In my quest for mountain moonshine, we leave the wide, sweeping Făgăraș Depression and begin to wind our way through a different part of the Carpathian Mountains, where the high alpine softens into low-elevation deciduous forests. Fall colors are just beginning to light these hills, and I feel an ache of nostalgia at how much this place reminds me of the Smoky Mountains. I could be back home except for the reminders that I am not: the pyramid-shaped haystacks, the red-tile roofs, the telltale red tassels on the bridles of the horses pulling rough-hewn wooden carts.
It was inevitable that my search for țuică would eventually take me to the Jiu Valley, the heart of Romanian coal country. I did not grow up in the coal mining region of Appalachia, but the southwestern Carpathian mountains recall the southern Appalachians of my youth far more so than the towering peaks of Făgăraș. Alongside the familiar remnants of the mountain peasantry that persist here, these valleys are studded with the relics of an industrial past, skeletons of an extractive economy that has pivoted away from fossil fuels, and is searching for its next act, for what comes next when the mine closes down.
This is a familiar story in the Appalachian coalfields, and it is the story that first brought me to Petrila in 2019 with the Appalachians/Carpathians International Conference. We came to the Jiu Valley to meet Ion Barbu, the avant garde artist behind the effort to preserve what was left of the shuttered Petrila Mine, once the deepest coal mine in all of Europe, which was decommissioned in 2015 as part of an EU commitment to ending subsidies for fossil fuels and shifting towards more green energy sources.
Alongside post-extraction communities worldwide, the residents of Petrila and nearby Petroșani are grappling with their industrial history, and what the erasure of that history might mean for their identity, and their community.
Because in these places, coal mining wasn’t just a job. It shaped the identity and the imaginable futures for generations, here and in Appalachia. As fraught as the politics of coal has become in the 21st century, it was perhaps even more so 100 years ago, when miners in both Appalachia and the Jiu Valley fought (literally, with weapons) against their own governments for the right to form a labor union.
In 1921, three decades of labor abuses and union suppression erupted in the Battle of Blair Mountain, where 10,000 West Virginia miners fought US troops in the mountains of Logan County for the right to organize. Private security forces hired by the coal companies joined forces with the national guard to stop the striking miners’ march on non-unionized counties. When many of the striking miners refused to fire on US troops, leading to the end of the conflict, at least 16 miners were confirmed dead.
Just 8 years later, in 1929, three thousand Jiu Valley miners went on strike, demanding better pay, supplies of food and boots, and an end to children working underground. As their demands remained unmet, a group of striking miners occupied the power station that supplied electricity to the mine’s pumping equipment, threatening the lives of 200 miners still working underground who had refused to join the strike. The following day, a standoff between federal troops and the occupying miners escalated to violence. In the end, dozens of miners were killed.
In both of these conflicts, the deployment of state power led to the defeat of the union, setting back the labor movement by decades. In both cases, the strike was cast as a communist conspiracy, justifying violent intervention and delegitimizing the miners’ very valid demands for basic human rights. In both places, the cultural legacy of resistance—and resilience—animates modern-day social movements to recognize and preserve these mines, these monuments to extraction. Because mining was more than a just a way to make a living. It was a way of life.
When I visited the Petrila mine in 2019, it had been turned into a DIY museum of protest art and mining history, shocking and delightful in its jubilant irreverence.
A former mine rescuer, Catalin Cenușă, led us through an exhibit of the equipment that rescuers used during mining disasters—all the latest technology that looked like it might have been used 100 years ago during the era of the mine wars. Cenușă then led us to a modest display selling t-shirts sporting the logo of the documentary film in which he played a starring role, and other souvenirs that helped keep the museum open. The shop also sold homemade palincă, in re-used glass wine bottles, for $5 each.
This was the moment that I knew I would pursue this project, and that I would one day return to Planeta Petrila, looking for the people who made that hooch.
Coming back, I think I expected to find moonshine stills tucked back in narrow valleys next to cold mountain streams, just like home. I’m sure those are out there, somewhere, but I never saw them. Despite the rolling mountains and small farms strung out along the road leading toward the mine, the miners who worked there continue to live in the post-industrial towns of Petrila and Petroșani, in the grey blocks of communist flats on the rural-urban fringe where the occasional flock of geese or chickens, maybe even a pig or two, scratch around in a tiny common courtyard overlooked by several floors of narrow balconies where laundry hangs to dry.
I didn’t find the people who made the palincă that I bought at the mine rescuer museum 4 years ago. What I did find were moonshine stills tucked inside of garages and kitchens, people living in a post-industrial town making hooch from grocery store seconds and leftovers from the refrigerator. I didn’t expect to be thinking about what making țuică might mean to city folks. I didn’t expect city folks to be making țuică.
My first interview took place in one unit of a long stretch of garages not unlike a row of self-storage units in the US. On our walk there, my local guide told me,
The garage is the summer kitchen of the city.
What she meant, I think, is the city garage is a space of creation, a place to gather, a sort of indoor/outdoor workshop of community-making. In the garage we visited, dozens and dozens of repurposed half barrel beer kegs and glass carboys were hidden behind homemade curtains. Those vessels contained tuica made from the spoils of a son’s job at the local Profi supermarket. Alongside the traditional plum, apple, and pear were jugs of țuică made from oranges and bananas. This spirit of experimentation yielded some dubious results (even he admitted that the banana țuică was….not good), but that spirit also manifested in countless DIY gadgets and systems that turned the garage into a strikingly efficient mad scientist hooch laboratory.
My next interview was in a modest home just a block or two away, where I was invited into a small kitchen that was host to a steady stream of household cats and dogs. The woman of the house rummaged in her lower cabinets and soon produced a single electric hotplate, a small 10-liter copper still that could be held in one hand, a cooling chamber and coil, and 2 lengths of rubber tubing, one of which was connected to the faucet of the kitchen sink and the other which dangled over the edge of the counter and into a glass wine bottle. Her husband produced a bucket of leftover fruit that had reportedly been sitting out back for a couple of months, and proceeded to dump the pungent slurry into the pot of the still.
As we passed around a bowl of dried plums and small glasses of tuica, the countertop system gradually began to warm, and in 45 minutes or so, clear liquid began dripping from the end of the rubber tubing and into the bottle. In another month or two, when the bucket out back is once again full of discarded leftovers from the refrigerator, another liter of țuică will be set to boil in the kitchen.
When I told Romanians in other parts of Transilvania that the Jiu Valley was on my list of places to conduct fieldwork, they often seemed puzzled by the choice. Even in Petrila, when I asked my subjects a standard interview question—“Is this region known for its țuică? If so, what makes it special?”—the answer was always, No. Not really. There’s nothing special about it here.
I’m still puzzling over how to interpret that answer, but part of me wonders if it is more of a rural/urban question than a regional one. My rural interlocutors would rhapsodize about the quality of the fruit, the soil, the water, the care that they take in crafting the final product. In Petrila, that sense of pastoral pride was replaced with a sense of industriousness, a spirit of invention, and pride in self-reliance. I think that this is what we need to understand about what an industrial mining heritage means to these displaced miners. We romanticize the “old ways” of the peasantry, we valorize their independence and resourcefulness. But we find that spirit of resistance and resilience, too, in the garages and the kitchens of Petrila.
Fabulous!
Lovely post!