text:
On this day...
• 1939 – Romanian Prime Minister Armand Călinescu (pictured) was assassinated in Bucharest by pro-Nazi members of the Iron Guard.
On this day...
• Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism / Black Ribbon Day
• 1944 – King Michael dismissed the pro-Axis government of General Ion Antonescu, putting Romania on the side of the Allies for the remainder of World War II
30 July 2014
Consider, for a moment, the misfortunes of winemakers in Moldova, a former Soviet republic in southeastern Europe, tucked in between Ukraine and Romania.
Their country is the poorest in Europe, with a per capita GDP about the same as Honduras. They'd love to sell their product—which has gotten approving nods from foreign critics—in wealthier countries. But most of those customers don't even know that Moldova exists, let alone that its winemaking tradition goes back thousands of years.
"It's a very popular question: Where's Moldova?" says Veaceslav Nivnea, marketing director for Albastrele Wines, a company based in Chisinau, the country's capital.
Now throw in a dose of political upheaval. And we're not just talking wars and revolutions, Soviet rule or destruction of vineyards during Mikhail Gorbachev's anti-alcohol campaign in the 1980s.
There's more. Late last year, Russia, traditionally their biggest market, banned imports of Moldovan wine, ostensibly for reasons of food safety.
But the timing—right before Moldova was set to sign an agreement to pursue closer ties to the European Union—suggested that the move could have been political retaliation. (The EU's food safety authorities saw no problem with the same wines.) Meanwhile, right next door in Ukraine, there's a political crisis and escalating violence.
So are Moldovan winemakers feeling beaten down? Not at all. "It helps us," says Andrian Davidescu, commercial director of Vinaria din Vale, another wine producer. "Before, nobody knows there is a country Moldova. Now, they know where it is. Next to Ukraine!"
In fact, 13 of Moldova's top wine producers chose just this moment to promote their wines—which observers say have improved vastly in recent years—to wine reviewers and importers in the U.S. Earlier this week, they held a tasting event in Washington, D.C. At each table there was a sign: "Looking for importer." On Thursday, they'll be doing the same at the Astor Center in New York.
According to Christy Canterbury, a New York-based wine expert, wines from Moldova certainly could claim a place on the wine list, if given a fair chance. "Prospects for the dry aromatic whites are fantastic," she says. Their biggest obstacle? A lingering perception among many importers that former Soviet republics "must be rustic countries that don't know what they're doing."
Moldova has outgrown that reputation, she says. Winemakers are using the latest technology, and "the terroir is excellent." She's tasted 13 wines from producers on the current tour. Eleven of the 13, she says, "were very good." (The other two were "fine, but nothing to write home about.")
The other big obstacle for Moldovan producers, she says, is the crowded wine marketplace, and the tendency of shops to put wines from Moldova in the section marked "Other Regions," at the back of the store or the bottom of the rack. Canterbury advises Moldovan producers to focus on promoting their local wine varieties, such as Feteasca Alba and Feteasca Neagra, because few others grow them.
But the essential problem of Moldova's obscurity remains. The country's winemakers need something to grab a buyer's attention; something that gives Moldovan wines an identity, and makes them memorable.
Canterbury has one idea. There may not be another country in the world that relies so heavily for its economic survival on this ancient drink.
Only 3.6 million people live in Moldova, but somehow it's the 14th biggest wine producer in the world, just ahead of Brazil. According to Canterbury, roughly a quarter of the country's population works, directly or indirectly, in the wine business. Astonishingly, it even boasts the world's biggest wine cellar, a vast cave with 120 miles of passageways, of which 34 miles are used. Moldovans even claim that the shape of their country resembles a bunch of grapes.
So who's got a catchy marketing slogan for a small, embattled country that's kind of like a big, big vineyard?
On this day...
16 July 2014
I once heard an unusual tale about an Indian investment broker working in Bucharest, Romania, who had become enchanted by the Danube River Delta region, with its lonely canals, floating reed beds and silver onion-domed monasteries alongside quaint blue cottages in fishing villages one could only reach by boat.
But back then, in 1999, there was no real way to explore the area, teeming with such a variety of wildlife that it had been named a Unesco Biosphere. There were no comfortable places to overnight, aside from some depressing Soviet-era hotels. So the Indian expat Diwaker Singh decided to build a resort that would offer a window into the delta, a region that is home to more than 1,200 species of plants and trees; 100 species of fish; tortoises, foxes, otters and wild boar; and a vital hub for some 300 bird species from as far away as Siberia and China in their southerly migration. Mr. Singh's vision was realized nearly a decade ago with the 2005 opening of the Delta Nature Resort.
The resort, which has since changed hands, was opened against the backdrop of an Eastern Europe that was making significant economic strides. And the story of it lingered with me, for many reasons. Like Mr. Singh, I have a fondness for Eastern Europe. My father was born in Budapest, and I was an exchange student there in 1991. I toured western Romania at the end of my year abroad. Two years later, I served with the Peace Corps in Poland.
Back then, Romania was still redefining itself after the overthrow and assassination of the Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. It seemed a hopeful gesture to open an eco-resort in a historically neglected region, to employ locals in order to create a robust economic engine. Last summer, I returned to Romania to see what had become of the country, and that dream.
The great Danube River, the Continent's longest after the Volga, originates deep in the Black Forest in Germany and meanders southeastward through 10 countries and four capitals before finally emptying into the Black Sea. There, touching the borders of Romania and Ukraine, it disintegrates into a wild labyrinth of channels, swamps, lakes and countless corridors of reeds.
I got to the delta region via road. Upon arriving in Bucharest, a resort bus and driver were waiting for me. It would be a three-and-a-half-hour drive. We passed prairies and groves of dried sunflowers, miles of apple orchards and, along the roadsides, makeshift wooden tables with bushels of gladiolas and mountains of red and green grapes for the honest taking. We sometimes shared the road with horse-drawn carriages sinking beneath loads of humongous watermelons or bright yellow corn and had to occasionally make way for gaggles of geese or shepherds and their flocks crossing the road. I saw, too, abandoned factories immersed in weeds and bleak prefabricated tenement housing with laundry fluttering from balconies, legacies of Communist urban planning. It seemed as if little had changed since my last visit to the country, almost a quarter century ago.
The Delta Nature Resort, with its 30 bungalows, overlooks the western edge of the delta, just outside the town of Tulcea. While I checked in, I went over my two-day itinerary with the resort's tourism director, who told me she had arranged for a speedboat to take me along one of the three main delta canals. When we looked at the map, however, and she showed me which canal, I told her I was intrigued by another one because I'd read the area around it had served as hunting grounds for Ceaucescu. The director laughed and, sweeping her hand across the delta map, said, "But this was all his!" I ended up taking the tour she suggested.
My bungalow was comfortable and spacious, with whitewashed walls, a sitting room and colorful rugs across the wooden floor. After unpacking, I sat on the veranda for a privileged view of the sun setting across the desolate steppes. It was silent, until I heard — and then turned to see — hundreds of egrets among the reed beds erupt into flight toward the setting sun, and then suddenly swerve en masse toward the Black Sea, a spectacular image, as if in a dream.
The moment of stillness was but a memory the next day, when I headed out from Tulcea's harbor on a speedboat with Vasile, a burly, stoic man who chain-smoked and spoke no English but, I was told, was a delta native who'd fished the area since he was a boy. We zipped by deserted, rusty barges and houseboats until Vasile took us north into quieter canals and slowed down to point out to me whenever he saw an egret or stork or falcon, sometimes a cormorant, in the distance, standing motionless. We cruised by fishermen and women in track suits with their poles amid weeping willows and black poplars, and by grazing cows and goats.
At one point, Vasile abruptly slowed the motor and jerked the boat around. He'd seen something. "Problem?" I asked, but he only put his finger to his lips as he veered into a narrow, heavily wooded channel. I was alone with this stranger, and my imagination started to get the best of me until we reached the mouth of what I saw on my map was Lake Furtuna, one of the delta's largest. And as we entered, I was greeted by a stunning vista: a vast carpet of pelicans covering almost every inch of water, clucking and paddling and flapping their wings among clusters of white and yellow waterlilies. I ambled to the bow, marveling at the scene and snapping photos, so engrossed that I barely noticed Vasile had turned off the motor. When I looked back at him, I saw his boyish half-smile, and that he was every bit as transfixed as I was.
At Sulina, the delta's biggest town, Vasile motioned that he would nap while I went ashore to have lunch on the esplanade. My meal was fatty swordfish and French fries, but also a tasty house white wine, accompanied by stray dogs circling my table. When I returned to the boat, Vasile was still asleep, so I continued along the esplanade, looking up at iron-lattice balconies hanging at rakish angles and buildings in various stages of arrested decline, all covered in chipped paint. I saw snoozing mutts in front of boarded-up houses, and I tried to imagine the prosperous port Sulina had once been in the early 1900s, when it was the seat of the European Danube Commission.
As we sped back toward Tulcea, in almost every direction I looked, electrical power cables stretched toward the horizon. There were hollowed-out warehouses and crumbling smokestacks, and giant freighters plying the canals. In Tulcea, a Soviet-era factory still used for manufacturing aluminum juts out to the shore. On my map, I saw how the waters had been dammed and rerouted over the centuries to make it easier to navigate. Never before had I seen the industrial so close to the pastoral, and moreover, where the pastoral is supposed to be protected.
While the resort offered a way into this idyll, staying there was a reminder that it was not the well-oiled machine you'd find in a busier tourist destination. Among the things that went wrong: My meal orders in the restaurant got consistently mixed up, a television there blared nonstop, the pool was dirty, the Jacuzzi was out of order, the safe in my room was broken. The staff, though well intentioned, was young and inexperienced, as command of English was seemingly the sole requirement for employment.
The frustration slid off me the next day, when I took an excursion on a small fishing boat across the brackish Lake Samova toward the 19th-century Saon Monastery. My guide was Ross, a 20-something who spoke English and was working as a chef and tour guide at the resort. Homesick for the delta, where he was born, he'd recently moved back from a six-year stay in Italy. His passion for the delta was evident throughout his tour, when he pointed out a true silver pheasant at the monastery aviary, and the glowing icons and exquisite paintings inside the church, as well as a wooden pagoda sheltering five copper bells. Later on the boat, he plucked marsh thistles, and happily described how he spices his cooking with them.
If everyone who spent time in the region was entranced, why was it still a sleepy backwater, I wondered. I talked about this one morning with a French couple at the resort, and they referred me to an independent tour guide in Tulcea. I caught up with Iuliana Stanescu via email a few days later, told her my impressions of the delta and asked her for hers.
"I like my job, and most of all I love this beautiful spot called the Danube Delta," she wrote me. "The authorities don't apply the law as they should in order to keep this spot clean, they don't implement a development program."
Edward Bratfanof, governor of the Danube Delta Biosphere Reserve Authority, acknowledged that it could be better preserved. While there are no "industrial activities" inside the reserve, he said, fishing, reed harvesting, cattle breeding, small-scale agriculture, tourism and "services for people's day-to-day life" are allowed. He acknowledged, however, that the speed at which freighters travel there remains a problem.
A new law is under consideration "in view to protect the fauna and flora and to reduce bank erosion." It was a delicate balance, he added, to encourage tourism and revenue for the region and yet "decrease the pressure on natural resources, especially on fish populations."
I left the delta dazed by its utopian landscape but, like Iuliana, concerned for its vulnerable beauty. This was nearly a year ago, and I thought recently to track down Diwaker Singh, curious as to what had happened to him and how it was that the delta region had so beguiled him. Now living in London, Mr. Singh quickly responded to my email, telling me he still visits the delta at least once a year.
"Romania is resplendent with natural assets which can be exploited for sustainable tourism," he wrote me, describing how he and his wife were personally invested in the resort, ensuring its quality for guests. "However, the country has found little interest with tour operators because of lack of adequate, targeted and sustained marketing."
He told me of Ceausescu's industrialization of the delta region, how the deposed dictator had converted it to farmland with a focus on exports, in light of proximity to the Black Sea.
"The current generation of Romanians love their nature and are keen to preserve it," Mr. Singh wrote. "I strongly believe that in time, as the economy of the country improves, the delta will come back to its full glory."
13 July 2014
BUCHAREST, Romania (AP) — For the first time since communism collapsed in Romania 25 years ago, a former prison commander goes on trial Monday charged with being responsible for the torture and murdering prisoners considered a threat to the country's old order.
Survivors say the delay in bringing perpetrators to justice was a cynical tactic by Romania's new rulers, some of whom held senior positions under the communist regime, to avoid accountability.
"These criminals were left in peace on purpose and most died in their beds. now they are bringing some of the crimes to light and it is important," said Octav Bjoza, director of the Association of Former Political Prisoners in an interview with The Associated Press.
Alexandru Visinescu, 88, goes on trial charged with crimes against humanity for deaths that happened under his command at Ramnicu Sarat prison from 1956 to 1963. Since authorities brought charges against him, Visinescu says people in the street have shoved him to the ground and called him a criminal. He has pleaded not guilty and calls himself a scapegoat.
"I only followed orders. They should ask those that gave the orders," he told the AP on Friday. "I am convinced they will do anything to take revenge.
"Why didn't they put me on trial in 1964?" when the political prisons closed "or after (Communist leader) Nicolae Ceausescu died? Why now?"
He contests the number of deaths that prosecutors say happened under his command and denies mistreatment happened under his command that led to prisoners' deaths. The word "criminal" is scrawled on the outside wall of the building where he lives in a shabby one-room apartment, full of old photographs of him in uniform and as a young boy. Born into a family of peasants, Visinescu said his father died the year he was born.
He seems more resigned than he was a year ago when he cursed and lunged at reporters after hearing charges against him and says he expects to go to prison. Another former prison guard was charged in 2000 with aggravated murder, but died before his trial could get underway.
Former ministers, diplomats, army officers, farmers, priests and workers considered a threat to the Communist regime were locked up in prisons from 1948 to 1964. Historians say one-fifth of the 500,000 who were incarcerated died. Bjoza says there were 40,000 political prisoners when communism ended with only 3,000 alive now.
Former prisoner Valentin Cristea, who was incarcerated in Ramnicu Sarat while Visinescu was commander, communicated by Morse code in the grim lockup where prisoners were mainly kept in solitary confinement and banned from communicating.
Cristea, 84, said he learned that the inmate in the neighboring cell, former army officer Jenica Arnautu, had gone on hunger strike to protest mistreatment, was being force-fed with a tube down his throat. In November 1959, three days after the tapping on the wall stopped, Arnautu, who was 36, died, Cristea said in an interview from his home in Campina, 80 kilometers (50 miles) north of Bucharest. Visinescu denied knowledge of the case.
