Sulfur Hour
A Treatment of Stillness and Disconnection
Băile Herculane, a small town in southwestern Romania, has a few obvious selling points for tourists: clean air trapped in a deep green valley, a kind of decaying grandeur that makes for great photos, and the quiet of a place the world has largely left behind. But as you walk up and down the Cerna River that runs through it, you will sooner or later inhale a strong stench that reminds you of the real reason this town exists — the unmistakable smell of sulfurous water bubbling up from deep underground. These mineral baths have their own local legends, living somewhere between medicine and mythology. The smell follows you up the street, into hotel lobbies, onto your clothes — like the town is quietly insisting you take a break from sightseeing and submit to its age-old tradition.
At this stage in my life, I travel with a distinct plan of where I’ll be, but not necessarily what I’ll do. I find it more freeing to have a general list of options I’ve looked into, but leave the specifics up to the day — purposeful wandering. After climbing a small mountain the previous day and visiting the local gym that morning, my body’s message was clear: take the afternoon off. A trip down the twelve flights of stairs from my room found me at the ground level reception desk of the “spa” where I asked — equal parts curious and suspicious — how one goes about taking a turn in the sulfur baths.
The heavy-set woman behind the desk informed me that for the price of thirty lei (about seven dollars) I could join a half-hour session, along with whoever else decided to show up. I asked what the sulfur baths could help with. The answer was, essentially: everything — from circulation to joints, skin to stress, etc. I half-expected her to say it’d sort out my taxes too. In any case, I kept my skepticism to myself, smiling and nodding, and asked to have the thirty lei charged to my room. I went back upstairs to change into swim shorts and a hotel robe. Purposefully leaving my phone and watch upstairs, I returned a few minutes later for the men’s scheduled time slot.
She led me through dark hallways, explaining to me that after the thirty minutes were up, I should sit at an open chair by the indoor pool and not rinse off for at least thirty minutes to “let the minerals do their job.” I nodded obediently, rolling my eyes only within the safe confines of my mind.
At last I was ushered through the final door and immediately was gripped by a brief moment of anxiety — I wondered what I’d gotten myself into. Before me was a small pool occupied by eight older Romanian men, the water so opaque that I could hardly tell if they were sitting or standing. Though many parts of the self-proclaimed “resort” had been renovated since it was built in the communist era, it was clear from the faded colors and old tile that this room hadn’t made the cut. Tired exhaust fans whirred above us, attempting to clear the sulfurous air.
I hung my robe from one of the hooks and removed my flip-flops. I could feel some of their weathered eyes turning and looking at me as I hesitated at the steps. This was perhaps already past the moment when a sensible person would have turned around and called it a day, but into the water I went.
I eased down and submerged myself up to my neck in the soup. It was hotter than I expected and deeper as well — warmth immediately spreading across my body. I shuffled my way to one of the spots along the wall that was unoccupied, careful not to splash whatever we were standing in onto my face. To my right and left were two elderly men who avoided eye contact. They both had serious, distant expressions on their faces, like they’d come here to do something important and were intent on doing it properly.
At first my body stayed braced, shoulders raised, teeth clenched, as I continued to scan the room. The murkiness of the water was even more apparent up close. Harsh light bounced off the tiles around us and gave the room an almost clinical feeling. This was, after all, considered by many to be a legitimate medical treatment. And yet it all carried the distinct mood of a ritual — powered perhaps as much by collective belief as the water itself.
With the wall clock out of my field of vision and no watch on my wrist, the minutes began to blur together. The water made me feel almost weightless — little by little, the heat began to win. I became used to the sulfurous smell of the water and my concern for the thirty minute cutoff faded away.
No one around me looked particularly happy, but nobody looked bored either. A man across the pool from me walked, bobbing up and down, three steps forward, three steps backward, like a slow-motion metronome. Two of the men to my left were chatting quietly to each other, but so softly that I seldom caught a word. Little waves of water lapped up over the edges of the pool and into the drains surrounding us.
My mind did what it rarely gets to do at home: wander without a task. I watched the man pacing in the pool and, without meaning to, started imagining his life — though surely not a word of it was true. Perhaps he was a retired factory worker who worked his way up to a manager, stubborn and weathered. He’d survived the communist times and was now content to live on the fourth floor of a nameless concrete apartment block in some provincial third tier city, the type of person who only spent money on the bare essentials. What if he was a widower now, and after years of caring for his wife, his doctor convinced him that it was time to take this vacation to treat his own knee that’s been slowing him down more and more. All he wants now is to be able to play with his grandchildren, though they don’t visit as much as they used to.
I wondered who they thought I was — perhaps to one I was a successful foreigner, taking a rest from showing his young children around their ancestral homeland. Or to another, a lonely city-dwelling artist looking for a new direction. Or maybe I was nobody at all, just another head bobbing above the murky soup, here today and gone tomorrow.
Before I knew it, some of the men began to make their way back up the steps and out of the pool. I turned to look at the clock and sure enough, a little over half an hour had passed, and to my own surprise, I felt disappointed that it was over. I waited patiently for the others to exit before making my way toward the railing: last in, last out. I noticed one of the men turning on a shower in the corner. Others immediately reminded him: don’t rinse off. Amusingly, he shuffled back in the water for another moment to coat himself once more in the grime.
Putting my robe and flip-flops back on, I made my way to the pool deck and sank into a chair, body still warm. I closed my eyes. I could hear water lapping up against the side of the pool; quiet conversations went on around me. Without my screens, I was untouched by whatever anxiety-inducing headlines the world was pushing that hour. To the credit of the “treatment,” I did feel rested. Whether or not the sulfur itself played much of a role was beside the point. In Herculane, these treatments run on a mixture of minerals and superstition, and nobody seems particularly interested in separating the two. Something in me had loosened — helped, perhaps, by some combination of the heat and stillness, but also the increasingly rare luxuries of anonymity and unreachability that the water provided. I checked my wrist again for the watch that wasn’t there and decided the next few minutes could stay unaccounted for.
