The Fate day Fear – March 4, 1977

“Nature reveals its secrets in two ways: through its external force and through the movements of its marshmallows. External actions are, strong winds, rains, bad currents, waves, ice, forest fires, floods, there is only one internal force-the earthquake. “– Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov .

Since I often do not want to remember this day, yet every year that follows March 4, I feel a sinister message in my heart, and a feeling of terror, because I never know what could it be worse than what was on March 4, 1977. It was the hottest earthquake that we had lasted for 55 seconds, with the power of 7.3 degrees on the Richter scale.

I was in the 5th grade at a technical high school of building materials, and on 5th of March I was going to support a more special work on a subject I worshiped everywhere, namely physics.

Why would a pupil in Year 5 ask some of you?Because those years were not established in the country but two high-schools, and names theoretical high schools with different profiles, humanities or physics-mathematics and industrial high schools with technical profile for various specialties, for example: construction materials electro mechanical profile as we followed me, chemistry profile, etc.The difference lies in the fact that from the theoretical high schools at the end there was no technical training and the industrial ones had as much technical preparation, the theoretical ones were 4 years and the industrial ones were 5 years old.This was finally the communist thinking of those troubled times.

However, at the end of the two high-school classes, to enter the University, you were going through very hard examinations, and if you had the chance to come in, you were a student, in other words, you had to learn hard at high school aptitude to get the chance to become a student.

What really bothered me most of those years was the fact that my parents always made me do what they thought was best for me, never letting me have the chance and the right to decide what is better for me or worse, being probably married I think about the concepts of life and society of those troubled times.

This has marked me for my whole life, but that did not stop me from later following my conceptions and developing my destiny and the karma of an open-minded man.

I do not want to go into too many details of those times, but by returning to my story I mean that we had colleagues in the class who were mad like a wild horse, were willing, energetic and open to any kind of fun.

Obviously knowing what was going to follow on March 5th, those projects’ support and lectures at high school level, we decided to go to a confectionery to eat a cake and have a cup of coffee, because if we went to a restaurant to drink alcohol they would not have served us, because of our age.

The confectionery was called “CASATA” “your home-in English”, a famous confectionery in the center of the capital where I knew that the cookies were of good quality at the time, and the coffee was original and not an ordinary mix of coffee, chicory, and what other ingredients were contained, only they knew. Anyway, jokingly or more seriously, everyone was call (the shop owner) “NECHEZOL” probably from horse hunting.

I ask myself, and now does the confectionery have a predestined name for what would follow that night of horror?(because the earthquake that was about to fall collapsed because of a bastard of administrator who had dismantled two pillars of resistance on the grounds that there was not a bigger space in the confectionery for clients – a crook in other words).

I spent a few hours with colleagues with jokes and stories told by children of high school age.After that at 8 pm in the evening I went to the bus to get home to have time to prepare for the next day, possibly to read something interesting or to watch TV and why I do not relax a bit.

We arrived home pretty fast around 8:20 pm, and obviously after a hot shower (because we were also conditioned by the hot water that was provided at that time with a portion of a program only if they knew you, if you were lucky) do you think I’m doing something or telling immortal stories of sleeping children, knowing that the regime of those times gave you everything with the portion and not how you wanted it.

Also, on TV there were miserable shows, films in general from the communist bloc  other names and other political programs, you know, of course, and patriotic songs and poems.What else?

In about half an hour I prepared what I had for school and I wanted to watch TV because it was a Bulgarian film about what? I did not know but there was something, a film that even if I repeat was destined for what was to follow, the movie was called “Dulce si Amar” (Sweet and Bitter-in English) and it started at 9:15 pm in the evening, you realize I cannot forget the hours.

The film had stupid name, nothing spectacular, even uninteresting, but still it was anything but regular TV programming.

I was sitting in the living room, next to a cabinet with a display window in which my mother kept the glasses, crystal glasses taken under the hand in the shops (the usual practice then with the most special items), to my right was the table, and on the wall the opposite was a body of the library where the books I used to read.The block where we lived was built of monolithic reinforced concrete on the first floor of 10. And now the real nightmare begins…

The time of 21:15 pm starts the movie, not even now, I cannot remember the subject, love, life, I suspect as an amalgam of all, being actually a mix of subjects with no notion or connection between them.But what can I do?Instead of getting bored, you try to look at yourself and establish yourself or the common denominator of those images you see.

