Tag #129045 - Interview #78031 (Arnold Leinweber)

From the age of 8 until I got married, I lived in the Aparatorii Patriei [quarter]. The house had its charm because, when we moved, it was being built, so we witnessed its erection. The pillars were already planted into the ground. They had been burnt to prevent them from rotting and fixed at an equal distance from one another. The space between the laths that united them was filled with bundles of clay mixed with straws and horse manure which I had collected in a bucket from the street myself. Hundreds of carts loaded with fruit and vegetable would come from Berceni and other villages and head towards the Natiunii Marketplace – the Great Marketplace, as they used to call it back then. So I witnessed how a house was built. The roof was hastily made, because we had no authorization for the house. If the gendarmes caught you building a house without authorization, they would stop you, unless the house already had a rood. So the pillars were fixed in a hurry, the roof was completed fast, and so were the timber walls. Reeds were added to the walls, and then came the plaster and the whitewash. Most houses were built directly on the ground.