The Piata

The Piata


You’ve pronounced it wrong. In English it would be spelled pe-at-za. In Romania it is the name of the market where fresh produce, and everything else, can be purchased from vendors. It is also the name of the main squares of the city or village, but when you say you’re going to the Piata, everyone knows that you’re going for your vegetables.

Cluj has several, the largest is right behind the McDonalds. Now that’s sort of a clash of cultures, but no one seems to mind. Vendors are jammed check by jowl along narrow passage ways and various specialties are grouped together. All the potato sellers are in one area, the honey sellers, the cheese vendors each have their own sections. The market we go to is here in our neighborhood of Manastur. It’s not as big as the downtown market, but it usually has everything that one could need.

We also have ‘normal’ grocery stores where we do much of our shopping and occasionally when friends take us we ride out to the ‘Metro’ – much like a Costco -, but nothing is so picturesque as the Piata.

It’s often hard to decide which vendor to purchase from. They almost all have the same produce, probably from the same wholesaler, at the same prices. For our bananas, we have a favorite lady who smiles at our broken Romanian, but as we walk along trying to decide which onions to buy, it can be difficult. Often the seller will lean over the bench his or her produce is resting and say, “Poftiti, Domnul, Poftiti” (Don’t worry, you didn’t say that right, either. It’s the funny little thing they put beneath the last ‘t’ that my computer doesn’t have to make the tz sound). But these guys are professional. Every time I come away with more product than I than I had planned to buy and therefore less money.

We do a fair amount of our fruit and vegetable buying not at the Piata but at a tiny store specializing in fresh produce. It is clean, always full of good food and as cheap as anywhere. It’s run by a Hungarian family and except for the fact that it’s not as big as our living room with always twenty people in it, the place has a distinct charm. And they smile so broadly when I tell them thank you in Hungarian.

As we have no automobile, we can only purchase what we can carry. Our apartment is on the high side of a hill, so we have to carry everything up hill. We fill our two plastic bags with our goods so we are limited in how much we ever buy at once. Up the hill we trudge, carrying our pungas (bags – bring your own, they don’t give ‘em away) looking just like real Romanians.

The picture of the orange sellers is actually from the Piata on Rodos. We have had marvelous citric fruit here all year, but the Greek picture turned out more colorful.