At 21:20 pm, I was thinking what to do?I was still talking to my father sitting on a chair on my right hand in front of the library, about what I was going to do next day in high school and the way I would do it in the idea of getting a maximum rating to be of use to me.In the kitchen, my mother and grandmother were trying to pack something for dinner, and my grandmother as usual struggled to make quince jam, which for me was one of the most delicious pleasures we enjoyed always with joy out of the ordinary.Her grandmother knew how to conquer me and what to do to please me, and there is no honest way of not dealing with what he had in the pantry which, in my opinion, was a bit empty.Dear one, and now I love her wholeheartedly, even if she left this world as it will happen to all of us when it comes down on the spool.

At 21:22 pm, at a certain moment, there is a powerful clanking of glass that grows louder and the floor begins to move in a transverse plane with light waves like a boat on a sea of waves.At that moment my dad cried out loud “earthquake” rattled out of the chair to escape to the entrance door to get out, my mother runs to use.From this unmoving and rebellious motion of the floor, it is followed by a more rigid motion in the longitudinal plane, and a slight buckle of the walls.A loud whistling sounds outside as a continuous alarm sound.I hardly get up from the chair because I had to push the closet to the wall that had threatened to fall over me, my attempt was not successful, but the fact that I could get out of the closet and the table was a momentary success.My grandmother, supported by the door of the living room door, yells to get out as quickly as possible outside to jump on the balcony from the balcony below to save me, the distance from the balcony to the outside being about 2.5 m.

It all rained because it was the first time in my life when I went through such an attempt, but it was quite lucid to move quickly into the kitchen to stop the gas from the stove, first turning off the light in the living room and the TV.I do not know what was in my head, maybe a lucidity of indescribable, maybe consciousness or maybe insanity, I do not know either.I think it was better to be self-mastery.The cabinet and the library moved to the center of the living room, leaning over the table.

Thinking of these phases for a few seconds, I did not mind the fact that my grandmother was the only one from my family who was interested in my fate, my parents running away.I did not know what to do while I was bewildered; maybe even that infernal zombie that flooded my ears.I went out on the front door forcing it to close it and not let it open, and all this in less than 1 minute.I do not want to reproduce what was in my soul at that moment, fear, terror, panic, I did not even know.

Even though it was evening, and the sky darkened, it was of a bright red, as I had never seen before, and the strong whistle ceased.I learned later that there were panic alarms from the businesses in the area.

It was like the atmosphere was in accordance with a mortuary ritual that created the fear and panic of the people outside.Later I was to find out that there was a powerful earthquake of 7.3 degrees on the Richter scale, in the Vrancea Area at about 200 km from Bucharest, with a duration of 50-55 seconds both horizontally and vertically at a depth of 100 km to the center of the earth and which could be felt in Turkey, the shock wave being extremely strong, and destroyed a lot of buildings in Bucharest and has ended many lives.

I did not stand outside even at the risk of another earthquake, although the reps had enough but I did not feel any more, because I quickly fell asleep.

In the morning on the way to high school, I passed past the former “CASATA” confectionery, which was now a pile of bodies, debris and glass, where one evening before, I had spent several hours of fun with my high school colleagues.And when you stand thinking that I left there an hour before the inferno started from that fateful moment?Was not the Good God worried that nothing would happen to me and fall into that infernal trap of nature?The people left in the confectionery were now just lost souls, strange beings who were beating at the gate of Heaven.

I had but to see the city I could not believe it, as if it was a war with street battles, buildings collapsed, people dirty debris running erratically as a Brownian motion, screaming, they do not know where, areas closed police, army detachments looking for disastrous, ugly, miserable images, under the dilapidation of potential survivors.

And when you think that a pure and pure soul has thought about my life, cherishing her more than her, Grandma I adore today.

I do not want to impress anyone, but those horrors seen by my childhood have terribly impressed me, but there are things you can not overlook, you cannot predict them, and you cannot avoid them unless you have the power to move to another dimension, dangerously breaking the boundary between reality and fiction, things that only unfold after occult elements that transcend our border of some understanding.

I wish from all my heart that none of you should pass through those moments that I have gone through.

The paraphrasing of the “Ralph Waldo Emerson who said:” We are studying geology on the morning after the earthquake,” I can say that I have passed a life episode that I did not know, but who would not want to repeat it again.

March 14th / 2018