Ghidigeni is a village, easily overlooked, in southern Moldova, just off the main road between Tecuci and Barlad. Just next door to the town hall a locked metal gate stands in front of the Chrissoveloni Palace, built in the late 19th century in a French neoclassical style, but having endured a particularly tough history.
I was taken round by Viorel, whose family has been linked with the place for generations. He was joined in caretaking duties by a collection of chained dogs, who contributed an uninterrupted barking whenever I came into their view. Viorel pointed out to our right a building which apparently housed the first covered tennis court built in Romania. Its roof was, he told me, initially much grander, but was altered when the place was converted into a military hospital in the First World War.
To explain this twist in the building’s history, and its place in the UK Romania relationship, we must now introduce the character of Sybille Youell, one of the four beautiful daughters of Edward Youell who, as part of the Watson and Youell partnership, was an Englishman in the shipping business in Galati, where he was involved in the export of corn from the Wallachian plains.
Another of the prosperous merchant families of cosmopolitan Galati as the 20th century dawned was that of Chrissoveloni. Zannis Chrissoveloni, from the Greek island of Chios, had settled in the town in 1848, and the family were moving gradually from the cereals trade to banking. His son Nicolas bought the Ghidigeni estate in 1879, and as well as the construction of the palace set to work in building the church and modernising the distillery in the village. In 1907 Sybille Youell married Nicolas’s son, Jean Chrissoveloni, and they moved into the palace at Ghidigeni.
Sybille and Jean hosted some of the finest names in Romanian society, and Sybille became friends with another Englishwoman, Princess Marie of Romania. She and Prince Ferdinand were regular visitors to Ghidigeni. There are a few reminders now of the opulence of that time. Across the Barlad river, on the edge of a wood, we could spot the Ionic columns of the small temple built by Jean as the Chrissoveloni family mausoleum, apparently designed to remind of the Temple of Nike in the Acropolis. The white marble was brought here from Penteli in Greece.
A Doric-columned arcade to the side of the former tennis court was, said Viorel, the location for a bowling alley, and he produced from somewhere a heavy round stone ball and a much lighter plastic pin, the latter apparently dating from the Communist period.
During the First World War, Jean and Sybille set up a field hospital here, catering to wounded Romanian soldiers. Photos of the period show Sybille at Ghidigeni, joined by Queen Marie of Romania, both dressed in nurses’ uniforms. Jean Chissoveloni set up the Queen Marie Ambulance Society, which brought patients to the hospital.
Sybille Chrissoveloni died in Paris in 1931. Jean had predeceased her. Queen Marie was godmother to their only child, a son Nicky, born in 1909, who helped the family banking business weather the tribulations of the Great Depression, only to see it nationalised by the Communists. Interrogated and imprisoned under the Communist regime, Nicky was allowed to leave for Greece in 1960 on the intercession with the Romanian regime of the Greek Foreign Minister, Evangelos Averoff. One story, I have no idea whether true, has it that Nicky Chrissoveloni managed to visit the expropriated Ghidigeni Palace just before his departure, seeking his Swiss bank account number which he had inscribed years before on the kitchen table. To his horror the table had disappeared, and he was only able to establish his bona fides with the bank through the help of the French writer and former Nazi collaborator Paul Morand, who had married Jean’s sister Helene and had served as Vichy French Ambassador in Romania in the Second World War.
The main building itself has suffered many predations. A kitchen fire in 1936 put paid to the wooden-roofed tower. In the Communist period, and until the start of the new millennium, the place housed a special needs school, before being restored in 2004 to the Chrissoveloni family heirs.
We were joined at that point by the Greek restorer who was trying to renovate the building for the owners: he was managing to keep things stable. But it was a constant battle: a new fall of plasterwork in the first floor room where Queen Marie had once slept was the result of an earthquake a few weeks back.
The room which served as the main entrance hall to the school in the Communist period has a floor still decorated with five red stars. At the back an original fireplace has been boarded up. Other rooms bear touches of their old glory, particularly the one described by Viorel as “Queen Marie’s Oval Room”, and an adjacent day room with some original lighting. And there are a couple of carvings of Pan decorating an external wall.
But more recent evidence of the building’s role as a special needs school is more dominant. The day room has an empty board where the timetable for 2001/2 was once placed, faded papers on the walls typed with educational bureaucracy, and group photographs of the children. Having seen harrowing films of the conditions suffered by children in other such schools across Romania, which came to light following the Revolution, it is difficult not to worry whether similar horrors lay behind the impassive expressions of those in the photos. I found myself fervently hoping, but not quite believing, that the school in Ghidigeni was different. There was a faux-cheerful peeling mural of a waterfall on the stairs, and the roles of the rooms upstairs were described by plaques, identifying them as “dormitory 3” and soforth. Outside there were rows of school-desks in what appears to have once been an ornamental pool, as well as buildings constructed in Communist times as a sports hall and toilet block in the midst of what were earlier landscaped gardens of the aristocracy.
Viorel commented wistfully, looking around, that the place was known as the “Palace of Pleasures” in the early 20th century. I asked him how it got the name. He gave me a conspiratorial look and said that they were more enjoyable times, back then. At least for the rich.
I will be blogging periodically with other accounts of remarkable Britons who have played roles in the development of modern Romania. Some are well known; others, like Sybille Chrissoveloni, much less so. I would be delighted to hear your ideas on other Britons with strong connections to Romania who should be the subject of future accounts, as well as other thoughts and photographs illustrating the many close linkages between the United Kingdom and Romania. Please use the #BritainInRomania hashtag on any social media to get involved in the discussion.