Prosecutors say 14 people died under Visinescu's command, and said corpses showed signs of malnutrition according to doctors who signed the death certificates. They accuse Visinescu of denying medical treatment and postponing the hospitalization of gravely sick prisoners. "The regime ...did not allow for the minimum survival conditions in the long term, "the indictment said. "Prisoners died in a long drawn-out process, that was nonetheless efficient, in which they were tortured physically and mentally," were denied food, and were physically punished on the slightest pretext, the indictment says. Visinescu says fewer died.
A probe ordered by the Communist government in 1968 into the prisons concluded the state had installed "a regime to exterminate political prisoners from 1948-1964."
Diplomat Victor Radulescu Pogoneanu, who was serving a 25-year sentence for "plot and treason," died at Ramnicu Sarat after prison guards held his paralyzed legs and dragged him down stairs, banging his head on each step, according to the indictment. Visinescu denied he had been dragged down the stairs.
Bjoza said many prisoners died disappointed that there had been no attempt to punish former prison guards.
"We forgave these people but there has been no justice, so we feel condemned again."
24 June 2014
CHISINAU, Moldova (AP)—Despite protests from Moscow and only partial support among his own people, Moldova's prime minister says he believes his firm pro-European stance will benefit the country's relations with both the West and Russia in the long term.
Prime Minister Iurie Leanca says Moldova's entry Friday into an association agreement with the 28-nation European Union will make it a "more predictable country, which is good for our partners in the West and ... in the East."
In an interview Tuesday with The Associated Press, Leanca called European integration the "fundamental choice" of his government for the poor, former Soviet republic of 4 million sandwiched between much-larger Romania and Ukraine.
He said the tragic developments in Ukraine directly affect Moldova and "its security, its trade, especially with our traditional partners in the East." Ukraine saw mass protests and its former president toppled after he abruptly pulled out of a similar EU agreement in November.
Leanca said his government had been clear that it intended to move closer to the EU ever since it came to power in 2009, unlike the former government in Ukraine.
"When you show hesitation, when you show a certain confusion on what you want to achieve," it can have a detrimental effect, Leanca said.
Russia has taken punitive trade measures against neighboring Baltic states and Ukraine as those countries sought closer ties with the West. Last year, Russia placed an embargo on Moldovan wine and brandy as Moldova said it planned to go ahead and sign the agreement with the EU, where half of its exports now go.
Moving closer to the EU— which about half of Moldovans favor— is the best solution for the country's future, Leanca said. With average salaries of just 220 euros ($300) a month, some 600,000 Moldovans now work abroad, half in the EU and half in Russia.
The EU is "the most efficient instrument in modernizing the country, in modernizing the institutions, in making them accountable, in achieving the real independence of the judiciary," Leanca said. "(I want) to make sure the country has a good system in place to fight corruption ... to give the citizens ... confidence that this country has a future."
Leanca, a former foreign minister, said his government was concerned but also optimistic about the frozen conflict in the pro-Russian separatist region of Trans-Dniester, which broke away from Moldova in 1990 over fears that Moldova planned to reunite with Romania. There are still 1,500 Russian troops stationed there and Russia's annexation of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula in March raised concerns that it could also annex Trans-Dniester.
"I appreciate the fact that no decisions have been made that could have destabilized the situation (in Trans-Dniester) as happened in eastern Ukraine or it happened unfortunately in Odessa," he told the AP, referring to riots in that Ukrainian port. "I want to ... do our utmost so that the situation remains under control and ... we can find a lasting peaceful solution."
He said his government would persuade citizens with "facts and arguments" that the EU was the country's best option but Moldovans themselves will choose whether to pursue a future with the EU or closer ties with Russia when they vote in the November parliamentary election.
"This will be the most democratic way to decide the destiny of Moldova," he said.
Alison Mutler contributed to this report from Bucharest, Romania.
15 June 2014
The countries of the former Eastern Bloc have totally transformed themselves since the fall of the Iron Curtain 25 years ago, as the BBC's Tanya Beckett reflects—drawing on her own experiences of the region, both then and now.
When I was 14 years old my parents took my brother and me to Romania on holiday. My father was always up for a bargain vacation abroad and it seemed, as they say, like a good idea at the time.
I didn't have much experience of hotels, but this one was awful—drab with a broken shower, and the food was pretty much inedible.
We exchanged our pounds for Romanian lei in clandestine manoeuvres, swapping wads of cash wrapped in napkins back and forth in the hotel.
In the absence of anything else to occupy our time, we managed to find a man teaching windsurfing on the Black Sea.
So we spent most of the time wielding a sail in the sun, and becoming pretty proficient in the water, as our parents waved frantically, shouting inaudible instructions from the beach.
The natural beauty of the country must have been a cherished bright spot for Romanians stuck in an otherwise grey and hopeless existence.
There was the odd bit of male attention for an adolescent me, but that was clamped down on pretty quickly by the security police, of whom most people seemed to live in terrible fear.
Beggars on the streets
Romania's Securitate seemed to be everywhere, and that wasn't just in people's minds. It was, as I was later to learn, the largest police force in the whole of communist Europe.
The few Romanians we could talk to described how they wanted to get out of a country where they could not choose their work, and where hope for a better future seemed an impossible prospect.
As part of my brother's and my education, our parents opted for a trip to Bucharest.
It was not the sort of day out you might hope for as a teenager—the capital was grey, and for all that we had been taught about the equality and benefits of communism, the streets were littered with beggars.
Fencing on bottled water
The experience of the holiday meant that when I studied at university, I found I had little tolerance for the table-banging students who espoused the benefits of communism without actually having understood how it worked in practice, and the despair it wreaked on society.
Whilst a student I went on a fencing trip to Poland. It was a test of survival. We couldn't drink the tap water and the only option we had while we were training was to prise open endless tiny bottles of fizzy water with anything we could find.
There was nothing in the shops really, just some ghastly salami, and the windows were filled with displays of the same item—quite often with those bottles of fizzy water again.
If you expressed a hope that there might be an alternative, you were batted back with not just incredulity, but impatience. Why entertain the prospect of diversity when all it could lead to was frustration?
When we travelled around, we noticed that the Poles had no interest in us at all. It seemed that the weight of their terrible history had expelled every ounce of joy from their souls.
The only escape was the lure of vodka, which we were introduced to on New Year's Eve. I wasn't used to handling spirits and aside from a few rather jolly flashbacks, I remember very little about the festivities at all.
Nostalgia for communism
Last month, decades later, I returned to central and eastern Europe to film some reports on how former communist countries had changed since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
We wanted to capture how some economies had managed to make the transition to market capitalism and how it had affected people's lives.
You can guess that in any society there are those who are driven by the idea of possibility and are happy to take risks, whereas there are others who favour the prospect of security.
The recent roller-coaster ride in the aftermath of the financial crisis has shown just how dangerous rampant capitalism can be, so this was a particularly interesting time to find people in some cases reflecting wistfully on the stability that communism had offered.
The two countries which leapt out at me as being polar opposites were, by coincidence, Romania and Poland. The latter has become a dynamic economy driven by hard working, determined people.
We visited a Fiat factory which was energetic, shiny and new. It looked to be at the cutting edge of how a business with a global perspective should be run. Gone was the pall of grief: it had been replaced by a nation with a uniform sense of purpose.
Romania, which we visited a couple of weeks later, was different entirely—Bucharest embodied a sense of opportunity squandered.
There are terrible cases of poverty, and Romanians are angry that government after government has failed to deliver on the nation's promise.
The next quarter-century
I wondered if the different outcomes had their roots in how their revolutions had taken place—in Poland through a dogged march by the unions, and in Romania a bloody confrontation which masked what was in effect, a coup.
Perhaps the trajectory of their economies since then came down to the political momentum at the start of their transitions.
When I came home and reflected more on what I had seen, I felt encouraged. Central and eastern Europe still has a way to go, but the next 25 years will be much more sure-footed than the last.
His Royal Highness receives honorary doctorate from the University of Bucharest
3 June 2014
Message of acceptance for honorary doctorate by Bucharest University for contributions to sustainable agriculture and rural development
'(….) Romania has become closer to my heart (…) I have come to love Romania for its unique and unspoilt natural beauty, its fascinating patchwork of landscapes and rural communities, each with their own diverse customs, together with the astonishingly rich and varied biodiversity of a countryside that is truly a European and international treasure. (…)'
'However, even now, tragically, all too often the region's really remarkable historic architecture and rural settlements seem subject to piecemeal destruction—largely, it appears, through lack of information in the local areas.(…) Romanians have much to be proud of , and this pride should lead you to do everything possible to protect your traditional way of life (…)'
31 May 2014
A Romanian Orthodox service in Luton, north of London. More than 100,000 Romanians were living in Britain in 2012 Luke Macgregor/Reuters
31 May 2014
LONDON—Three days after Andrei Opincaru, a 29-year-old Romanian, arrived in Britain this year, police officers saw him smoking a cigarette on the street. They stopped, searched and questioned him about having marijuana.
"I asked them: 'What are you doing? You cannot do this to me. You're treating me like a criminal,' " he recounted. The officers, he said, laughed and went away. "To them it was just a joke," he said.
Mr. Opincaru came to Britain in hopes of landing a good job by taking advantage of newly extended employment rights for workers from Romania and Bulgaria, which were among the latest entrants to the European Union. But Mr. Opincaru, like other newcomers, was surprised by how little his European citizenship did to shield him from an intense political backlash against the employment measure.
The tension became more apparent last month when Nigel Farage, leader of the U.K. Independence Party, expressed discomfort at the idea of having Romanian neighbors, suggesting there was a high level of criminality among Romanians in Britain. "This is not to say for a moment that all or even most Romanian people living in the U.K. are criminals," he said. "But it is to say that any normal and fair-minded person would have a perfect right to be concerned if a group of Romanian people suddenly moved in next door."
In an interview with LBC Radio, Mr. Farage, whose wife is German, was pressed on whether he would feel uncomfortable with German neighbors. "I think you know the difference," he replied. "We want an immigration policy that is not just based on controlling not just quantity but quality." The independence party, known for an anti-immigration stance, won about a quarter of the vote in last month's election for European Parliament members.
Mr. Opincaru, who found a job in construction, shares an apartment with four Italians and two Portuguese who also came to London for work. But he and other Romanians say they are made to feel like second-class citizens, more so than the migrants from affluent countries in Western Europe, despite having equal legal rights. One bank refused to let him open an account, he said, though he provided all the required documents and had secured a job and a national insurance number—the equivalent of a Social Security number.
Being a Romanian in Britain is "very, very difficult," Mr. Opincaru said. "They're not treating us like other citizens from Europe," he added. "Wherever you go and they hear you're Romanian, they change the music."
When the European Union extended full employment rights to Romania and Bulgaria this year, allowing workers there free movement throughout Europe, nationalist politicians warned there would be a flood of desperate immigrants who would take jobs from native workers. Headlines predicted a surge in crime and cheating on benefits. One Conservative politician, Philippa Roe, said the arrival of Romanians and Bulgarians would escalate problems like begging.
In November, the government froze loans and other financial support for thousands of Romanian and Bulgarian students as a "precautionary measure."
But the figures published last month did not reflect an influx of migrants from the two countries. The number of Romanians and Bulgarians working in Britain from January to March of this year dropped to 140,000 from 144,000 in the previous quarter, according to the Office for National Statistics. That compared with 1.7 million migrants from the rest of the European Union working in Britain, it said.
And not everyone has been unwelcoming. The Muswell Hill Baptist Church in London has set up a charitable organization to help Romanian migrants. "We should respond to them as European citizens, not per nationality," said Martin Stone, who leads the program. "We should grow up and not lower ourselves to petty nationalism. We know where finger-pointing has led to in the past."
Part of the antipathy today stems from previous decisions to allow unfettered immigration from Poland and seven other Eastern European countries immediately after they joined the European Union in 2004.
The number of native Poles in Britain has grown tenfold since, and today they are the second largest immigrant population, just behind Indians and ahead of Pakistanis, who have colonial links to Britain.
This year, the government tightened rules for migrants seeking benefits. Migrants may not seek jobless benefits for three months after their arrival, and they must show weekly earnings of at least $255 before they can apply for child care, unemployment, housing or health care benefits.
Romanians and Bulgarians interviewed in Britain acknowledged that the benefit system was subject to abuse and said the rules could be stricter. But they said the government and public response to their arrival had been disproportionate.
About 101,000 Romanians and 57,000 Bulgarians were living in Britain in 2012, according to the latest annual residency data from the Office for National Statistics. They gained the right to visa-free travel in 2007 when both countries joined the European Union, but they required work permits until the beginning of this year. They were significantly fewer than Britain's Asian population, and fewer than the French, Irish, Italian, and even German and American populations.
Around 23,000 Romanians and Bulgarians arrived in Britain in 2013, a threefold increase from the previous year, according to the statistics office. They were among the 201,000 immigrants from the European Union over all, it said. About 134,000 British citizens left the country during the same period.
The number of Romanians applying for a national insurance number more than doubled, to 47,000, in 2013 compared with the previous year, according to the latest figures from the Department of Work and Pensions. About 18,000 Bulgarians registered. In contrast, about 102,000 Poles applied.
Despite the tension, Romanians and Bulgarians said they were eager to make the move to Britain. And one recruiting firm said the workers were much needed in Britain to meet labor demands.
Companies posted 36,285 job offers in Britain in the first quarter of the year, according to Tjobs, a recruiting company that places Romanian workers across Europe. Andreas Cser, the company's president, said British companies were having particular difficulty filling jobs in the construction and infrastructure sectors.
Eugen Smintina, 39, found a job with an electrical company. "I would like to say to all English people that I come here as a Romanian citizen in your country because I have work," he said. "Not because of alcohol, drugs or stealing other people's jobs."
Andreea Corsei, 28, who has a law degree from Romania and arrived in London this year to pursue a Ph.D. in criminal law, dreams of setting up a law firm with her husband, Daniel, who is also studying law. Romanians in Britain face "walls that are higher to climb" but also the opportunity "to prove what you can do," she said.
27 May 2014
Have you ever seen Count Dracula and Vlad the Impaler in the same place at the same time?
Of course not, and that, according to Radu Florescu, is precisely the point: The two men, he argued, were one and the same.
Professor Florescu, who died on May 18 at 88, was the scion of a distinguished Romanian family and a noted scholar of Balkan affairs. But he was known to a much wider public as the author of books that sought to identify Vlad, the evildoing 15th-century monarch, as the historical inspiration for Bram Stoker's antihero.
