Rags soaked in turpentine hang from old, holey beams. Someone has planned to paint or repair things here and then suddenly stopped and left everything lying around. The light falls diagonally into the room through the blind skylight, the dust particles dance in the light. Old wooden furniture and furniture parts stand around, some understandable in their function, others so incomplete that they remain completely mysterious. Strange old leather harnesses, which no one knows what they might have been used for, hang above chairs or chair-like structures with wobbly or incomplete legs. Some of the heavy chests are open, others have their lids closed. The open ones contain dusty books and half-decayed magazines in unknown languages, handwritten papers and letters in illegible handwriting. Perhaps they are love letters that have won or broken hearts at some point. In between, old bottles of licorice liqueur, their contents darkened by unknown lengths of time. Earthy-scented dried leaf twigs lie pressed between the layers of paper.
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A space between past and future. Without contemporary witnesses or people who can provide even fragmentary information, the shadow of memory searches around unsteadily, the memory remains suspended in the air, unable to dock anywhere. Something was here, something may have been important here, these objects may have meant something to someone. On the homepage, Adi ale Van talks about memories, feelings and sensations that the fragrance can trigger by transporting you to different places and times... He is inspired by old Romanian traditions, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the Holy Cross, Adi's own childhood in the Danube Valley, memories of loved ones.
For me, however, the scent also has something very modern about it, representing contemporary Romania, which has always been caught between East and West. A current renowned weekly newspaper is called "Dilema Veche", which means "old dichotomy". The writer Mircea Cartarescu says: "Romania is full of beauty, full of magic. The boulevards of Bucharest are more enigmatic, more melancholy, more human than the cities of glass and concrete. I feel at home among the ruins." I myself have fond memories of a trip to Bucharest, an extremely lively modern city with an architectural mishmash of Art Nouveau, Classicism, Neo-Romanesque, Socialist Modernism, Orthodox churches and magnificent postmodern buildings that reek of big money.
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Dilema can be ordered from time to time, depending on how he keeps up with production, via Adi ale Van's homepage. The bottles are handmade works of art, elaborately and wonderfully packaged, here in a specially designed wooden box with a clasp like an old leather belt with a buckle. They come with a personal thank you note from Adi ale Van on artistically designed paper. Even unpacking the box is a joy and a feast for the eyes.
The cap of the bottle and the bottle itself are artistically designed by hand, you always get a unique piece that looks ancient, as if it had fallen directly onto my table in a time machine from centuries past. The wooden box reminds me of those old attics when households are broken up and things are found that perhaps no one has remembered for a long time...
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For me, the fragrance begins almost pungent and exhaustingly alcoholic, in a very similar quality to
Gethsemane, only not quite as harsh and agonizing. I can't make out saffron and bergamot or other citrus notes individually. Bitter myrrh emerges quite quickly. Later, the whole thing becomes more and more licoricey (licorice) and lasts a long time in this licorice phase, which is gradually supported from below with leather and woody notes. At the very end, after several hours, a very soft fragrance remains with light woody and patchouli notes.
Because Anne Sophie Behaghel is named as one of the two perfumers (together with Camille Chemardin) whose work I often greatly appreciate, I had a certain amount of advance confidence in the fragrance. After what was for me a stressful start, it is a moderate, wearable and extremely interesting fragrance with the potential for time travel!