My grandfather, the country squire C.C.C. Sărariu, was called up for the War of Independence under the name Costandin Costandin, which was both his baptismal name and his surname; ‘Sărariu’ being the nickname he had as a local nobleman, which he adopted as his surname after the war. ‘Sărariu’ comes from the saltwater springs on the banks of the Cerna in Vâlcea, which were guarded by the Sărarii—first as guards, and later salt carriers in the Vâlcea region from Ocnele de Sibiu and Vâlcea, on the backs of their small mountain horses; thus, Costandin Costandin returned from the war with his chest full of all the decorations, nine in total, as were awarded to heroes—he being a hero wounded at Smârdan in the victorious battle, and also because the first boy born in the village in hundreds of years was named Costandin, he was also the local boyar of the family, and so that people might ‘distinguish’ him, he also took the name Sărariu. Thus, Costandin Sărariu.
Costandin Sărariu, the local boyar with five generations of Costandins behind him, built churches in the narthexes of which he was depicted dressed in Oltenian costume and with the new decorations on his chest; he erected hermitages, wayside shrines and tall stone crosses at the boundaries of his estate, as was the custom. This is how he came to be visited after the Unification—that is to say, after the War of Independence—by Ion C. Brătianu and Carol I at Slătioara, at his manor house. And so, because he had learnt to write on the sand in a wooden box filled with that golden dust, and to read the letters written in the sand in the same way, he also founded a school to bear his name: ‘C. C. C. Sărariu’ in Slătioara, where I too went to school and where my teacher was Constantin C.C.C. Săraru – now without the ‘i’ – the son of the minor boyar mentioned at the start and my own father. That would be the first story.
The second story
Constantin C.C.C. Săraru, the teacher at the C.C. Sărariu, whose father was depicted wearing traditional Oltenian dress with the nine decorations on his chest at the Reunification, this teacher left in 1941 to fight in the War of National Reunification with the rank of reserve lieutenant Constantin C.C. Săraru.
He fell heroically less than two months after the start of the war, on 15 August 1941, on Saint Mary’s Day, in Tiraspol, and was buried with a national military funeral in the section of the Central Orthodox Cemetery in Chișinău reserved for officers who had also fallen by that time, in the Central Orthodox Cemetery in Chișinău, where the 11th Division erected a marble cross bearing his name and the years of his birth and death. In 1942, I too went with my mother and my father’s elder sister to his grave in the Central Orthodox Cemetery in Chișinău, in the officers’ section. In 1988, the cross of Hero Lieutenant Constantin Săraru, the schoolteacher from Slătioara, was still in its place, and it was also in 1988 that the Bessarabian writer Serafim Saca, then secretary of the Writers’ Union of the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic and a friend of mine, just as the poet Grigore Vieru, the literary critic and historian Mihai Cimpoi, and Ion Ungureanu—Minister of Culture of the future Republic free from socialism and the Soviets—were friends of mine in those years or even before. I too went there, now an elderly man, with my wife, when I was in 1993 a freelance war correspondent, sent by the newspaper Adevărul*, to visit, on my return from the front, along with Vieru, Cimpoi and Ungureanu, my father’s grave in the Central Orthodox Cemetery. Now, in a free Moldova, the plot for Romanian officers who fell for the Reunification of the Nation no longer existed, and naturally neither did the grave nor the marble cross erected by the 11th Division in 1942 at the head of Lieutenant Constantin Săraru’s grave.
There is no point in describing the moment I experienced then. No one – not even the cemetery manager, who still spoke Russian – knew anything. I had dreamt of being able to bring my father’s remains home to Slătioara, to the Sărarilor cemetery. They, too, were no longer there.
In 1942, King Michael I, as he was then, awarded the Royal Order of the Heroes of National Reunification to ‘Mr Săraru C. Constantin of the village of Slătioara, Vâlcea County (that is, myself at the age of 10), son of the hero Constantin C. Săraru, who fell for the Reunification of the Nation’ – as stated in the Decree.