Professor Florescu's death, in Mougins, France, from complications of pneumonia, was confirmed by his family.
By day, Professor Florescu taught at Boston College, where, at his death, he was an emeritus professor of history and the former longtime director of the East European Research Center there.
He advised the State Department and Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts on the Balkans and wrote a string of scholarly books, among them "The Struggle Against Russia in the Romanian Principalities: A Problem in Anglo-Turkish Diplomacy, 1821-1854."
But thanks to his moonlight job, Professor Florescu was for four decades also one of the world's leading experts in matters Dracular.
The first of his many books on the subject, "In Search of Dracula," published in 1972 and written with Raymond T. McNally, helped spur the revival of interest in Stoker's vampirical nobleman that continues to this day.
"It has changed my life," Professor Florescu told The New York Times in 1975. "I used to write books that nobody read."
Radu Nicolae Florescu was born in Bucharest on Oct. 23, 1925. As he would learn in the course of his research, he had a family connection to Vlad, who was known familiarly if not quite fondly as Vlad Tepes, or Vlad the Impaler: A Florescu ancestor was said to have married Vlad's brother, felicitously named Radu the Handsome.
At 13, as war loomed, Radu left home for London, where his father was serving as Romania's acting ambassador to Britain. (The elder Mr. Florescu resigned his post after the dictator Ion Antonescu, a Nazi ally, became Romania's prime minister in 1940.)
The younger Mr. Florescu earned bachelor's and master's degrees in politics, philosophy and economics from Oxford, followed by a Ph.D. in history from Indiana University. He joined the Boston College faculty in 1953.
In the late 1960s, Professor McNally, a colleague in the history department, grew intrigued by affinities between events in Stoker's novel, published in 1897, and the actual history of the region. He enlisted Professor Florescu, and together they scoured archives throughout Eastern Europe in an attempt to trace Count Dracula to a flesh-and-blood source.
Vlad emerged as the prime suspect, for he and the count, it transpired, had much in common.
Both were noblemen from the same part of the world: Vlad was prince of Walachia, an area that with Transylvania, the count's stamping grounds, would become part of Romania.
Both shared a surname: Vlad's father, a member of the Order of the Dragon, a chivalric brotherhood convened to fight the Ottomans, was known as Dracul, meaning "dragon." Vlad was called Dracula, "son of the dragon"—or, as it is sometimes translated, "son of the Devil."
Both Vlad and Count Dracula displayed marked criminal proclivities: Vlad was known for dispatching his Ottoman foes (as many as 100,000 in some accounts) with sharpened stakes. Dracula, who did not care for stakes, favored a more direct approach.
The thesis of "In Search of Dracula" has not been universally accepted by scholars, nor did all reviewers embrace it. But for the authors, who became the toast of the television talk-show circuit, that did not matter.
Other collaborations followed, including "The Essential Dracula: A Completely Illustrated & Annotated Edition of Bram Stoker's Classic Novel" (1979); "Dracula, Prince of Many Faces: His Life and His Times" (1989); and, shifting focus to Robert Louis Stevenson, "In Search of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" (2000).
Professor Florescu also wrote "In Search of Frankenstein: Exploring the Myths Behind Mary Shelley's Monster" (1998) and "Dracula's Bloodlines" (2013, with Matei Cazacu).
A resident of Antibes, France; Scituate, Mass.; and Poiana Brasov, in Transylvania, Professor Florescu is survived by his wife, the former Nicole Michel, whom he married in 1950; a sister, Yvonne, a Benedictine nun known in religion as Sister John the Baptist; three sons, Radu, Nicholas and John; a daughter, Alexandra Lobkowicz; and 13 grandchildren.
Professor McNally died in 2002.
If, in his second career, Professor Florescu risked the opprobrium of some ivory-tower colleagues, he seemed unperturbed. At Dracula conventions around the world—and there are many—he sometimes materialized wearing a cape, a reliable indication that when it came to Stoker's sanguinary protagonist, Professor Florescu did not mind sticking his neck out.
18 May 2014
Camelia Sucu knew that people had died on the night of the Romanian revolution when she saw the street cleaners scrubbing away the blood the following day.
She, along with thousands of others, had been in the square on 21 December 1989 demanding the end of the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu's regime. She arrived in the afternoon with her mother and then-husband after watching Ceausescu's earlier speech on TV. The address was meant to win the public over, but descended into chaos.
As the night came, with protesters still chanting: "We want freedom, down with Ceausescu", it turned violent and shots were fired.
"Everybody was running," says Mrs Sucu. "I could hear the bullets and I could see the broken car windows.
"I remember being kind of scared, but also being together with all the other people—we encouraged each other."
She readily admits that she didn't know exactly what a free Romania would look like, or how it would work, but she is clear that she wanted to be "free to talk to foreigners and free to travel".
For her, a free-market economy has worked out well. After the revolution, instead of becoming a doctor as planned, she set up a successful furniture business with her then-husband.
In her mid-20s at the time, she had recently moved into a new apartment with her young family and was frustrated by the lack of choice of chairs available to her.
"Before 1989, bookshelves, chairs were all similar... I wanted something lighter, more colourful."
Today, sitting in her in swish designer showroom, her life is very different to the one that she and her mother had envisioned before the revolution. And yet 25 years later, her daughters just cannot imagine her life under communism.
"I'm always curious when I hear your stories... were you constantly afraid?" 23-year-old Cristina asks her mother, referring to the many strict rules under communism that to her seem nothing less than bizarre.
"We can't imagine being forced to do something."
Her sister Ioana adds that even though her parents take her to Revolution Square every year to help understand what people died for, it still seems difficult to understand how it worked.
"My future husband's parents told me that they were afraid that their friends would tell the state police about them watching movies," says Ioana, explaining that they were very nervous about having anyone new in their house.
The sisters express their amazement at the thought of it being illegal to own a video recorder. They don't appear to have wanted for much.
Ioana, 27, runs a special events company, while Cristina plans to open a children's playground later this year. They both studied in the UK and exude confidence, worldliness and ambition.
It's something their grandmother, 69-year-old Elvira Nitoi, comments on, saying it is one of the ways in which she sees the world has changed. "In the communist era, women were not as empowered," she says. "Now they struggle more to get a good career."
Mrs Nitoi, who herself worked in a textile factory, also wants to dispel her granddaughters' idea that everything was grey and miserable.
"It is not as you picture it. In my circles we used to makes jokes and talk freely," she says.
"Without wishing to be nostalgic, some things were better, for example the certainty of tomorrow, everybody had a job, nobody was on the streets."
But that's not how her daughter Camelia remembers it.
She says that although her childhood was very happy, when she became an adult she understood how difficult life was, and was at times afraid.
At one point she describes how difficult it was to get baby milk, and how, when she was lucky enough to get hold of 18 Pampers nappies, they were kept for special occasions. When she talks about queuing for food, she points out that she's not talking about minutes but the hours spent waiting for eggs or bananas.
"We were fighting every day to get something on the table."
Romania has come a long way since then but it is still the second poorest country in the EU, behind Bulgaria.
Investment banker Matei Paun says the country has not met its economic potential.
"It is obvious to the naked eye that the level of development is at least five if not 10 years behind Poland."
He blames it on the country not having a clean enough break with its past and not bringing in much-needed radical reforms.
"The fact that there is clear lack of reformist leadership is a big hindrance.
"One of the biggest undermining problems in Romania is that you don't have an authentic, ideologically driven political system. You don't have a left and you don't have a right which makes the democratic process difficult to manage," he adds.
It is true that there is a certain dissatisfaction with politicians amongst Camelia and her family.
"We have to learn more about how to choose. Left side, right side, middle. The parties are so young. They can't prove which direction they are," says Camelia.
"There is a choice of bad and not so bad," says Cristina.
This lack of conviction in today's politics, it seems, is something they all agree on.
On this day...
5 May 2014
A worker cleaned the windows of an office building in downtown Bucharest, Romania. Bogdan Cristel/Reuters
1 May 2014
A number of recent books have lauded the connection between walking—just for its own sake—and thinking. But are people losing their love of the purposeless walk?
Walking is a luxury in the West. Very few people, particularly in cities, are obliged to do much of it at all. Cars, bicycles, buses, trams, and trains all beckon.
Instead, walking for any distance is usually a planned leisure activity. Or a health aid. Something to help people lose weight. Or keep their fitness. But there's something else people get from choosing to walk. A place to think.
Wordsworth was a walker. His work is inextricably bound up with tramping in the Lake District. Drinking in the stark beauty. Getting lost in his thoughts.
Charles Dickens was a walker. He could easily rack up 20 miles, often at night. You can almost smell London's atmosphere in his prose. Virginia Woolf walked for inspiration. She walked out from her home at Rodmell in the South Downs. She wandered through London's parks.
Henry David Thoreau, who was both author and naturalist, walked and walked and walked. But even he couldn't match the feat of someone like Constantin Brancusi, the sculptor who walked much of the way between his home village in Romania and Paris. Or indeed Patrick Leigh Fermor, whose walk from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul at the age of 18 inspired several volumes of travel writing. George Orwell, Thomas De Quincey, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Friedrich Nietzsche, Bruce Chatwin, WG Sebald and Vladimir Nabokov are just some of the others who have written about it.
From recent decades, the environmentalist and writer John Francis has been one of the truly epic walkers. Francis was inspired by witnessing an oil tanker accident in San Francisco Bay to eschew motor vehicles for 22 years. Instead he walked. And thought. He was aided by a parallel pledge not to speak which lasted 17 years.
But you don't have to be an author to see the value of walking. A particular kind of walking. Not the distance between porch and corner shop. But a more aimless pursuit.
In the UK, May is National Walking Month. And a new book, A Philosophy of Walking by Prof Frederic Gros, is currently the object of much discussion. Only last week, a study from Stanford University showed that even walking on a treadmill improved creative thinking.
Across the West, people are still choosing to walk. Nearly every journey in the UK involves a little walking, and nearly a quarter of all journeys are made entirely on foot, according to one survey. But the same study found that a mere 17% of trips were "just to walk". And that included dog-walking.
It is that "just to walk" category that is so beloved of creative thinkers.
"There is something about the pace of walking and the pace of thinking that goes together. Walking requires a certain amount of attention but it leaves great parts of the time open to thinking. I do believe once you get the blood flowing through the brain it does start working more creatively," says Geoff Nicholson, author of The Lost Art of Walking.
"Your senses are sharpened. As a writer, I also use it as a form of problem solving. I'm far more likely to find a solution by going for a walk than sitting at my desk and 'thinking'."
Nicholson lives in Los Angeles, a city that is notoriously car-focused. There are other cities around the world that can be positively baffling to the evening stroller. Take Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital. Anyone planning to walk even between two close points should prepare to be patient. Pavements mysteriously end. Busy roads need to be traversed without the aid of crossings. The act of choosing to walk can provoke bafflement from the residents.
"A lot of places, if you walk you feel you are doing something self-consciously. Walking becomes a radical act," says Merlin Coverley, author of The Art of Wandering: The Writer as Walker.
But even in car-focused cities there are fruits for those who choose to ramble. "I do most of my walking in the city - in LA where things are spread out," says Nicholson. "There is a lot to look at. It's urban exploration. I'm always looking at strange alleyways and little corners."
Nicholson, a novelist, calls this "observational" walking. But his other category of walking is left completely blank. It is waiting to be filled with random inspiration.
Not everybody is prepared to wait. There are many people who regard walking from place to place as "dead time" that they resent losing, in a busy schedule where work and commuting takes them away from home, family and other pleasures. It is viewed as "an empty space that needs to be filled up", says Rebecca Solnit, author of Wanderlust: A History of Walking.
Many now walk and text at the same time. There's been an increase in injuries to pedestrians in the US attributed to this. One study suggested texting even changed the manner in which people walked.
It's not just texting. This is the era of the "smartphone map zombie" - people who only take occasional glances away from an electronic routefinder to avoid stepping in anything or being hit by a car.
"You see people who don't get from point A to point B without looking at their phones," says Solnit. "People used to get to know the lay of the land."
People should go out and walk free of distractions, says Nicholson. "I do think there is something about walking mindfully. To actually be there and be in the moment and concentrate on what you are doing."
And this means no music, no podcasts, no audiobooks. It might also mean going out alone.
CS Lewis thought that even talking could spoil the walk. "The only friend to walk with is one who so exactly shares your taste for each mood of the countryside that a glance, a halt, or at most a nudge, is enough to assure us that the pleasure is shared."
The way people in the West have started to look down on walking is detectable in the language. "When people say something is pedestrian they mean flat, limited in scope," says Solnit.
Boil down the books on walking and you're left with some key tips:
• Walk further and with no
fixed route
Then you may get the rewards. "Being out on your own, being free and anonymous, you discover the people around you," says Solnit.
A military memorial in Transnistria, an area in Moldova that Russia may soon annex, comes complete with a life-size tank. Credit Nicholas Kristof/The New York Times
23 April 2014
CHISINAU, Moldova—If there were an Olympic competition for bravest country in the world, the gold medal might well go to Moldova. Wobbly politicians from Europe and America should come here to get spinal transplants.
Think of Moldova as "the next Ukraine," for Russia may be about to take a bite out of this little country, nestled beside Ukraine and Romania and often said to be the poorest country in Europe. Russia already has bullied Moldova mercilessly for trying to join the European Union, imposing sanctions such as a block on Moldova's crucial wine exports. Russia is even threatening to cut off the natural gas on which Moldovans depend.
"We hope that you will not freeze," one senior Russian official publicly warned Moldovans.
Yet the valiant Moldovan government refuses to buckle. It is determined to join the European Union and forge bonds with the West.
"There is no alternative for us but to pursue European integration," Prime Minister Iurie Leanca, a former diplomat, told me in perfect English in his office here in the capital, Chisinau. "We are European! No one should contest this."
Moldova's love for the West is unrequited. Washington barely notices it. No sitting president has ever visited. Vice President Joe Biden's trip to Ukraine this week would have been a perfect moment to drop in and show support, but it didn't happen. After all, Moldova has a population of less than four million and no obvious strategic significance.
With a few modest gestures, President Obama could reward Moldova's grit. Instead, in the face of American obliviousness, President Vladimir Putin of Russia may formally annex part of Moldova, Transnistria, in the coming weeks.
Transnistria is a Russian-speaking enclave within Moldova, armed by Moscow and protected by Russian troops. Transnistria claims to have seceded and established an independent country, and, in a troubling omen, its government (which Moscow controls) appealed this month for Russia to annex it.
So Russia could soon swallow both Transnistria and a chunk of southern Ukraine, including Odessa, to access it.
