"Thirty years ago, 200 people lived in the Moldovan village of Dobrusa. But most have since left or died. After a twin killing in February, there’s only one survivor still standing..
Grisa Muntean, a short, mustachioed farmer often found in a flat-cap, a checked shirt and a ripped pair of blue trousers held up by a drawstring. For company, Mr. Muntean has his two cats, five dogs, nine turkeys, 15 geese, 42 chickens, about 50 pigeons, 120 ducks and several thousand bees. The other humans have either died, left for larger towns and cities in Moldova, or emigrated to Russia or other parts of Europe.
“The loneliness kills you,” Mr. Muntean, 65, said on a recent afternoon. His former neighbors’ houses are vanishing almost as fast as their owners. With few animals to graze the roadsides, and with only Mr. Muntean to prune the orchards, the buildings are sinking below a canopy of walnut groves and apple trees. “When I work, I speak with the trees,” Mr. Muntean said. “With the birds, with the animals, with my tools. There is no one else to talk to.”
Dobrusa was once a village of 50 houses that lined two parallel streets at the bottom of a shallow valley. Like many settlements across Moldova, it emptied out after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, an exodus mirrored across Eastern Europe, which has the world’s fastest shrinking population. Now only a few corrugated iron roofs can still be seen in Dobrusa, poking above the undergrowth. They are visible from the dirt track that connects the village to the nearest tarmac road. Even the village graveyard, set on the other side of the valley, is slowly receding into an undergrowth of nettles and brambles, grass flowers and cow parsley. Plants like these are the closest Mr. Muntean has to neighbors. Until February, Mr. Muntean relied on the company of Gena and Lida Lozynsky, a couple in their early 40s who lived at the other end of the village."
