It's my last day here, and I'm totally exhausted. The Romanian Writers' Union has run us absolutely ragged — no time to even report on what's happened! I guess I'll have to do that when I get home. Until then, here are some photos from Constanta, formerly Tomis, where Ovid was exiled:
Above, Ovid's statue, and the Constanta Archeological Museum
Ovid's piercing stare
English translation of a message on a funerary altar (tombstone) unearthed in Tomis
Inside the Church of Sts. Peter and Paul
Communing with the Black Madonna
Communion
The Black Sea at Constanta
Casino
Cenotaph of Mihai Eminescu, Romanian poet, prose writer and journalist, with his lover, poet and journalist Veronica Micle, below (hey, at least she gets a statue … sort of)
The abandoned Hotel Angleterre, in ruins, where Eminescu stayed for ten days, and wrote poems about the sea
Constanta's mosque
Writers Aleksandar Sajin (left) and Rui Zink, as we made our way to lunch just outside Constanta. Aleksandar — poet, prose writer, dramatist and translator –is Serbo-Croatian by birth, Danish by citizenship. Rui is Portugese, author of novels, short stories, essays, plays and children's books. He's also a translator of Saul Bellow into Portugese. Both were excellent companions on all our rather harried adventures.
Next, more of my excellent (and harried) companions, and their work …