Transnistria remains a police state, so I slipped across the border as a tourist, and the area feels just as the old Soviet Union did. Indeed, Transnistria should market itself as an open-air museum of Soviet rule, complete with Lenin statues, Russian troops on the roads and an intelligence agency still called the K.G.B. The propaganda department is in overdrive, with countless billboards celebrating patriotism and past Russian triumphs.
"You must be proud of your country!" one billboard declared.
Transnistria's military memorials complete with a tank or armored personnel carrier praise the heroism of local people and denounce those killed "by fascists" in fighting with Moldova's military in the early 1990s. One giant collection of posters celebrated Russian and local heroes and praised "those great men who contributed to our culture."
Transnistria's apartment complexes are dilapidated and identical, and, despite large Russian subsidies, the economy is a mess. But a vast modern sports complex is the pride of the region. The atmosphere was such that I expected to run into the crusty old Soviet leader of the 1970s, Leonid Brezhnev.
"For people here, Putin is a hero," one young woman told me.
It's true that the Moldovan government in the past was sometimes heavy-handed or threatening to Russian speakers, and, just as Moldovans had the right to leave the Soviet Union, people in Transnistria should have the right to secede from Moldova. But that should happen when Russian troops are gone and people have the right to speak freely.
Moldova, which is Romanian-speaking, is rural, relaxed and green, but the economy crashed after the collapse of the Soviet Union and perhaps one million people fled the country to find work. In some Moldovan villages, it is difficult to find young women because so many left for jobs abroad. According to human rights monitors and United Nations officials, these women were tricked, raped and trafficked by organized crime into brothels across western Europe.
In recent years, the government has tried to build a pro-Western market economy, and the country is rebounding but still fragile. Many fear that Putin will now direct his "masked warfare" of infiltrators and provocateurs to turn Moldova into the next Ukraine.
It may be too late to deter Putin in Moldova, but, whatever happens, we should back Moldova's plucky government. The United States can help by supporting infrastructure for Moldova to import natural gas and electricity from Romania, making it harder for Putin to freeze Moldovans into submission. We can nudge the European Union to embrace Moldova's desire to join.
And if President Obama could visit this gutsy country for a few hours, people would cheer him as he's never been cheered—and he would see an example of gold medal grit that we can all learn from.
23 April 2014
Fascinating glimpses into 20th century have been uploaded to YouTube by the British Pathé, including numerous clips of Romania shot during the period.
King Michael arriving at Waterloo Station, Queen Marie of Romania visiting New York, the 1969 European Boxing Championships in Bucharest, Russian troops pursing Germans while they retreat from the country in 1944—these are just some of the black and white news clips now available to watch online.
Another shows a glamorous royal wedding between the Archduke Anton of Habsburg and Princess Ileana of Romania held at Peles Castle in 1931. The uprising against Nicolae Ceausescu is also among the clips.
The footage is accessible after the British Pathé, the newsreel maker which documented all walks of life on video during the 20th Century, uploaded its entire collection of moving images to YouTube.
The archive of 85,000 clips, or 3,500 hours of footage was digitized in 2002 thanks in part to a grant from the National Lottery, and is now freely accessible to anyone around the world.
Historic moments covering both World Wars, tragedies like the Hindenburg disaster, rare glimpses into the lives of celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe are just some of the thousands clips available.
The full collection of videos on Romania is here on YouTube.
18 April 2014
Nina Cassian, an exiled Romanian poet who sought refuge in the United States after her poems satirizing the regime of President Nicolae Ceausescu fell into the hands of his secret police, died on Monday at her home in Manhattan. She was 89.
The apparent cause was a heart attack, her husband, Maurice Edwards, said.
A prominent writer and translator in Romania before she was forced to seek asylum in 1985, Ms. Cassian had since become well known in the West. Her poems—some translated to English; other, more recent ones composed in English—have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly and elsewhere.
Her English-language collections include "Life Sentence: Selected Poems" (1990), "Take My Word for It" (1998) and "Continuum" (2008).
Intense, passionate and cleareyed, Ms. Cassian's poetry often centered on the nature of erotic love and—both before her exile and after—of loss, death and decay. In "Ballad of the Jack of Diamonds," published in The New Yorker in 1990 in a translation by Richard Wilbur, she wrote:
But Ms. Cassian's work could also be mordantly funny, as attested by "Please Give This Seat to an Elderly or Disabled Person," displayed in New York City subways by the Poetry in Motion program, a joint effort of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the Poetry Society of America:
Ms. Cassian was born Renée Annie Katz to a Jewish family in Galati, Romania, on Nov. 27, 1924. Her father was a noted translator who rendered into Romanian the work of writers in German and English, including Edgar Allan Poe.
When she was about 11, her family settled in Bucharest; there, under Romania's fascist wartime leadership, she attended schools in the Jewish ghetto. As a teenager she joined a Communist youth organization: Communism, she felt, offered a more salubrious alternative to fascism.
Trained as a pianist from the time she was very young, Ms. Cassian studied painting, literature and composition at the University of Bucharest and at the city's main conservatory; her musical compositions, many for the piano, were well regarded in Romania.
Her first volume of poetry, "La Scara 1/1" ("On a Scale of 1/1"), appeared in 1947 under the pen name Nina Cassian. It was condemned by Romania's Communist authorities for its Surrealist cast and lack of appropriate ideology.
For the next few years, Ms. Cassian's work hewed to the Socialist realism the party preferred, but she found she could not stand that way of writing and reassumed her own style.
Ms. Cassian's first marriage, to the novelist Vladimir Colin, ended in divorce. In 1985, not long after the death from cancer of her second husband, Alexandru Stefanescu, she traveled on a Fulbright fellowship to the United States, where she taught writing at New York University.
While she was in New York, a Romanian friend, Gheorghe Ursu, an engineer and poet known for opposing the Ceausescu government, was arrested by the Securitate, the state secret police. Tortured, he died of his injuries.
Among Mr. Ursu's papers, the Securitate found several unpublished poems by Ms. Cassian in which she lampooned the Ceausescu regime. It was no longer safe for her to return home. Granted asylum in the United States, she settled on Roosevelt Island in New York City, where she lived until her death.
Mr. Edwards, the retired executive and artistic director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic, whom she married in 1998, is her only immediate survivor.
Ms. Cassian's other work includes the English-language collections "Call Yourself Alive?" (1988) and "Cheerleader for a Funeral" (1992), as well as her translations into Romanian of Shakespeare, Brecht, Molière and Paul Celan.
Though she moved with apparent ease in American literary circles, reading and lecturing widely, Ms. Cassian by her own inclination remained something of an outsider. She was amused, for instance, by a practice she deemed singularly American, in which a poet giving a reading precedes each work with a précis of the very work to be read.
Parodying this practice, as The New York Times reported in 1995, Ms. Cassian liked to say:
"There was a pear tree on my grandfather's farm, and one day I noticed that when its blossoms fell, they looked like dandruff falling on my grandfather's shoulders. So I wrote a poem about it. It goes like this:
17 April 2014
A Romanian woman burning incense at a cemetery in a village southwest of Bucharest. Orthodox Christians went to church and cemeteries early on Maundy Thursday to light candles, burn incense and mourn relatives as part of a southern Romanian tradition. Bogdan Cristel / Reuters
1 April 2014
Fighting the system used to be dangerous anywhere in Eastern Europe. For one protester from a small Romanian village it was disastrous—and also for his family, whose every word was recorded by the secret police. Carmen Bugan, who found the transcript of her childhood, tells their story.
See more photos and a documentary at the article's website on BBC News
Carmen Bugan is the author of memoir Burying the Typewriter: Childhood Under the Eye of the Secret Police
Soon after my brother's birth in February 1983 my father, Ion Bugan, was faced with the biggest decision he ever had to make.
Should he and my mother continue secretly typing anti-communist manifestos on an illegally-owned typewriter and distributing them around Romania? Or should he go to Bucharest to take on Ceausescu all by himself, without telling anyone a word about it?
Thirty years on we still live with the legacy of my father's choice. And with the discovery of an intimate, horrifying story of our lives written by the secret police, the Securitate.
This was a Romania of food shortages, frequent power cuts, and ferocious reprisals for any form of dissent. The sounds of forbidden US radio stations—Voice of America and Radio Free Europe—woke us up and put us to bed every day, sending shivers up our spines as they merged with the noise from the kitchen. They gave my father hope that life could be better if only people stood up for themselves.
The Securitate was well acquainted with my parents. In early 1961 my father was in a bar with his best friend Petrica and a few others complaining about high tax rates and the collectivisation of farms. They came up with a plan to hijack an internal flight from Arad, in the west of Romania, and to fly it out of the country.
Petrica was a retired air force officer who in civilian life repaired radios like my dad. They had no idea that one of their friends was a Securitate informer.
All were captured before they had a chance to take control of the airplane and condemned to eight years of hard labour "for preparatory actions leading to fraudulent crossing of the border" (leaving the country without permission was illegal) and "plotting against public order".
My father, in his 20s, found himself in terrible prisons at Jilava and Deva and at the Great Island of Braila labour camp, where he met some of the political dissidents who were systematically tortured there.
In July 1964, my father and his friends were liberated in a general amnesty but the Securitate followed his every move, looking for any reason to discredit him and throw him back in prison. Suffocated and intimidated, in February 1965 dad bought a compass, binoculars, antibiotics, a few vials of caffeine, some cans of sardines, and a roll of salami. He and Petrica made a heart-stopping escape from Romania in a blizzard. Dodging police and hiding in haystacks, they made it all the way to the Iron Curtain at the Bulgarian-Turkish border.
On 2 March 1965 at 07:30 in the morning, starved, weak and frozen, they rolled down a hill, jumped a 2m-high barbed-wire fence and nearly crossed into Turkey. The patrol squad showered them with bullets in no-man's land, just 400m from freedom, and sent them back to Romania. My father was sentenced to 11 years at the harshest prison of all, Aiud, for "fraudulent crossing of the border, punishable with art. 267 of the penal code".
Part of the sentence was a five-month period of torture by solitary confinement and starvation while wearing 45kg of chains day and night, in the "special" wing of the prison at Alba Iulia. The prison records say he was transferred to Alba Iulia "for judicial affairs" which is true in a sense: my father was tortured there in order to "admit" his supposed role as an "accomplice" in the theft of money that had "disappeared" from his radio repair shop after he ran away to Bulgaria. My father's own account of this period is hair-raising: he was fed once every two days, and allowed to wash three times in the entire period he was held there.
But, as dad puts it, there was an angel looking after him—he was transferred back to Aiud and freed in January 1969 as a result of changes to the penal code.
Dad now attempted to live a normal life. He married and had children. Things didn't seem so bad on the surface. We had summer holidays on the Black Sea and built a lovely house in our village, Draganesti, near Galati, in eastern Romania.
But behind the scenes the Securitate pushed him to breaking point, following and spying on him. My mother, Mioara, was denied a career in teaching because she married a "political agitator" and was therefore likely to "pollute the minds of the younger generation". Told to choose between job and husband, she opted for the marriage, and they both began working in a grocer's shop. Before long, mum was running the shop, and as dad had been banned from keeping the books at his TV/radio repair workshop, she did that too. Dad worked on repairs when he wasn't stacking shelves. My parents put up with their lot, and worked hard.
By 1981, however, there were not many groceries to sell. Hungry factory workers yelled at them: "What am I going to put in my bag for lunch?" Evening bread queues often ended in fist fights. When the doors closed for the day, my father's angry outbursts at the back of the shop mingled with blasts of Radio Free Europe. One day he told my mother: "I don't want to spend my life just breathing air, and doing nothing."
They bought two typewriters, one of which they did not register with the police, and began making anti-communist flyers protesting against shortages and human rights abuses. They spent the nights typing and driving all over the country to put them in people's letterboxes, while my sister and I slept. The police kept coming to the house to check the prints of the legal typewriter, and to see whether they matched with the letters.
On 10 March 1983, about a month after my father and I visited the hospital with a bouquet of carnations to see my new-born brother, Catalin, my father took to the streets of Bucharest. On top of our red Dacia car, he mounted placards demanding human rights, and denouncing Ceausescu as a torturer who should be put on trial. Then he drove through the city centre, throwing leaflets from the window and blowing a whistle to attract attention.
The spies drew a map of Bugan's protest drive through Bucharest
He had said nothing to my mother. She was in the hospital with Catalin, who was close to dying from an untreated lung infection. My younger sister Loredana was away at gymnastics school and I was at home, aged 12, with my grandmother. This marked the beginning of hell for us.
Dad's protest landed him back in Aiud, condemned to 10 years of hard labour for "propaganda against the socialist regime", punishable under art. 166 line 2 of the penal code. My mother, my sister, my brother and I were placed under close surveillance.
We became accustomed to travelling across the country for a yearly prison visit, letters sent but not always received, food packages returned to us because "the prisoner did not behave appropriately". Rotten fried chicken, softened apples and ulcer medication were sent back in the battered cardboard boxes in which we had placed them months before, hoping he'd receive them.
The Securitate had their own keys to our house and ordered us not to pull the curtains in the kitchen to make it easier for them to observe us. We later learned that my father had accumulated the codenames Andronic, Butnaru, Cazul Cocor, and Barbu, while Mum was codenamed Bela and Barbu. A school friend codenamed Cornelia was in charge of keeping a record of my feelings about dad for the Securitate.
In 1985 mum and dad were forced to divorce. By 1987 I had become accustomed to children at school, and one of the teachers, referring to me and my sister as "the criminal's daughters".
On his birthday in 1988, Ceausescu proclaimed a general amnesty. My mother quipped that history would remember him for his compassion—having no idea that we would find her words transcribed 30 years later in government archives.
When my father walked home in the night on 5 February 1988, secret microphones in the house "registered an atmosphere of joy coming from the children". My father "visited each room", "asked for his shaver" and looked "for his radio". He cradled Catalin in his arms, they noted. The transcripts of that first night say that "the family went to sleep at 03:45 in the morning. The Obj. [my father] complained of a pain in his heart."
The Securitate kept thousands of files on the Bugans
None of us remember all of these details, they are a gift from the record-keeping Securitate, but I recall the smell of prison on dad's clothes.
A couple of months after dad's return from prison, the secret police files note:
"At 01:32 in the morning, we could hear someone trying the door to the room equipped with listening devices. The door doesn't open. We hear the footsteps of someone walking away and the insistent barking of the dog as to a person who is a stranger to the house."
It is a transcript of the Securitate registering itself in the act of trying to come into the house to change the microphones. I read this file last August for the first time. It made me understand that when we heard noises in those years in Romania we weren't really crazy as we thought.
