We love watching Dobrogea travel, and this month it travelled to the capital in the most delicious way possible. At the Tomato and Biodiversity Festival in Bucharest, our ambassadors from Moșia Generalului carried a piece of the region, with a table full of heirloom tomatoes and a story worth telling.

A festival about seeds, not shelves

Held on 1 August at the “Dimitrie Gusti” National Village Museum, the festival is the work of the Semințe cu Suflet (“Seeds with Soul”) community, which every year champions the genetic diversity of the vegetables in Romania’s gardens. As a celebration of biodiversity, seeds, and the quiet, patient people who keep traditional varieties alive, with hundreds of tomato varieties on display, from giants to the most delicate cherries.

It’s exactly the kind of gathering where Dobrogea belongs.

A double honour

Moșia Generalului, the Dobrogean garden of Florin Bidașcă and Anamaria Balmuș, was there with a double honour: as exhibitors, showing their collection of heirloom tomatoes, and as ambassadors of the Dobrogea – European Region of Gastronomy 2029 project. This year they chose to exhibit rather than compete, happily leaving the podium to others while their collection drew admiring eyes across the museum courtyard.

The two returned to Romania after years of working abroad, and in a little over a decade they’ve turned their plot into a genuine laboratory of biodiversity, this season alone, around 150 tomato varieties, including rarities brought home with great care. They’ve learned to see a garden not as a set of separate plants, but as a living ecosystem where every insect, weed and patch of soil plays its part.

In their own words

For Florin and Anamaria, the point of it all reaches well beyond the tomato:

“Dobrogea means more than the Danube Delta and the coast. It also means small villages, perhaps less known, but full of hardworking people, traditions, inherited recipes and authentic flavours that tell the story of this land. We believe the true gastronomic identity of a region is built in households, on farms, and in the communities that keep traditions alive and make the most of local products. We’re proud to be part of this story, and to show that Dobrogea has far more to offer than most people imagine. Every tomato on our table is an invitation to discover the authentic taste of this land.”

We couldn’t have put it better, and it’s precisely why they make such natural ambassadors.

The General’s Dowry

If there’s one variety that captures their spirit, it’s Zestrea Generalului, “the General’s Dowry.” It appeared from an unexpected pollination (tomatoes usually self-pollinate, but nature keeps its exceptions): a cherry tomato with green-gold hues and a taste that turns heads. It took first place at the 2025 Bucharest Tomato Festival, and it’s the first variety-in-the-making born on Moșia Generalului itself. Still being stabilised, it has years of careful selection ahead, but that patience is the whole point.

After twelve years of growing tomatoes, the couple sum it up with a line we keep coming back to: “we tend the plants, but nature signs the final product.” It’s a small sentence that holds the entire spirit of the festival, a celebration of patience, not fast production.

Why they’re the right ambassadors

Their way of gardening, protecting the soil, favouring diversity, leaning on less chemistry and a great deal more soul… Is exactly the kind of thinking the Dobrogea 2029 candidacy is built to champion. A gastronomy region isn’t made only of restaurants and recipes; it’s made of the households and farms where flavour actually begins, and of people willing to keep a genetic heritage alive for the next generation.

That’s what Moșia Generalului carried to Bucharest: not just beautiful tomatoes, but proof that Dobrogea’s identity is grown, seed by seed, in places most maps overlook. We’re proud to have them fly the flag for the region, and prouder still of what each of their tomatoes quietly says about the place we’re all working to share.

Thank you, Florin and Anamaria, for representing Dobrogea so beautifully. Every seed you save is part of the story we’re telling toward 2029.