about 'inger parc'

The surroundings of the port became the setting for the Angel Park project, initiated in the summer of 2002 by Mircea Dinescu and a group of friends, sculptors and ceramic artists, soon after the old administrative house of the port was fully rebuilt.

The idea was a reaction to the nation-wide hysteria surrounding the controversial Dracula Parc project, which was being secretly negotiated and hotly debated in public at the time. the project was abandoned soon after and Dracula remained shrine-less. But the angels stayed.

‘We made the park to counter polemically with the Dracula Park project. This country was never in the full monopoly of the devil, at least at its peripheries, on the bank of the Danube, there may still be some angels left. Besides, it seems to me that building your 'national brand’ with angels could be a much better idea.

‘… it was dusk already when I saw seven horses – who still run around freely around here – stop in front of the house. For a while it appeared to me that they were looking at the sculptures of angels we put there, right by the water . I thought, you don’t see many people stop to look at angels anymore, but horses still do. And I said to myself, this is what I want to do here. Convince people to start looking a bit more at the angels”
Mircea Dinescu

After a sanctuary for angels, another was made for humans. Between two hills at the western edge of the village, in a spot with several ponds and natural springs called Ulmi (The Elms), where the oldest human settlement in the area was located several thousands of years ago, professor Ernest Budes and his friends (sculptors, painters, ceramic artists) built a small Neolithic village, with 6 types of huts made from earth and reed, painted with bright colours and prehistoric motifs, and endowed with all the clay pottery of the day.

And to finish the job, the two surrounding hills, facing south toward the summer sun and the Danube breeze, were planted with vinyards in 2006. The vinyard will reach maturity in the autumn of 2010 but the first Neolithic village of the 21st century didn’t flourish in the housing bubble that followed. Its time is yet to come.

about the foundation

At an auction in 1996, the Mircea Dinescu Poetry Foundation acquired the administration building of a former agricultural port on the Danube. That’s how that deserted place started being transformed into the Cetate Cultural Port, where residence programmes for writers and artists, translation workshops, film-makers’ conventions and pottery camps brought together people from all over Europe and somehow managed to succeed each other most naturally, without a trace of panic or institutional pressure. The very remoteness of the place is beneficial both for artists in search creative solitude and for those who, having gathered at the river, feel inclined to concentrate on the topics they share.

Throughout the years, the Foundation has cooperated with the Goethe Institute, the LCB, the Swedish Institute and the Romanian Cultural Institute. Symbolically enough, the first vessel to drop anchor in the port after a 50-year break, was packed with the artists taking part in the project L’Odysee du Danube 2007.

Since 2006, Culture Port Cetate is a member of Halma, a network of European literary houses which now has 26 members in 23 countries.

see also:
Culture Port Cetate on the Halma Network
Kulturhafen Cetate