After receiving a series of invitations from mysterious men to meet them in town, death threats on the phone in the middle of the night, and even a call from a woman offering sex to dad, we decided to seek political asylum in the US. It was my turn to make a heart-stopping journey to the American Embassy with my father's prison papers to give testimony on behalf of the family.
I managed to get into the Consulate but I was promptly arrested on the way out and interrogated for 45 minutes. I kept repeating what I was told to say: "We are under American protection, you can't do anything to me." They let me go and told me to never go back there again.
The Securitate records show how "concerned" they were about us and what might happen, as immigrants, to our sense of Romanian identity. They tried to dissuade my mother from going to the US—they told her that life in the West was a form of slavery to rich, lazy capitalists.
We waited 11 months for our passports, under house arrest. One record says that "after we have used every method to discourage the obj. [this time Mum] from leaving, we decided to expel her from the Communist Party". It was, even according to the Securitate's own file, a humiliation ceremony, where her friends were forced to hurl insults at her.
"Your girls will become prostitutes," the passport clerk yelled at my parents. "Our hand is long," they said, turning to my father, threatening us with death if we spoke about what had been done to us once in America. I now read my mother's declaration in the files "not to damage the image of our socialist regime by actions or words", and wonder how she must have felt to leave the country in her 40s with three children, a husband who had returned from the heart of evil, and no idea where we were going.
As we made our way to Michigan at the end of 1989, each carrying one suitcase in which we packed a lifetime, the Berlin Wall tumbled down behind us. The bloody Romanian Revolution followed at Christmas time.
We arrived as political refugees in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on 17 November 1989, travelling via Rome, and landing at night, in a snowstorm, not speaking a word of English.
In a refugee centre in Rome we had been taught that Americans, when they ask "How are you?" don't really expect an answer; that they all have chequebooks; that they value democracy and free speech; and that all immigrants gain 8kg in the first year in the West because, well, there is just a lot of food to eat and most of it is rather different from our homemade soups. We couldn't have been more thrilled with all of that.
We became eager to "assimilate" into Western life.
My sister and I would often ask the people in Grand Rapids we knew best: "Do I look American yet?"
At the same time we saw on a donated television how the Ceausescus were executed. My father said: "This is all wrong, now the world will never find out from him about his abuses." My mother cried: "They are just two old people, they should not have been killed." And all of us danced in the living room with joy that a revolution was happening in Romania.
I wondered if my father's protest might have played some role in bringing it about. My father wanted to return. We said firmly: "We are staying here, and you are not abandoning us yet again."
Twenty years have passed. We cleaned nursing homes, churches, worked at Burger King, made golf clubs, Mum worked in a children's clothing factory, and we went to school. My father collected all of the discarded televisions we found, fixed them, and we had a TV in each room: "Such a waste," he'd say.
We became American citizens. My sister and I married. She and her husband bought a house in the suburbs. We became "Romanians by birth".
In 1999 Romania opened the archives of the secret police to people who had been subjected to surveillance during the communist years.
My father said: "I know who I am. I don't need to know what the Securitate said about me." But I disagreed and managed to find our records in 2010.
Now, it was one thing to experience the Securitate following and threatening us. But it is another thing to read the complete record of our daily lives, including the traps neatly laid out for us, to lure us into committing an offence, which we escaped simply by instinct or luck.
So, when my mother was in the hospital with my brother, the Securitate placed next to her a "patient" who also had a "sick child". Nurses and doctors helped to stage it all. The woman who became Mum's "friend" had a question scripted for her to help her spark the conversation. She produced reports on what mum said about my father and his dissidence.
Another example is a "legend" (a technical term used by the Securitate) by which an "Amnesty International employee" came to ask mum about my father and whether we were persecuted because of him. The officer was trained to have a German accent, and to look nervous. He invited her to a hotel in town to talk "out of the reach of the microphones".
This was a trap to throw my mother in prison for speaking with foreigners about my father. Again, we now have the official record against which we can test our own memory of that day when the man came to the house. After he left, my mother said: "No-one is this worried about us, I don't trust this stranger." It was a lack of trust that saved her.
There are records of dreams we recounted to each other in the mornings. The transcriber knew us so well, he or she was able to read and duly note our moods. Some even took sides in family arguments, noting on the margins of the transcripts who they thought was right. It's like having had a one-sided relationship with these invisible broadcasters of our tormented souls.
Needless to say, the documents have been sifted through, parts have been blotted out in black ink, pages are missing. What I have is what was given to me as publishable.
But we now have every letter that my father wrote to us from prison and we wrote to him. Half of the letters are direct transcripts—they were copied out by the censors—while half are paraphrases of what we wrote. There are not always quotation marks to indicate which of the words are ours, which are theirs. It is nearly impossible to detangle the self from the words of the Securitate. Some of the letters were not forwarded to us, so I read them for the first time last summer.
The question of what my father was thinking of when he drove away to Bucharest on 10 March 1983 has lost its painful intensity for us over the years. Yet in the files I see our daily recitation of blame and anger at the time.
That question would have remained unanswered if it hadn't been for a trip to Romania that we took as a family in October 2013. My father was by then 78, my mother 67, so it was a good time to make the journey back.
Walking into my father's prisons, Jilava and Aiud, the cells completely submerged in darkness and bone-chilling dampness, reading the records of his admission to the prison infirmary with fractured ribs and "bruises from hammer applied to fingers", I understood what I could not have understood before.
When he left home, the car stuffed with placards and leaflets, my father knew what he was returning to. Yet he had no choice. For him the family was his country and the country was his family. If he did not fight for everyone else, he could not have hoped to put food on our own table. Or a shred of dignity in our lives. He left us out of desperation and moral conviction.
He protected us by saying nothing to us. But you can only understand this by going into the prison rooms where he suffered. And by standing next to him while he shouts that he has no memory of receiving beatings that fractured his ribs, even though you face him, with the radiography record trembling in your hands. This is the side of heroism no-one likes to talk about, not even him. But it is the face of heroism that now makes me proud.
Artemis Cooper, Patrick Leigh Fermor's biographer.
21 March 2014
From the time he was a boy, acclaimed travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor wanted to live like a character in a novel. Somehow, he found out how. During his lifetime, he was stabbed in Bulgaria, car-bombed in Greece, targeted in a blood vendetta, and hunted by German soldiers after kidnapping their commander on the island of Crete and handing him off to a waiting British submarine during World War II. But his story started in 1933, when at 18 he was focused on the single goal of walking across Europe, "From the hook of Holland to Constantinople."
"This journey means more and more to him the older he gets; he realizes that in a funny way, it set the course of his life," said Artemis Cooper, his biographer, who was an editor of Mr. Leigh Fermor's third and final book about the trip—one that fans of the writer's inimitable flare for whorling descriptions and evocative prose have waited nearly three decades to read. The story ended up being called "The Broken Road," a reflection of the fact that the writer was unable to finish the book before his death in 2011. It ends in midsentence, with him still 500 miles short of his goal. Below are excerpts from a conversation with Cooper about Mr. Leigh Fermor, known affectionately as Paddy, and his adventurous walk.
Q. When did Mr. Leigh Fermor first devise his trip across Europe?
A. He was the kind of kid that makes all parents despair. When he was 18, he had finished school, but seemed absolutely unemployable. His father was this eminent geologist in India—one of the hardest-working people you could meet. And all of his friends would say, "Why can't you be like your father?" But of course to Paddy, that just sounded like life imprisonment.
All he really wants to do is become a writer. Of course, he had nothing to write about and only produced the usual adolescent poetry that nobody wanted to read. At the time, he was in turmoil. He was going to too many parties, having too many hangovers and on the inside he was completely miserable. Then he describes that it just came to him from one moment to the next: He would walk across Europe.
He traveled through Europe during a significant time in history.
Right, he crosses through Germany nine months after Hitler comes to power. At the time, Paddy wasn't interested in politics or Nazidom, except that he recognized it as something hateful and extremely regimented, but the young Nazis were certainly interested in him. They had heard about the Oxford anti-war debate, so for them, he represented an example of the young, decadent, Englishmen, who would not fight for king and country. During some of those clashes, Paddy tried explaining the anti-war movement that was happening within the younger generation in England, but of course that didn't cut much ice.
Paddy was more interested in writing about the hospitality he received, as he traveled further East to the more remote parts of Germany. For a child who had been born in 1915 and raised with a visceral sense of anti-German sentiment, he was amazed by how kind people were to him, by the generosity he was shown. And this continues throughout his trip.
Mr. Leigh Fermor seemed to have a natural gift for drawing out people's hospitality.
Oh yes, and they didn't want him to go, no matter how many cigarette burns he left in the sheets. He could put an incredible spell on people. Part of it was he had the right kind of curiosity. Even at the age of 18, he was extremely interested by the way the past enriches and leaks into the present: the way you can see it. And these counts, living in their dusty old schlosses must have loved that. Here this kid comes along, hungry to know all about their family history: all the wars they had participated in and their great dynastic marriages. And suddenly, instead of seeing themselves as part of some washed up bit of broken empire, bang in the middle of nowhere, with the world moving very fast around them, their place in the world became this wonderful treasure house of history, with lineages stretching back past Charlemagne to the depths of time.
What else did he see?
In Bulgaria, he encounters Islamic culture in person for the first time. He sleeps alternately in mosques, hayricks and grand estates, and meets wealthy barons and humble peasants in homespun clothing. The Bulgarians tell him if he ever goes to Romania he'll be attacked by wolves, bears and gypsies but, of course, that never happens. Instead in Bucharest, he meshes with a lovely high-society crowd and goes to nightclubs and parties. In Greece, he travels from monastery to monastery, picking up Greek from the monks. And there he finds Mount Athos, the holy mountain.
He wrote that only men were permitted to go there.
Yes, and not only is it only men, but no female animal is allowed there either. You will only see roosters there, you will only see rams. I don't know how they control the cat population, realistically, I don't think they do. The reason for this is the mountain was dedicated to the Virgin Mary. As the story goes, if a woman tries to go to the island, she'll see a terrifying vision of the Virgin Mary surrounded by flames saying, "Get out! There is another queen than thou!" Paddy knows he finally left the holy mountain when he descends into a valley and spots a group of young girls playing in the fields.
What did the journey mean to him?
Remember, most of what you're reading is put together 30 years after the walk. At the time of the journey, he was a callow youth, and the descriptions he jotted down were quite pedestrian. It was only in hindsight, after a world war and the dark years of Communism, that he really was able to write what he felt about that particular swath of civilization. Memory can be slippery stuff and sometimes it was hard for him to find the overarching voice that would somehow absorb the reality of the diary with what he'd written later on. But what he's created is this wonderful poetic vision that is lyrical, evocative, learned and all the things we love about him. Together, those books are a kind of love letter to Europe: the Europe that perhaps never existed but lies suspended somewhere between memory and imagination.
On this day...
14 March 2014
BUCHAREST, Romania (AP)—Broken promises of help from the West. A tragic history of Russian invasion that goes back centuries. A painful awareness that conflicts in this volatile region are contagious. These are the factors that make nations across Eastern Europe watch events in Ukraine—and tremble.
From leaders to ordinary people, there is a palpable sense of fear that Russia, seemingly able to thumb its nose at Western powers at will, may seek more opportunities for incursions in its former imperial backyard. The question many people are asking is: Who's next?
"There is first of all fear ... that there could be a possible contagion," Romanian Foreign Minister Titus Corlatean told The Associated Press in an interview. "Romania is extremely preoccupied."
Specifically, concerns run high that after taking over the strategic peninsula of Crimea, Russian President Vladimir Putin may be tempted to try a land grab in Moldova, where Russian troops are stationed in the breakaway province of Trans-Dniester. It's one of several "frozen conflicts" across Eastern Europe whose ranks Crimea—many in the West now say with resignation—has joined.
In Romania, which neighbors predominantly Romanian-speaking Moldova, Monica Nistorescu urged the West to stand up to Putin—lest he come to view himself as unbeatable.
"The world should stop seeing Putin as the invincible dragon with silver teeth," said Nistorescu, "because we will succeed in making him believe that Russia is what it once was."
Across the border, Moldovan fears of Russian invasion were in no way theoretical: "We are afraid the conflict in Ukraine could reach us in Moldova," said Victor Cotruta, a clerk in the capital Chisinau. "Russian troops could take over Moldova in a day."
Many in the region are keenly aware that Poland had guarantees of military aid from France and Britain against Nazi aggression. But when Hitler invaded in 1939, France and Britain didn't send troops to Poland despite their declarations of war. That history feeds skepticism that NATO would come to the aid of eastern member nations in the event of a Russian attack.
"Poland's history shows that we should not count on others," novelist Jaroslaw Szulski told The AP.
Such feelings are particularly acute in the Baltic nations that are members of NATO and the European Union. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have sizable Russian populations that Moscow periodically declares it needs to "protect"—the key word Putin used in justifying its invasion of Crimea.
"I'm a bit skeptical," said Tiina Seeman in Tallinn, Estonia, when asked if she believed the West would come to her nation's rescue. "I'd like to believe so but I can't say I trust them 100 percent."
Moscow routinely accuses Estonia and Latvia of discriminating against their Russian-speaking minorities. Tensions between Russia and Estonia soared in 2007, when protests by Russian-speakers against the relocation of a Soviet-era war monument ended in street riots. Many Estonians blamed Moscow—which has handed out passports to ethnic Russians in the Baltics—for stirring up the protests.
As she arrived at an EU emergency summit on Ukraine last week, Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite expressed more confidence than Seeman in the U.S.-led security alliance: "Thank God! Thank God that we are already 10 years in NATO!"
But she, too, expressed grave concerns about Russia's actions: "Russia today is trying to rewrite the borders in Europe after World War II."
History weighs heavily in Eastern European minds as they contemplate the future.
Many people see Russia's seizure of Crimea as similar to their experiences after World War II, when Soviet troops rolled through towns and villages, effectively putting them under the Kremlin's rule for decades.
"Of course there's a potential threat for us in the future," Katerina Zapadlova, a waitress in a Prague cafe, said with a bitter smile. She recalled how Soviet troops rolled into Czechoslovakia in 1968 to crush the Prague Spring liberalization movement.
"I'm afraid," she said, "It's because of what they did to us in the past."
Some experts say those fears are overblown.
"I wouldn't be afraid of Russian aggression in a short term," said Michal Koran of Prague's Institute of International Relations. "I'm 100 percent sure (that NATO would help its eastern allies). I think that NATO gets stronger as a result of the conflict in Ukraine."
