The Romanian caviar, the so-called meal of the billionaires, hides a history of exploitation of a small fishermen community in a village at the mouth of the Danube Delta lower channel, Sfantu Gheorghe (Romanian for St. George).
For Nicu Efimov, a man in his early 50s who acts as the president of the Sfantu Gheorghe Fishermen’s Association, caviar is not the refined appetizer served with a slice of lemon, but a meal he used to occasionally eat as a child with a spoon from a bowl.
It was the 1970s and 1980s, a golden age the residents of Sfantu Gheorghe remember dearly, when the communist government of Romania had set up a special state-owned company that produced and exported the meal of the billionaires, fresh wild black beluga caviar.
My wife’s grandfather when he caught a sturgeon and managed to come home with some caviar put a bowl on the table and said eat now, cause there will be a time when you won’t be able to eat this anymore. And he was right, those times have already come, he told BIRN while sitting with guests in his large house in Sfantu Gheorghe.
The Romanian caviar and the sturgeons caught in the Black Sea are nowadays just memories of a lost glory. Due to overfishing and lack of proper environmental management policies sturgeon in the Danube has become rare, some species are already extinct, and the Romanian government imposed a fishing ban that has lasted for already 15 years, leaving the community in Sfantu Gheorghe to find new ways to survive.
While foreign travelers speak of the meal of the billionaires and the exquisite taste of the delicacy put on the menu of royal weddings and banquets, the beluga and its black caviar has been Sfantu Gheorghe’s blood diamond. While the beluga black caviar from the tiny village in the Danube Delta sold for $75 an ounce in a select restaurant in New York in the 1990s, the fishermen in the small isolated village at the mouth of the Danube struggled for survival.
Retired engineer Nichita Timofei, who also served as the head of the sturgeon fishing company for two years after 1990, said that Ukranians brought sturgeon fishing to Sfantu Gheorghe and this has been the main job in the village since the 1700s. Before their arrival there were only shepherds and sheep here. Fishing was just for household consumption, but never industrial or commercial, he explains.
As anthropologist Jill Massino writes in a chapter of Communism Unwrapped: Consumption in Cold War Eastern Europe dedicated to the so-called abundance period in Communist Romania, in the collective memory of Romanians caviar became a symbol of the abundance they had experienced as opposed to the penury of the 1980s.
BIRN 2007