Cetate Cultural Port, the peace oasis on the banks of the Dolj Danube

About 70 kilometers from Craiova, on the banks of the Danube, there is an ideal place to relax for those who want to escape the hectic life of the city, at least for a few hours. The Cetate Cultural Port, a venue for film festivals and various cultural events, is, for the rest of the time, rather an opportunity to relax and feel the pulse of nature and the simple life on the banks of the Danube.

Once a grain port in the 1880s, now the port has been transformed into a multicultural space, of Romanian-Serbian-Bulgarian intersection, with the possibility to accommodate and feed the people who come here from tens, maybe hundreds of kilometers away.

The culinary experience of the place is far from the pretentious restaurants, the gourmet dishes or the impeccable luxury of the places with many famous stars. Instead, it offers the pure experience of the life at the countryside, surrounded by forests, orchards, domesticated donkeys, dogs, cats and little lizards that walk by your feet, on the pedestrian alley near the Danube waters.

Culinary speaking, if you want to eat the food that your grandmother used to cook, the taste of home comes bundled in clay cups in which the thick and charming soups are steaming, which are enough alone for a hearty meal. The brave can go on with the second course, with combinations of meats, vegetables, pickles, hot pepper jam and polenta, which combine with each other in the best way possible. The dessert has one option and all the food listed above changes with each visit, so it's almost impossible to eat the same thing. The food list is written in chalk on a blackboard, as it is in school, making you become a very attentive student when you want to find out what to order.

The food from the edge of the Danube - or the food from Oltenia and from Dolj, better said - has an aroma of its own, unmistakable, endowed with many greens and less fat. It is a vegetable culture embraced by the banks of the Danube, so it would be a shame not to have a place that takes full advantage of its freshness.

After eating, you need to let yourself calm down a bit and sit down properly. And how better to do that than quench your salty thirst with a good wine from the places or an elderberry flower syrup with soda, which gurgles cold in sweaty carafes. And while you taste the local nectar, let yourself be carried away by the shade of the trees older than the world, rinse your eyes with the waves of the Danube and with a world that stands in place only for you.

It's as if everything is designed so that, after you get up from the table, the steps will take you around the port, on the alleys beaten by thousands of other steps, through greenery, cherries, mulberry trees and insects that notice you. This is the life at the countryside, the one to which many are fleeing more and more lately.

A short distance away, if the weather allows, you can sit on the beach on the banks of the Danube, warm up and let the sun see you for a few hours. And, if you want to stay, you have at your disposal covered rooms or rooms under the open sky, which offer sleep under the song of insects: the tents you bring from home.

It is known that the most beautiful things in life are the simple things, which do not require too much effort to be. Eventually, the return to the nature will be made more and more often by each and every one of us. And it's good that we have a place like that here, in Dolj!

Photo: discoverdolj.ro