see as a child that you never forget.
Some are beautiful. Others are funny. And some follow you throughout your life, even if you go for decades without speaking about them.
One such memory takes me back to Galați, Romania, to a neighborhood called Țiglina.
And to pyramids of human skulls.
Yes, you read that correctly.
Pyramids of skulls.
The Journey to Galați
When we were children, my older brother Adi and I occasionally traveled from Brăila to Galați, where our aunt Claudia lived. She was our father's twin sister.
Claudia had been married to a civil engineer named Georgescu, whom she later divorced. They had a son, Dudu, our cousin, who was about Adi's age.
The journey itself was an adventure.
When we were very young, we traveled aboard a paddle-wheel steamer. Adi still remembers the enormous side wheels turning, the noise of the churning water, and the streams cascading from the paddles as they rose above the river.
Later came the Soviet-built hydrofoil boats, the Săgeata and the Racheta, which seemed to fly above the water.
We no longer remember exactly which vessel carried us to Galați on the particular day I am about to describe.
But we remember what we found when we got there.
A New Neighborhood Over an Old Cemetery
Țiglina was a neighborhood undergoing rapid development.
The city was expanding. New apartment buildings were rising, and construction required land.
Nothing unusual about that.
Except that an old cemetery stood on land intended for the expanding neighborhood.
As we understood it at the time, the communist authorities had decided to eliminate it.
In those days, decisions made by the Communist Party were rarely open to challenge. If a neighborhood was to be built, it would be built.
Even if the dead stood in the way.
The graves had been opened.
And what we saw exceeded anything we could have imagined.
Human remains had been gathered into piles, separated by anatomical category.
Ribs. Thighbones. Shinbones. Upper-arm bones. Pelvic bones. Jawbones.
And skulls.
Entire pyramids of skulls.
Some were smaller, belonging to children. Others were larger. Skulls with empty eye sockets, a few front teeth still attached, some missing their lower jaws.
There was a separate pile of jawbones.
The bones lay exposed to the open sky, the rain, and the sun.
They were not museum exhibits. They were not theater props. This was not a horror movie.
These were the remains of real people.
People who had lived, loved, raised children, and belonged to families. People whom someone had mourned and buried there, believing they had finally been laid to rest.
And now their bones had been arranged into pyramids.
Dudu and the Macabre Soccer Game
Dudu was showing us what he considered the interesting sights of Galați.
He was a rather eccentric boy, as I remember him.
But looking back, I think there may have been something else.
Perhaps he had simply become accustomed to that place.
For him, and possibly for other neighborhood children, the construction site may have become a playground, much as the mill near our home in Brăila was a playground for us.
Except that our mill did not have pyramids of human skulls.
At one point, Dudu suggested that we play soccer.
With the skulls.
He wasn't joking.
Adi remembers Dudu picking up a skull and attempting to pass it to us.
We did not play.
But the skull rolled across the ground.
Adi still remembers the sound it made.
A hollow, dreadful sound.
As it struck the ground, several teeth broke loose and fell out.
When Adi reminded me of that detail, the scene came back to me as well.
No, it wasn't funny.
And I don't believe there is anything amusing about a child attempting to play soccer with another human being's remains.
Still, I don't want to judge Dudu solely by this incident.
Adi has the impression that Dudu may have done similar things with other children before. We cannot be certain.
Perhaps he had become so accustomed to the sight that he no longer understood how horrifying it was.
And perhaps that was one of the most disturbing consequences of what had happened there.
The abnormal had become normal.
What Our Mother Said
When we returned and told our mother what we had seen, she was deeply saddened.
But her reaction was different from ours.
We were children. We were horrified by the skulls, the pyramids of bones, and Dudu's behavior.
Our mother thought about something else.
The dead.
And their families.
Adi reminded me, after all these years, that our mother wondered how the relatives could possibly know which of those bones had belonged to their loved ones.
What had happened to their graves?
What about the people who had perhaps spent years visiting those graves, lighting candles, or bringing flowers?
How could anyone turn a person's final resting place into a construction site, and their remains into an anonymous pile?