Mutual economic dependence also lowers the likelihood of an armed conflict between Russia and the West. Russia's economy runs largely on the massive natural gas supplies it sells to Europe every year—and in 2012 it bought $170 billion in European machinery, cars and other exports. But it is also precisely the reliance of both eastern and western European nations on Russian energy that gives the West fewer options in taking a hard line against Moscow.
Romania's foreign minister also said that NATO has taken positive action in dealing with the Ukraine crisis, citing the dispatch of AWACS reconnaissance planes to fly over Poland and Romania to monitor the crisis.
"The measure taken by the North Atlantic Council aims ... to prevent tensions at a regional level and to guarantee the security of state members," Corlatean told AP.
Yet he, too, could not refrain from expressing historical fears, evoking the bloodbath that resulted when dictator Nicolae Ceausescu ordered troops to fire on protesters in the dying days of his regime.
"Romanians followed very closely everything that happened in these weeks, especially the dramatic events in Kiev," said Corlatean. "For us Romanians, this reminded us of the December 1989 revolution."
Some countries like Poland, which shares a border with both Ukraine and Russia, are already starting to take precautionary measures. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has warned that instability in Ukraine may be prolonged and lead Warsaw to upgrade its weapons. At Poland's request, about 300 U.S. airmen and a dozen F-16 fighters arrived in Poland this week for a military exercise.
Tusk alluded to Europe's appeasement of Hitler and Stalin in the 1930s as he warned about the implications of letting Russia get away with its takeover of Crimea.
"Anyone who believes that peace and stabilization can be bought through concessions is mistaken," Tusk said last week in parliament. "Europe has made such mistakes, and they always led to a catastrophe."
Scislowska reported from Warsaw. Associated Press writers Pablo Gorondi in Budapest, Hungary, Karel Janicek in Prague; Jovana Gec in Belgrade, Serbia; Corneliu Rusnac in Chisinau, Moldova; Jari Tanner in Tallinn, Estonia; Liudas Dapkus in Vilnius, Lithuania; Veselin Toshkov in Sofia, Bulgaria; Aida Cerkez in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina; and Shawn Pogatchnik in Dublin contributed to this report.
Patrick Leigh Fermor in the 1940s. Popperfoto
7 March 2014
In the winter of 1933, an 18-year-old named Patrick Leigh Fermor set out from the Hook of Holland to cross Europe on foot. His goal was Istanbul, which he bookishly insisted on calling Constantinople. He had little more in his rucksack than a volume of Horace and a few blank notebooks. He also had a bad reputation: The masters who expelled him from school—for a flirtation with a local girl—saw only "a dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness." He spent the next year charming his way through a doomed prewar landscape of landed aristocrats, feudal peasants and benevolent monks, sleeping alternately in schlosses and hayricks. It was a journey that would become legendary, not so much for the extraordinary things he saw and recorded as for his prose—an utterly unique, hybrid vehicle that combines youthful exuberance with a dense, dauntingly erudite display of verbal artifice. Unlike most authors of travel literature (a rattlebag genre that doesn't really do him justice) Leigh Fermor does not confine his role to that of camera obscura. He builds dense whorls of wordplay to echo the carvings in an old church door; he slips into baroque historical fantasias, scattering a shrapnel of words like "gabions," "hydromel," "eyot" and "swingletrees" at the unsuspecting reader. In between salvos, there are moments of ferocious humor and quiet, lyrical beauty.
In part, this richness is a measure of the extraordinary gap between the experience and its narration. Leigh Fermor did not begin writing the first book about his journey, "A Time of Gifts," until the 1970s. In the intervening decades, he had written several other books, becoming a fiercely learned autodidact and adventurer. His exploits during and after World War II—when he helped to kidnap the Nazi commandant in Crete and deliver him to a waiting British submarine—are said to have helped inspire his friend Ian Fleming, the author of the James Bond novels. As a result, the travel narratives are a kind of palimpsest in which his younger and older selves exist in counterpoint. He initially considered naming the first book "Parallax," to reflect this split perspective.
Few books have been as keenly or lengthily anticipated as the third and final volume of Leigh Fermor's youthful travels. (A second installment, "Between the Woods and the Water," was published in 1986.) It never appeared; burdened by writer's block and frailty, Leigh Fermor was still working on it when he died in 2011 at age 96. But he did leave a manuscript. His biographer, Artemis Cooper, and the British travel writer Colin Thubron chose to tidy it up and publish it as "The Broken Road," a reference to the abrupt narrative halt before the author reaches Istanbul.
"The Broken Road" narrates Leigh Fermor's travels in Bulgaria, Romania and Greece, a more tribal and violent world than Northern Europe. It does not always have the gemlike polish of the first two volumes. But it is an unforgettable book, full of strange encounters with a prewar Balkan cast of counts, prostitutes, peasants, priests and castrati. The greatest pleasure of all, as usual, is Leigh Fermor's own infectious, Rabelaisian hunger for knowledge of almost every kind. His memory seems eidetic; his eyes miss nothing. He seems to carry within himself a whole troupe of sharp-eyed geographers, art historians, ethnologists and multilingual poets. For anyone who has tried to document a journey, reading him is a humbling and thoroughly inspiring experience.
"The Broken Road" is also full of his signature verbal architecture: The Orthodox bishops "in copes as stiff and brilliant as beetles' wings, and the higher clergy, coiffed with globular gold mitres the size of pumpkins and glistening with gems, leaned on croziers topped with twin coiling snakes." Or the Virgilian evocation of a passing flock of storks in the Balkan mountains, which goes on for pages: "All at once we were under a high shifting roof of wings, a flotilla that was thickening into an armada, until our ears were full of the sound of rustling and rushing with a flutter now and then when a bird changed position in a slow wingbeat or two, and of the strange massed creaking, as of many delicate hinges, of a myriad slender joints. They benighted the air."
In some respects this book is even more satisfying than its predecessors because it is less guarded; the narrator emerges as an angrier, more troubled and more persuasive character. One of my few quarrels with "A Time of Gifts" is the dogged high-mindedness of Leigh Fermor's youthful self. Where is the lust? Where is the rage? This man is 18 years old, for God's sake. He never gives way to the curse-spitting xenophobia that overcomes most travelers (certainly me) at some point in their journeys. He runs into plenty of jams, and meets plenty of pretty young girls; but there is something a little too noble about him, too much of the innocent abroad.
This time things are different, and the young man seems to break free of his older narrator. At one point, lying on the damp earthen floor of a Bulgarian peasant's hut, he gives way to revulsion at the "noisily hibernating rustics swathed all over this stifling hellhole." He is overcome by self-hatred and yearns for the comfort and status of his school-bound peers. Elsewhere, he meets a spirited Bulgarian girl named Nadejda and falls in love with her; their romance, though apparently unconsummated, reeks of the adolescent emotional frailty that seemed absent in the earlier books.
One of the most vivid passages in "The Broken Road" takes place in Bucharest, where young Paddy (as all his friends called him) checks into what he takes for a modest hotel, the Savoy-Ritz, giving his bags to a baffled patronne. He returns late that night and discovers that it is not a hotel but a brothel. The laughing madam ushers him into the kitchen, where four attractive young prostitutes are eating a late supper: "I was given a chair and a glass of wine, and the girls on either side cut off bits of chicken breast and offered them on their forks with friendly solicitude." The women, charmed by his youth and innocence, feed and fuss over him for several days, telling him stories about their clients and themselves, though he remains discreetly silent about whether he got anything for free.
"The Broken Road" ends in midsentence, and the editors have chosen to follow it with excerpts from the diary Leigh Fermor wrote in early 1935, mostly at Mt. Athos in Greece. These are fascinating precisely because they are so ordinary: Suddenly we see how lucky we are that Leigh Fermor chose to wait four decades before starting. Young men have strong legs and eyes, but it is the older narrator, with his multilayered perspective, who knows how to turn memory into art.
History also played a role. "The Broken Road" is strewn with ominous, proleptic hints about the future that only we—and the older narrator—are privy to. In "A Time of Gifts," the Nazis were a constant presence, crass and often ludicrous, waiting to inherit Europe. In this book, it is both the Soviet boot and the Balkan breakup that lurk throughout, as young Paddy listens to his Bulgarian and Romanian friends spew hatred of one another. But he also evokes a quiet, starlit world where countless eccentricities of folk art and culture bloomed in isolated villages and persisted for centuries, untouched by the glare of television and the Internet. Much of this is gone now. We can be grateful he was there to record it.
Robert F. Worth is writing a book about the Arab uprisings of 2011 and their legacy.
Photo by Diana Mesesan
24 February 2014
At a certain moment in his life, Peter Hurley took a look back, took a look forward, took a look around and understood he had to start on a different road.
In a fancy cafe from the Old Center of Bucharest, a man carrying a big rucksack and hiking clothes gets in. He has either just arrived from a mountain trip, or he simply makes a short detour from his way out of the city. Let's be clear about the rucksack. It's not the medium-sized backpack kids carry around every morning on their way to school, nor the kind the IT guys wear on their backs carrying their laptops. This one is big and you could bet all your money saying that it contains some cans, clothes, a tent maybe and other necessary items when one gets on the road.
The man, a 40-something red-hair guy with shining eyes, takes off the heavy pack, puts it on a chair and takes some books out of it, with a white, simple cover. It shows a drawing of a small wooden church, a cross and the title "The Way of the Crosses". Below is the name of the author, Peter Hurley, who happens to be the guy in front of me. He has already ordered a long, black coffee, "the longer, the better".
He started his day in his apartment in Balta Alba, loaded his rucksack with books he ought to send to some acquaintances in Austria, Ireland, his homeland, or here, in Romania, where he had moved many years ago, so many that it's almost useless to actually count them. It was around 1994 when Peter arrived here, a 26-year-old man, a bit confused and still searching his way, like all 20-something people are. He had traveled to the Czech Republic and was impressed by a certain feeling about this Eastern area, a certain spirituality, hard to define, but which got him hooked and made him move over here and start a marketing business with a friend.
The first impression is that, well…Peter is quite an introvert guy, who answers briefly and who will most probably won't let himself dragged into the narrative of his own story. But I'm wrong. He does wait a few seconds until he answers. He does start a bit reluctantly and seems like he'll limit his answer to some very few sentences. But then, just like a mechanical clock that it's switched on and suddenly starts working, some internal trigger goes off and Peter starts talking. Without even realizing it, you're the one who's absorbed into his story.
Five years ago he kind of quit his job, sold all his shares in the advertising company he helped founding, Mercury 360 Communications and retained a very small stake in the market research company Mercury Research. "A few things happened at the same time. I sort of founded myself in an isolated personal situation that made me draw a line and made me reevaluate. I took a look back, took a look forward, took a look around and understood I had to start on a different road. At the same time I knew that there was a reason why I came here, a reason that I later had forgotten."
Along the years he came to the conclusion that there were some great things about Romania. Foreign investments, expertise and intelligence, they are all so important, but equally important are "the things that are from Romania and I thought the the balance was too far over along one side. Too many things coming in and the Romanians would go: Who am I? What do I have? What is this about?"
Peter Hurley started organizing a festival called "The Long Road to the Merry Cemetery", in Sapanta, in the Northern part of Romania, in Maramures county, trying to save the traditions which he considered so important. Save the traditions…that's a big thing to say. But Peter found something really valuable here and he slowly began to understand that it isn't about the tourism, nor about IT, or similar things which get promoted, it's about people's values. "We are talking about knowledge, living knowledge and until the last man dies, it's not dead. The more people know, the more relevant it is."
"For three years I've been investing in the festival and I lost everything, but I'm a really stubborn Irish guy, once I've done something and I think it's a good idea, I'll keep doing even though it's difficult and maybe misunderstood by people."
While he's talking, you can feel his enthusiasm, how serious he is about the whole thing and not in the sort of an idealist guy's way, who is disconnected from the actual reality and tries to preserves a myth. And you can also sense the disappointments he went through, because this isn't a country where many people actually care.
"It's about the Romanian rural civilization and the connection to a way of life that maybe is going into history, but it's not distant history, it's still part of the life. But apart from this heritage concept there are 9 million people living in this rural area, and apart from that there are 4 million farms, let's call them farming households, let's call them agricultural subsistence farming. What happens to all this people?"
But then on the 7th of October, 2012, he got a different idea.
"I was on a harvest festival in a village, in Romania, that was promoting the rural civilization. I could see that this festival was getting all the support of the organizations, local municipality, but in fact most of the music was prerecorded, nobody was playing live, most of the food sold there has been busked in, sausages from Carrefour, the local politicians were using this in order to be re-elected and a television was filming this. It was an anomaly, a parody. The only people that came with instruments to actually play sounded the worst because there weren't any microphones. The traditions are dying and these sort of artificial events are only accelerating their death."
He understood then he had to pursue his goals in a different form, by walking 700 km from Sapanta to the Peasant Museum in Bucharest.
"And why am I walking? Well, I've spent all my money. There's nothing left. I'm pretty sure no one listens when you talk, so there seems to be no point. All I have now is my body, my mind and my spirit. They're still in good shape; I can do things. And this walk is the best idea I have right now," he wrote in his book.
The same rucksack which he stuffed with books to send them away at the post office had been used to carry only the essential during the long walk. It was hard deciding what not to take. "I gave up the soap, the vitamins, even the toothpaste. All the books. I was left with the clothes I had on me, three pairs of socks, two changes of underwear, a t-shirt and pajama pants to sleep in, and then my additional winter clothing," Peter wrote in his book.
"At first I thought I would do 3.4 km an hour. I thought I'd be able to do 30 km a day in 6.7 hours. I thought I would be leaving early on in the morning at 8 and it would be early afternoon when I got to the destination." He realized pretty quickly it was taking him much more time: 12 – 13 hours of walking a day.
The night he got the idea, he looked at a map and realized that if he were to do this walk he knew some people and these people should know other people. And where he would not know anybody, he would simply knock on the door. He started his walk on the 26th of November, from Sapanta.
"Of the whole 26 nights there were four nights where I knocked on the door of complete strangers. Three nights I got it pretty much from the first knock, but on the fourth night, I got it only from the third try. You have to struggle with yourself to go on and knock on somebody's door. It's very hard to get up and do this. The hardest was when I tried it in a town, Valenii de Munte, it was very hard, hard, hard."
"The best experience I had was a night before the general elections, on the 9th of December. It was heavily snowing. I had a long long day. I knocked on the door of this house and a voice from inside said: come in. I opened the door and a man in his 60s from his bed said, "Come in, I'm, so glad you're here." "You're so glad I'm here?" I asked him. "I mean I'm so glad you're not outside, it's such a horrible night."
