Ada Kale is a bilingual publication. Ada Kale was an island exclave of the Ottoman Turks on the Danube in today's Romania. In the 1970s it was flooded during the construction of the Iron Gate dam.

Year of creation: 2018

Publication

Co-authorship: Lucie Rosenfeldová, Jiří Žák, Matěj Pavlík, Pavel Sterec

More info

Nicolae Ceausescu offered his residents the opportunity to move to another island, to which he even had the fortifications transferred from the original island. They did not accept the offer, and the "new Ada Kale" is still an empty abandoned model of the original. The case of Ada Kale Island raises many questions and is interesting as an environmental, historical, ethnic, but also an aesthetic problem. Situated in close proximity to Slovak, Czech, Serbian, German and, of course, Romanian villages, this is a remarkable case of contact between different linguistic, national and religious groups. Ada Kale serves as a metaphorical ground plan for the book since it has been advised by rhetors since the ancient times to imagine a particular place - a building, a floor plan - and to "store" themes of their speech into it so they can remember them better. The book presents themes elaborated by the authors, invited experts and specific artifacts which were “stored” in the layout of the abandoned island model. Authors of the book: Lucie Rosenfeldová, Jiří Žák, Matěj Pavlík, Pavel Sterec. 

Academy of Arts, Architecture & Design in Prague, Prague 2017, 238 pages., black and white., bilingual - Czech and English, ISBN 978-80-87989-26-5

Keywords

social engineering; land-use planning; political ecology; socialism; Nicolae Ceausescu; Iron Gate dam; Islam in Europe; Turkish community in Romania; collective memory; autonomous territory; island as a utopia; a libertarian dystopia of Liberland; 

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