Слобозия

Slobozia is a town literally named Freedom. A "slobozie" was a settlement exempted from feudal dues to attract settlers, and this one grew in the seventeenth century around a fortified monastery on the Ialomița river, in the middle of the Bărăgan — the great steppe of southeastern Romania, a horizon-to-horizon sea of wheat that is the country's breadbasket and its most existential landscape. The monastery church, restored, still anchors the town, and Slobozia's museums honour the plain that made it: the National Museum of Agriculture, unique in Romania, tells the civilisation of grain, while the county museum keeps the Bărăgan's older layers.

The town's most improbable landmark rusts on its outskirts: a fifty-four-metre replica of the Eiffel Tower, erected in 1996 at a private holiday park in the exuberant first decade of Romanian capitalism, complete — while it lasted — with a copy of the ranch from "Dallas". The park faded; the tower remains, a surreal exclamation mark above the wheat, photographed by every traveller on the road to the sea. Nearby, the salt lake of Amara has drawn cure-takers to its mineral muds for a century.

Cultural life keeps the honest scale of the plain — the county cultural centre, choirs, school ensembles, church music and visiting programmes, as the concert record attests. A monastery, a museum of bread, and an Eiffel Tower in a field: the Bărăgan does not lack imagination.