There is a big pause after he recounts this episode. I recall a story I listened to on the This American Life radio show, about a black man in his 20s, in the USA, who gave up everything he had and tried to make a similar walk across the United States, "The peace pilgrim", hoping to get shelter and food from strangers. He had been on a long search for spiritual truth and this walk was meant to really bring some meaning to his life. But it failed. People looked with distrust and even fear and nobody helped. He had to end his walk after three days.
"Who are you, what are you doing, is this a joke?" people were asking Peter. "It was also mixed with genuine concern. You can't be walking in the middle of the night when it's snowing like this. It was rude to knock on somebody's door. I put them into a difficult situation. What are you doing? I'm walking across the country. Why? Why not in the summertime?"
"Why didn't you have the patience to wait until summertime?" I also ask him. "Because I don't have much patience. Also I had worked so hard in 2012, I didn't have a day off and the project that I was working on had a two-week break, in the middle of December. I realized it wasn't going to start again until Christmas. From my experience, I know you can be lucky before Christmas, you can have good weather, without snow."
He didn't take any notes, just a few photos. That's all. "I didn't have time. I was exhausted. The people that you just met or bumped into, you have to talk to them. There is a physical and psychological recovery that needs to take place."
"With all the money in the world I couldn't have done that walk. You couldn't do that staying on your own in a hotel in nighttime. Watching TV. You would become overwhelmed by a complete sense of futility of the whole exercise. But then I realized that these people were picking you up. In some cases I helped them and in all cases they really helped me. This exchange of energy was really powerful."
"The idea of abandoning yourself, that was what it was. Abandoning yourself to the will of the people that you meet. That became central to the motivation of keep going. If you have the money to choose the chocolate bar, the bed, the bus, then you're grabbing control of the spirit that should be guiding you. The Indians have a word for that, the South-Americans too and maybe we would call that spirit God, whatever you want to call it, whatever your gig is. It doesn't really matter."
Getting home was amazing, Peter says, and he throws a big, big laugh. "Amazing. amazing! I can't describe. There was an amount of regret that it was over, a tiny one, but compared to the feeling of achievement. Not like I've won, I've got the gold, but rather like... I can't believe that God gave me that."
"I think when you're walking, you're giving God a chance to line everything up.. If you are driving fast in a car the faster you drive the further you are from synchronicity with the planet. I used to drive, I still drive, I also drive fast, it's good for you when you are in a hurry, but you do have to recognize…when you're walking you give things the chance to line up."
After the whole thing ended, he decided he should write a book about that walk. "Writing the book was so much harder. In the last five years the easiest thing I have done is that walk. The hardest was to write the book and to get it by the deadline."
But he did and with the help of 54 master students of the Faculty of Letters he got it translated into a record time. He then made the walk backwards, this time driving, visiting again all the people he met and offering them the book.
"When you're walking, you detach and you're able to get into a meditative state of mind. The big challenge is being able to keep this concept in this active life, in this urban environment." So how do you keep it alive? I ask him. "That's the idea, you don't. It has to be a way but I didn't find it yet. But you have to keep trying."
By Diana Mesesan, features writer, email@example.com
Close In the Institute for the Unsalvageable in Sighetu Marmatiei, Romania, shown here in 1992, children were left in cribs for days on end. Tom Szalay
24 February 2014
Parents do a lot more than make sure a child has food and shelter, researchers say. They play a critical role in brain development.
More than a decade of research on children raised in institutions shows that "neglect is awful for the brain," says Charles Nelson, a professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children's Hospital. Without someone who is a reliable source of attention, affection and stimulation, he says, "the wiring of the brain goes awry." The result can be long-term mental and emotional problems.
A lot of what scientists know about parental bonding and the brain comes from studies of children who spent time in Romanian orphanages during the 1980s and 1990s. Children like Izidor Ruckel, who wrote a book about his experiences.
When Ruckel was 6 months old, he got polio. His parents left him at a hospital and never returned. And Ruckel ended up in an institution for "irrecoverable" children.
But Ruckel was luckier than many Romanian orphans. A worker at the orphanage "cared for me as if she was my mother," he says. "She was probably the most loving, the most kindest person I had ever met."
Then, when Ruckel was 5 or 6, his surrogate mother was electrocuted trying to heat bath water for the children in her care. Ruckel ended up in an institution for "irrecoverable" children, a place where beatings, neglect, and boredom were the norm.
Polio had left him with a weak leg. But as he got older he found he had power over many of the other children, who had more serious disabilities.
"There was no right, there was no wrong in the orphanage," Ruckel says. "You didn't know the difference because you were never taught. I was put in charge of kids and I treated them just the way they treated us. If you didn't listen to me, I'd beat you."
Researchers began studying the children in Romanian orphanages after the nation's brutal and repressive government was overthrown in 1989. At the time, there were more than 100,000 children in government institutions. And it soon became clear that many of them had stunted growth and a range of mental and emotional problems.
When Nelson first visited the orphanages in 1999, he saw children in cribs rocking back and forth as if they had autism. He also saw toddlers desperate for attention.
"They'd reach their arms out as though they're saying to you, 'Please pick me up,' " Nelson says. "So you'd pick them up and they'd hug you. But then they'd push you away and they'd want to get down. And then the minute they got down they'd want to be picked up again. It's a very disorganized way of interacting with somebody."
The odd behaviors, delayed language and a range of other symptoms suggested problems with brain development, Nelson says. So he and other researchers began studying the children using a technology known as electroencelphalography (EEG), which measures electrical activity in the brain.
Many of the orphans had disturbingly low levels of brain activity. "Instead of a 100-watt light bulb it was a 40-watt light bulb," Nelson says.
As the children grew older, the researchers were able to use MRI to study the anatomy of their brains. And once again, the results were troubling. "We found a dramatic reduction in what's referred to as gray matter and in white matter," Nelson says. "In other words, their brains were actually physically smaller."
And the scientists realized the cause wasn't anything as simple as malnutrition. It was a different kind of deprivation—the lack of a parent, or someone who acted like a parent.
A baby "comes into the world expecting someone to take care of them and invest in them," Nelson says. "And then they form this bond or this relationship with this caregiver." But for many Romanian orphans, there wasn't even a person to take them out of the crib.
"Now what happens is that you're staring at a white ceiling, or no one is talking to you, or no one's is soothing you when you get upset," Nelson says. So areas of the brain involved in vision and language and emotion don't get wired correctly.
Izidor Ruckel says he suspects the wiring in his brain was changed by his time in the orphanage. And that may have contributed to his troubles after leaving the institution.
In 1991, when he was 11, Ruckel was adopted by an American family and moved to San Diego. At first things went pretty well, he says. Then he began to have a lot of conflict with his adoptive parents. Ruckel says it wasn't their fault.
"I respond better when you beat me, or when you smack me around," he says. "That never happened. When you show me kindness, when you show me love, compassion, it seemed to make me even more angrier."
And those feelings became increasingly intense. "I felt angry to a point where I could feel my heart is turning black," Ruckel says. "And at the same time I have been raised in a Christian home. And you know with my Christian faith I always wondered, am I a child from Hell? What went wrong with me?"
Scientists can't answer that question for Ruckel or any other individual. But they now know that, as a group, neglected or abandoned children tend to have abnormal circuitry in areas of the brain involved in parental bonding.
When typical children are shown pictures of their mothers, the response in the amygdala, a brain region that plays an important role in emotional reactions, is much greater than when they see a stranger, according to Nim Tottenham. She's an an associate professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Her team repeated the experiment with children who had been adopted after spending time in an orphanage or some other institution. This time, the children saw pictures of either an unfamiliar woman or their adoptive mother. And "the amygdala signal was not discriminating Mom from strangers," Tottenham says.
This sort of brain adaptation may help children survive in an environment without parents, she says. But it also may affect the kind of family relationships these children have once they are adopted.
Tottenham, who is a parent herself, says all the research on neglected children reminds her of something that should be obvious: "Parents are playing a really big role in shaping children's brain development." And parenting, she says, is a bit like oxygen. It's easy to take for granted until you see someone who isn't getting enough.
Children who lack parenting in the first couple of years of life are the ones most likely to have long-term problems, researchers say. Other neglected children, though, often show remarkable recoveries.
Things turned out pretty well for Izidor Ruckel. After leaving home at 17 and being out of touch with his adoptive parents for several years, he learned that his family had been in a serious car crash. He realized he couldn't just leave them there. So he went to the hospital.
"It was really hard because I wanted to make sure they were OK," he says. "I was scared. And I didn't think I was going to be forgiven for everything I'd put them through."
But they did forgive him. And since then, he says, he and his adoptive parents have become very close.
That may be possible because his brain has changed, Ruckel says. "I believe that even the brain cells that don't work as a child, I believe that they can develop as a grown man."
Scientists have their own version of that idea. They say the brain has a remarkable ability to rewire itself and compensate for things that go wrong during development, including some problems caused by neglect.
Ruckel is 33 now and lives in Denver. In addition to writing a book about his experiences, he's also produced a documentary on Romanian orphans who were adopted. And he's raising money for a second documentary about what happened to the orphans who stayed in Romania.
"I've become an advocate fighting for other orphans," Ruckel says. "And I believe that has everything to do with my parents because I realized what love, what compassion, what affection can do."
A single nurse looks after five premature babies in this Bucharest hospital
20 February 2014
"There are several reasons one might stay in Romania," says medical student Andreea Rosca sweetly, over a ginger beer in a Bucharest bar. "You love your country, you have family, friends. Maybe you dream about changing the system. I personally do not believe it will happen."
In the past seven years, 10,000 doctors and nurses have left Romania, according to estimates from a doctors' organisation.
Most of those who leave are young, at the start of their careers. They cannot live on the 250 euros (£205; $340) monthly starting salary, they say, and unlike older doctors are insufficiently experienced to set up a private practice, parallel to their work in state hospitals.
A specialist can earn 1,200 euros a month from the state, and at least double that in private practice.
So Andreea, 27, plans to pack her bags as soon as she graduates from the Medical University in Bucharest this summer, and to try her luck finding a medical career in France or Switzerland.
"I do not feel the moral obligation to stay here, considering that nobody is doing anything for us to stay and to have a decent life."
'Too poor'
More than half her class plan to leave Romania, she says: for Germany, the Nordic countries, France or the UK.
"Thirty per cent of the Romanian population does not pay health insurance, because they are too poor," explains Dr Cristian Posea, medical director of the Cantacuzeno hospital in Bucharest.
"Yet they are still entitled to state medical care."
He is proud of the equipment at his hospital, and of the rearguard action he and others fight to persuade doctors and nurses to stay.
"The maintenance of the equipment is problematic though," he admits.
In the intensive therapy ward for premature births, I count five babies in incubators in the care of a single nurse.
In hospitals in western Europe, the ratio is closer to one nurse for two babies, Dr Marian Martin explains. For the healthy babies, there is just one nurse for 14 babies.
"It is difficult, but this is the situation."
At 37, with a family of her own, she still lives with her parents.
'Bad management'
In a waiting room in another building, pregnant women sit quietly watching the door. Inside, Dr Ilonka Gussi rests on a bed, a little weary. A specialist in difficult pregnancies, she has worked 80 hours in the past week, half in this hospital, half in her private practice.
"Many hospitals only provide accommodation and staff, while patients are expected to arrive with their own medication. The hospital is just an intermediary," she says.
She feels the main problem is more about bad management than lack of resources. Hospital chiefs are often appointed in Romania on the grounds of political loyalty, she says, rather than professional ability.
In a cafe down the road from the hospital, Costin Minoiu opens his laptop to show me the latest job offers from abroad, mediated by his organisation Careers in White.
There are jobs for nurses in Britain for £12-14 an hour, for doctors in Ireland for 50,000 euros a year, and one for a specialist in Denmark for an annual salary of 83,000 euros—numbers which would make any Romanian doctor's eyes water. I ask why anyone stays.
"Some people don't want to relocate their family; some are just in love with eastern Europe and want to stay and make a difference here—there are a lot of doctors like that."
He has no qualms about helping medical staff leave Romania.
"In an ideal world, they would work abroad a few years, gain useful experience, then come back. But it doesn't often happen like that."
On a Saturday morning in the mainly Hungarian-speaking town of Sfantu Gheorghe in central Romania, hospital manager Robert Nagy takes me to the casualty ward.
He checks the figures: 3,300 people came to casualty in the first 40 days of the year, he says.
The hospital serves the whole of Covasna county. Dr Alexandru Mundru says he stays simply because he likes his job: "I used to work in the insurance system—but I missed the daily practice of being a doctor."
This morning he's the only doctor on duty, serving two waiting rooms full of patients. The shortage of doctors is particularly acute in three fields: casualty, anaesthetics, and surgery.
In intensive care on the third floor, the sound of elderly people groaning into oxygen masks punctuates my conversation with Dr Emese Jakab.
"Most of the young doctors would like to stay, but they have no choice but to leave, mostly for Germany," she says.
An important part of Robert Nagy's job is to tour the country, trying to recruit medical staff before they either leave or are snapped up by other hospitals. To help him, the town council offers free accommodation for 5 years for doctors who move to the town.
"But the biggest problem is still to come," he says. "Replacing the doctors who retire."
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17 February 2014
MOGOSOAIA, Romania (AP) — Romania's national dish looks like it will be granted a European Union reprieve.
The Romanian Meat Association says officials in Brussels have agreed that bicarbonate of soda, which gives spicy "mici" bullet-shaped grilled meat delicacies their springy texture, will be permitted by the EU.
Romanian food industry officials said Monday they have been lobbying Brussels since a ban last July on mici.
Mici, (pronounced MEECH) originated in Turkey during the days of the Ottoman Empire and are traditionally eaten with mustard and hunks of bread or french fries. Romanians eat 25 tons — or half a million — of the skinless sausages a day.
The EU's food safety committee will vote Thursday on the additive, followed by a vote in the European Parliament. Since the ban, the EU has allowed Romania to continue to produce mici, but not export them pending this week's vote. A culinary staple in the Balkans, other variants such as "cevapcici" — eaten in the former Yugoslavia — and Greece's "soutzoukakia" are also expected to be allowed to contain bicarbonate of soda.
Kevin Hill, a chef who works in Romania, said the EU had been concerned the additive was being used to disguise bad meat.
"It is part of Romania's heritage," said Hill. "It is like fish and chips for England."
In Communist Romania in the 1980s, a young translator became an unlikely voice of freedom. She illicitly dubbed thousands of foreign films, distributed on VHS tapes, turning B-movie stars into heroes.
