Seneca Anticafe – an activist bookstore, a meeting and epiphanies space in the crazy center of Bucharest

The history of my living in the Mihalache-Kiseleff neighborhood of Bucharest is intimately linked to Seneca Anticafe. Especially since I became a mother, I have always passed in front of the bookstore on my way to the park; I have seen in these peregrinations, from the outside, how this space was physically built and then how it became an emblematic place for the neighborhood, the city, the bookstore sector and for us, REPER21 team.

Initially I thought the space was (just) a bookstore, named after a stoic philosopher I liked since high school, Seneca. And it seemed like a very tasteful bookstore, aesthetically and culturally, given the way the books were arranged and their titles, many in the areas of food, ecology and inclusion. After going into Seneca several times and learning about the various things it offers, I discovered that it’s more than a bookstore, it’s a real space for activism and community engagement.  It’s hard to list all the initiatives the bookstore is doing in this direction, so I describe here the ones I’ve experienced firsthand. Seneca is a space where you can go to work, offering a large, modular and welcoming coworking area with lots of plants. If you want to work from here, you can do so by paying not for what you consume, but for the time you spend in the space, based on a charming bookmark you get at the entrance. The book token, which includes a philosophical quote, entitles visitors to consume as much fruit, tea, biscuits and water, plain or with lemon, as they like while in the bookstore. In the various places in Seneca you will see one of the philosopher’s best-known quotes explaining the alternative economic model of the bookshop: « Nothing belongs to us, only time is ours ». This economic model is a novel one for the coffee shops and coworking spaces sector in our country, turning Seneca into a real « anticafe ». Seneca is also an alternative publishing house in the Romanian book landscape because all its books are printed on recycled paper and many trees are planted in partnership with an association. Moreover, each book published by Seneca carries its own story as well as the ecological story associated with its production in terms of CO2, water, energy, wood savings …

Seneca’s social and civic responsibility goes beyond the bookstore, publishing house and coworking space and reaches out to the most vulnerable ones. Before the war in Ukraine, I would often see dozens of people at Seneca preparing thousands of packages of food and other necessities to go to lonely, elderly people in delicate situations across the country. With the outbreak of the war, the team’s solidarity and outreach efforts multiplied to include Ukrainian refugees who have received systematic support over the past two years in finding housing, employment, daily living necessities and learning the Romanian language.

Seneca is a community space where books are promoted and sold, where people are working, are supported, but also a third space. Here, on a daily basis, regulars – book lovers, parents, neighborhood residents, visitors to Kiseleff Park and the surrounding cafes – exchange ideas and inspiration for a different world. The regular donations and exchanges of books and plants, the intergenerational workshops, the comfy chairs and sofas of the space urge you to sit and chat with local acquaintances, booksellers, among non-human friends, the books. The third space continues outside the bookstore with the chairs and pots of aromatic plants placed outside that invite passers-by to touch, smell, slow down from the bustle of Bucharest to exchange a word at the bookstore, to have “plus de liens” (more links) and “moins de biens” (fewer things). Quite often, through Seneca EcoLogos awareness-raising and citizen action workshops, the third space gets out of Bucharest and populates various corners of the country, from Roșia Montană to Timișoara, where we have also teamed up many times at the La Pas artisanal gastronomy festival.

Seneca’s energy is maintained by the physical space and fueled by the bookstore team. Booksellers, female and male (increasingly rare in the sector), environmental educators, support staff, whoever you meet in the Seneca space will give you a smile and treat you with friendship and openness. Our team inevitably made friends with some of this group: with Katia, the Ukrainian refugee who has been working here for over two years, with the bookseller Monica, with Anastasia who coordinates Seneca’s work with charm and dynamism, and with Valentina.

With Valentina, a resource person in Seneca, we are connected through the love of books, the passion for ecology, the pleasure of being among people and a more complex story. Together with Valentina we started in the Spring of 2024 one of the pilot actions of the Erasmus+ project « Tiers Lieux climatiques », carried out at Seneca Anticafe, an emblematic third place for REPER21 and for the activist environmental movement in our country, for all the above reasons.

Together with Valentina, we identified a group of close third spaces, consisting in the French bookstore Kira Kiralina, the Romanian Peasant Museum, Garage Cafe, OPEN community garden (managed by Climato Sfera). Through the Appreciative Design approach of the project we aimed to develop an action that would connect these third spaces through a common story and bring the community closer to each of them.

This is how the Environmental Book Club was born, a unique initiative in terms of the proposed thematic and the actors promoting it. There are many book clubs in Bucharest and all over the country, but they do not prioritize environmental, ecology and climate issues, neither directly (through specialized books), nor indirectly (through books of literature or philosophy), as we propose with this Club. The existing clubs are mainly initiated by actors in formal education (schools, high schools, universities) and more rarely through partnerships between a civil society actor (REPER21) and an economic actor from the book sector (Seneca Anticafe).

The environmental book club allows Seneca to promote the environmental books it translates and publishes, a type of book that is not much sought after by the public. For us, REPER21 team, the Environmental Book Club creates the right context for citizen debates based on scientifically documented ecological issues from the books we propose for the Club. It also allows us to promote the few books on environmental themes from the Romanian landscape and to extend our network to young people, whom we specifically target through the Club, to biologists, anthropologists, landscape scientists, agriculturalists and various scientists who attend the Club’s monthly meetings for interdisciplinary discussions.

Launched on April 25, 2024, the Environmental Book Club has met six times so far and has put the spotlight on the books « No One’s Too Small to Make a Difference » (Greta Thunberg), « The 6th Extinction. An Unnatural History of the Earth » (Elisabeth Kolbert), « The Last Steppe Horses » (Maja Lunde), « Turning the tide » (Baptise Morizot) and « Ministry for the Future » (Kim Stanley Robinson). More than 60 people of all ages attended these meetings, and some of them were constant presences at each Club.

We, REPER21 team, took advantage of these meetings to analyze and rethink some of our citizen education and awareness-raising interventions on ecological issues. For example, at the June 2024 Club, when we debated the book « The 6th extinction » of Elisabeth Kolbert, we animated the debate on biodiversity through a graphic facilitation by the artist Niznaiu (Cristina Labo). Cristina has rendered in a complex drawing the most important tracks of our discussion and this drawing remained in the center of the library for other visitors to analyse. It was the first time in our association’s activity that we used such a visual tool, which proved to be a real success.

Recently, after its six-month maturation phase in Bucharest, the Environmental Book Club went out in the country and formalized its « friendships » with new civic actors and bookshops. Together with Seneca team, the bookstore Kira Kiralina and the local partner CRIES (Resource Center for Ethical and Solidarity Initiatives), on the occasion of the La Pas 2024 artisanal gastronomy festival, we launched the Book Club in Timisoara. We discussed the French philosopher Baptise Morizot’s book « Turning the tide », which was a real success at the Book Club in Bucharest. The journey will continue in Iasi, where in partnership with our friend association Mai bine we will launch the Club in this part of the country in the coming months.

We look forward to seeing you at one of the Club meetings in your city and, why not, maybe even at an online Environmental Book Club!