Our mother had no answers.
But she had compassion.
Adi's Questions
Adi never forgot the incident either.
He told me that after our visit, he repeatedly asked what had happened to the remains.
Had they been cremated? Reburied? Placed in an ossuary?
Nobody seemed to know.
Worse, some of the people he questioned seemed uncomfortable with his curiosity.
In our recent conversation, Adi called it "that pagan exhumation."
Eventually, he stopped asking.
Life went on. Other problems, other worries, and other experiences took over.
But the question remained unanswered.
Even today, we do not know what happened to those human remains.
Two Worlds No Longer Separated
A few days ago, I reminded Adi about Țiglina.
I had already told Maria about the incident, but now I wanted to reconstruct the details with my brother.
And, as so often happens when we discuss our childhood, our memories began filling in each other's gaps.
I remembered the skulls and Dudu.
Adi remembered additional details, including the sinister sound of that skull rolling across the ground.
We talked about how the neighborhood children had probably grown accustomed to the place.
And then Adi said something that stayed with me:
"Yes, but they had brought the bones of the dead out into the daylight, among the living...
They were no longer two different worlds... separate... they were mixing... coexisting..."
He was right.
The world of the dead had been brought, without their consent, into the world of the living.
And the living were beginning to accept it as ordinary.
The Dance of Death
When I told Adi that all of this would become a sad but true story, he suggested I listen to Danse macabre by Camille Saint-Saëns.
I found the composition and listened.
The legend that inspired it tells of Death beginning to play the violin at midnight, summoning skeletons from their graves to dance until dawn.
But there is one fundamental difference between that legend and what we witnessed.
In Danse macabre, the dead rise from their graves for one night.
In Țiglina, people had brought them out into the daylight.
And nobody knew when, or where, they would finally be allowed to rest again.
The Madness Did Not End There
What we witnessed in Țiglina would not remain, in my memory, an isolated episode unrelated to what was happening elsewhere in communist Romania.
Years passed, but the authorities' disregard for the past, for ordinary people, and for places filled with generations of memories did not disappear.
Quite the opposite.
During the 1980s, the policy of large-scale demolition reached almost unimaginable proportions.
I personally witnessed the destruction of parts of Bucharest before I left for America in August 1984, as Ceaușescu's regime cleared the way for the Palace of the People and the new Civic Center.
Homes, streets, churches, hospitals, and buildings that had been part of the city's life for generations were disappearing.
Families were relocated. Entire neighborhoods were erased from the map. History was buried beneath concrete.
And the demolitions continued after I had left Romania.
In Țiglina, we had seen the dead removed from the earth to make room for a new neighborhood.
In Bucharest, I would witness parts of a city being mutilated to make room for Ceaușescu's ambitions.
The two events were not identical, but to me they shared something profoundly disturbing: the conviction of those in power that they could decide the fate of places, memories, and human lives without being held accountable.
In Țiglina, even the dead had not been allowed to rest in peace. In Bucharest, even the living no longer had control over their own homes.
And all of it was done in the name of progress.
The Dead with the Dead, and the Living with the Living
I don't remember exactly how old I was. I don't know the precise date of our visit. And I don't know what ultimately happened to the remains of the people buried in that cemetery.
But I know what I saw.
I know what my brother remembers.
And I know that in communist Romania, decisions like these could be made while ordinary people had little power to stop them.
The development of a city was not the problem.
The problem was how it was carried out, without the respect owed to those who had lived before us.
A few years later, I returned to Galați.
The city had changed. New neighborhoods and a new riverfront promenade had appeared.
Life had moved on.
But somewhere in the memories of two brothers, the pyramids of skulls remained.
And so did the image of a skull rolling across the ground, making a hollow sound as several teeth broke loose.
On the night we reconstructed this story, Adi said:
"The dead with the dead, and the living with the living..."
That was how it should have been.
But in Țiglina, for a time, it wasn't.
And we were there.
We saw it.
A childhood story reconstructed from my memories and those of my brother, Adi. Some historical details and the ultimate fate of the human remains have yet to be verified.
The Owl Never Forgets.