Ecotopia - location

It was a long search to find the dream location for our place. We started looking for a place in the autumn of 1998, but it was only two years later that we arrived in a rainy day in Stanciova. We liked very much the house and moreover the price was affordable. It was empty for two years and the owner was an old man who had to move to the city to be taken care for by his younger relatives.

The Village

Stanciova is located approximately 35 km away from Timisoara and 12 km from Recas, where the Mayor office is located.

It's a very typical rural community, sharing most typical problems: the population is getting too old, the farming is inefficient and it can hardly provide people what is considered an acceptable standard of living.

One particularity of the village is the still large Serbian community. Banat is a culturally rich area where many ethnic groups can be found. This comes from the times of the Austro Hungarian Empire, when population was frequently re-located to colonize various areas. The population from Stanciova it is said to come from Montenegro and nowadays they speak a local dialect of Serbo-Croatian.

There are three shops in the village, a pub and a public phone. The mobile phones are out of the range of all the networks except for some "traces" of Orange network up the hills. The school bus comes early in the morning and brings the children back around 14.00 but it does not function during week-ends or summer vacations. In other words, a perfect remote place :-)

The House

The whole household is approximately 0.5 ha. There are three buildings forming an U - the traditional way of building in the hilly areas of Romania. Two are more or less for living and the back one is annexes. There is a bedroom on each side, the middle room is the shared kitchen. The other building has two rooms, one dormitory for the long term volunteers and visitors and one which is currently used as an office.

The facilities are very basic: a primitive compost toilet (which we are planning to 'upgrade' to an anaerob one; we are still looking for solutions), cold running water in the kitchen and in the volunteers' room, heating and cooking with wood-burning stoves.

The garden is quite large but only part of it can be cultivated and we grow various vegetables. Half of it is very steep or has a poor soil in a wind exposed area. The back of the garden is blessed with some fruit trees and a little vineyard.