17 February 2014
I was raised in Romania in the 1980s, under a Communist regime that, among countless repressions, reduced television to two hours a day of dull propaganda, traditional music, patriotic poems and censored films. One day when I was 6, my parents found a way to borrow a VCR. They invited their friends, and all night they watched grainy VHS tapes of Hollywood B-movies. I remember the films, but more so I remember how I felt when I stepped into the living room — like walking into a secret, magical and free world.
All the dialogue on these movies was dubbed into Romanian in a husky, high-pitched woman's voice. Throughout my childhood, these films provided a glimpse into the forbidden West, resplendent with blue jeans, Coke and skyscrapers. As Hollywood movies became ubiquitous through the black market, this voice became one of the most recognizable in Romania. Yet no one knew who she was.
After the 1989 revolution I learned the true story, which I present here in this Op-Doc video. In 1985, Irina Margareta Nistor, a young translator at the national television station, met a mysterious entrepreneur. He was smuggling, copying and distributing movies on VHS tapes. This was the beginning of a working relationship that lasted more than a decade. In all, Ms. Nistor says she dubbed more than 3,000 different films. Thanks to her, Chuck Norris, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Bruce Lee became popular heroes in Romania.
In a time when the Romanian state controlled every aspect of its citizens' lives -- including food, heat, transportation and information -- people found a way to escape and resist the state's far-reaching hand, through the power of movies.
Ilinca Calugareanu is a London-based Romanian documentary filmmaker. She studied documentary filmmaking at Manchester's Granada Center for Visual Anthropology. This Op-Doc video is adapted from an upcoming feature-length documentary, "Chuck Norris vs. Communism."
29 January 2014
A stray dog on an empty train platform in Bucharest, Romania, during a blizzard. Nearly 200 trains have been canceled and two highways closed in southern and southeastern Romania. Robert Ghement / European Pressphoto Agency
27 January 2014
"Our ways are not your ways, and there shall be to you many strange things," said a certain sharp-fanged count to his English visitor, freshly arrived by train to Transylvania.
In some sense, things haven't changed much since Bram Stoker published those words in 1897. I arrived by train myself in mid-January and I, too, found strange things: A picture-perfect medieval town square packed not with tourists but primary school students. "Bagel" shops that don't sell bagels. An Eastern Orthodox priest denouncing guitar lessons and raising bees.
Look, I fully intended to experience and write about Transylvania with no mention of vampires or anything described in novel by an Irishman who had never visited the region. I even requested that Twitter followers tracking my travels abstain from Dracula-related remarks.
That's because the real place—now a large swath of central and western Romania and almost certainly the place on earth most commonly mistaken for fictional—is mountainous and beautiful, its ancient towns lively and well preserved, its ethnic and political history rich and complex. In other words, a place well worth discovering in its own right, not digressing to mentions of scary monsters.
That worked until I was taking money from an A.T.M. in the scrupulously well-preserved medieval center of Sighisoara. Glancing up, I saw the sign: "Banca Transilvania"—and realized I was down the block from a medieval clock tower with torture chamber beneath; across the street was the house where Vlad the Impaler, a.k.a. Draculae, is said to have been born in 1431. A chill went down my spine. In my head, well trained since "Sesame Street" and "Scooby Doo" days in how vampires operate, organ music played, and lightning crackled.
I had come to Transylvania in the winter knowing that I would be sacrificing the mountain hikes and farm stays popular among summer visitors—but hoping to find cheaper prices, snow-dusted castles and perhaps a day of skiing. And soul-satisfying food: If there was ever a dish made for post-slope replenishment, it's Romanian ciorba de burta, the cream-based tripe soup that is rich, ubiquitous and cheap.
Alas, there had been no snow for a month, which meant no skiing, no fairy-tale dusting of ancient roofs. Still, having medieval towns and villages of Transylvania to yourself has its advantages. In Brasov, the 250,000-person city where I spent a day, that meant being the lone person gawking at the 16th-century Black Church, framing photographs through old city gates, and wondering at how just about every building in town is marked "Monument Istoric". Still, some were more obviously Istoric than others. Wandering narrow side streets I fell for a tiny 1837 home with an intricately carved wooden door and faux Corinthian columns bordering the windows; in front of it was a Romanian-made Dacia car propped up half on the sidewalk to allow traffic to pass.
The brisk winter temperatures made me more appreciative of bakeries selling warm-from-the-oven breads. In Brasov, I stopped at a shop called Bagel Magic, which in fact serves warm covrigi, which are like bagels Photoshopped like a celebrity for a cover photo—from pudgy and irregular to slender yet curvaceous (without, thankfully, airbrushing out the poppy seeds). Mine cost 1.5 lei, or 45 cents at 3.25 lei to the dollar. In Sighisoara, young and old lined up in the rain to pay one leu for truly piping-hot covrigi at the sales window of Gigi.
Brasov is the traditional home base for visits to two castles in the region: Bran and Peles. They could not be more different.
Bran Castle is probably the most touristy spot in Transylvania thanks to its completely dubious connections with both the fictional and historic Dracula. But with summer hordes replaced by a handful of Romanian tourists and a school field trip, I quite enjoyed the visit (the 25-lei admission price didn't hurt). Perched almost precariously on the side of a hill, the castle—which once served as a toll collector's headquarters and a defense post against Ottoman aggressors—truly seems like the sort of place a vampire might have lived.
In fact, I found out, the home was last used as a residence by the Romanian royal family before it was seized by the Communist government, and it is decorated largely from that period. (Although on the higher levels, things did get a tiny bit creepy—up there, where wind swirled and whistled outside, I came upon some restrained displays about Dracula.)
Peles Castle is a wholly different and entirely more mind-boggling experience. Built by King Carol I as a summer residence beginning in 1873, its lavish halls are filled with endlessly ornate detail, like a Versailles for the late 19th century: Carol seems to have spared no expense in the Arab and Turkish-themed rooms; his astoundingly vast European arms collection—swords, battle axes, guns—is displayed in all its excess in one hall, along with a full-on man and horse armor display that will leave no medieval fantasist unhappy. In an adjoining room is his collection of Ottoman and Persian arms, so flowery and ornate by comparison that they look runway-ready for Constantinople Fashion Week.
Still, Sighisoara, under three hours from Brasov by train (and free for me, as it was the first leg of my already-purchased return trip to Budapest), was the highlight. I'm very picky about medieval walled towns, having skewered places from Dubrovnik, Croatia, to Èze, France, as little more than polished museum pieces. But unlike those places (and true to what guidebooks said), Sighisoara is truly living medieval town, its 16th- through 18th-century homes largely still inhabited. When I stopped into a place called the Medieval Cafe for a 5-lei warm winter drink made of black currants, I could hear children playing in the neighboring schoolyard; I would later see the same kids rushing out of school in the square in front of the clock tower, which in many other places would be strictly tourist territory.
The city walls are guarded over by eclectic watchtowers, each maintained by (and named for) a different guild of historic craftsmen—tailors, tanners, cobblers, furriers, rope makers. But the clock tower is the true fairy-tale attraction. It was first built in the 13th and 14th centuries; a Baroque roof was added in the 17th century, along with its most charming element, seven figurines based on Greek and Roman gods that rotate each day of the week. From the belvedere at the top (which you reach through the creaky-floored museum, 12 lei) you get a remarkable 360-degree view of the city; astonishingly, I could spot barely a single building, even in the more modern lower city, that appeared to have been built in the 20th or 21st century.
Eager to see the much-touted Carpathian villages, I rented a car (I paid in euros, the equivalent of $33 a day) and drove out to the rural villages, many of which feature impressive fortified Saxon churches. That Saxon population, which once dominated many of the villages, has since largely evacuated to Germany, replaced by Romanians, Hungarians and Roma, the three largest ethnic groups in Transylvania today. (For those wondering, the last Romanian census counted zero vampires, though admittedly was largely taken in the daylight.)
After passing through Biertan, whose church was closed and residents not very chatty, I found a warmer reception a mile or so away in Copsa Mare. In the local magazin mixt—the cool Romanian term for convenience store—a woman used hand gestures to explain that I should knock at the house next to the church; there, an adolescent boy fetched the key and led me through its battered arched doorway. The old church wasn't anything special, although the experience of getting into it had been. So I left a donation in the bowl and took off to wander the town.
It was a village of dirt roads and modest, mostly Saxon-style houses; I noticed nothing out of the ordinary except several young girls carrying around guitars. When a young man pulling buckets of water from a well spoke to me in near perfect English, I asked him about the guitars. "There's a lady in the town who is teaching the children," he said.
"Great!" I said. He did not agree. He was the town's Orthodox priest, and the guitar lessons, he said, were an effort to recruit families to the Pentecostal church in town. He introduced himself as John (his name is actually Ioan Bico) and seemed delighted to entertain me for the next few hours. He may have been a priest, but he wielded a sharp tongue recounting an opinionated chapter of the town's recent ethnic history. To summarize: the Saxons used to refuse to marry Romanians, yet when they moved to Germany, the men found themselves discriminated against and returned to marry not only Romanians but even the more-maligned Roma. (He called them Gypsies, and they were not spared maligning from him either.)
He eventually invited me over for a beer—nonalcoholic for me, he insisted, since I was driving—and to see the icons he paints and sells to supplement his meager pay. He was also a beekeeper, and I happily bought a jar of honey for 20 lei. Conversation ranged from Hollywood to the Internet to birth control and abortion. (He did not think highly of any of the four.)
I had not eaten since breakfast, so I headed back to Sighisoara in search of a reasonably priced meal. Finding the pub-like Cafe Martini near the town center, I ordered a feast as most customers just drank beer and listened to a soundtrack lost in the '80s (Springsteen, Tina Turner, Asia). I had that tripe soup called ciorba de burta, mititei (grilled ground meat patties), cascaval pane (breaded, fried cheese), and the great Romanian dessert of papanasi (hot doughnuts, topped with sour cream and currant jam)—and returned, stuffed, to my guesthouse.
I was staying at Casa Soare, a family-run pension in the lower town, a 10-minute walk down from the citadel, where I had scored a winter discount at 80 lei a night—about 20 percent off the Booking.com price—by calling in advance. It was a nice place and worth the modest expense, but I had two lodging regrets. The first—that I had not stayed in a village or on a farm—was unavoidable: Most rural guesthouses were closed for the winter. But I realized I had missed an opportunity when I picked up my rental car at Casa Baroca, just down the block from the Vlad Dracul house. I got a tour of the place, and it was amazing. Entering through the 300 year-old front door, I found rooms under vaulted ceilings decorated with traditional furniture, antique wood stoves, old wood floors. And winter prices were only slightly more than what I was paying: 100 lei, down from 140 in summer.
Still, perhaps I was better off at my place. Staying at Casa Baroca, I had learned, would be in violation of a town ordinance forbidding foreigners to lodge in the citadel. Admittedly, the law was written around 1515 and is probably not still in effect, but in a city with a torture chamber, you can't be too careful.
For more photos from Transylvania, go to Seth Kugel's public Facebook page or follow him on Instagram, @sethkugel.
27 January 2014
Reading Patrick Leigh Fermor's The Broken Road is like feeling a fresh spring breeze against my face. It reminds me of Aristotle's definition of happiness as bloom upon the cheek of youth. It reminds me too of why I am in South-Eastern Europe and how much I love Romania and Bucharest, because after 15 years here I still feel like a tourist.
Patrick Leigh Fermor set out, aged 18, in 1934 to walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. In the 1970s the first volume of his trilogy describing his journey came out. I read it years later at university. Between the Woods and the Water, the second volume, came out in 1985 and describes his time in Hungary and Transylvania.
I remember that book's publication well as I did not have the cash to buy a signed hardback copy in the shop near where I lived. A quarter of a century passed and I gave up hope that we would ever read his description of Bucharest, to set beside his description of Budapest. Then after his death in 2011 we were told that the final volume in his trilogy had almost been completed. Now it is published.
In fact it is unfinished, which makes it much easier to read quickly. Reading Fermor's wonderful Ruskinian prose takes time. It can sometimes be, as Tennyson described reading Ben Jonson, like swimming in treacle.
After taking over a year to walk there from the Hook of Holland, we learn from The Broken Road that Patrick Leigh Fermor stayed in the city he (rightly) always called Constantinople only ten days before setting off again for Greece, where he was to make his life. He said he never left Constantinople 'without a lightening of the heart'.
Fermor did not like Constantinople, but he loved Bucharest. Oddly enough though, the chapter on Bucharest is one of the weakest in the book. It does read at times, as he himself admits, like an article from The Tatler. Yet the chapter is terribly interesting for those of us who live in Bucharest; one cannot imagine a Tatlerish Bucharest now. How different Bucharest was in 1934—not least in the upper class circles where he moved, after putting up by mistake for a few days at a bordello called Pisica Vesela, where the girls made friends with him.
On his first full day in Bucharest he enters a cafe on Calea Victoriei and feels a revulsion from the well dressed customers, who looked 'shiny and commercial despite their rice-paper cheeks. I had the illusion that the talk of this gleaming and overupholstered Babylon consisted entirely of sneers.'
That sounds like some Bucuresteni of the present day but Fermor has a remarkable gift for inspiring friendship in total strangers and in the cafe he meets a man who takes him to the opera and after that to a grand party and from then on he is lionised by the aristocracy. He also had many introductions from his time moving from castle to castle in Transylvania as described in the second volume of his travels. He says 'there was a strong bohemian, anti-conventional and un-pompous strain in the section of the Romanian world in which I now found myself.'
That describes quite a number of my close Romanian friends, but I have been very lucky. Most Romanians are very different, very conventional, very unbohemian, sometimes even a little pompous.
Of course he is describing a class many of whom later fled or were killed. Most of the 'historic centre' of Bucharest, i.e. the part built from 1880 to 1914, as a taxi driver reminded me the other day, was built by and for a class of people who left the country after the war if they could—not the upper classes only but the upper middle classes and the business class. Bohemianism in 1934 in Romania and in England was confined to a minority of the upper classes and a tiny minority of metropolitan intellectuals. Since then it became much more common in England, but is very rare in Romania.
The Romania of the elite in 1934 had great style, we learn. Nowadays the elite—the rich and powerful, if they are the elite—are singularly lacking in style. In fact, Romania has so many wonderful charms but style is not one of them. Another reason why Romania should restore the monarchy. The peasants clad in costume are gone too but much about the countryside remains much the same or did until a moment ago.
Apart from two chapters on Romania the book is about Bulgaria and very good indeed. I liked it all the more because even though I do not know Bulgaria very well I had been to almost all the places he visited. He describes Plovdiv and Tarnovo well and thinks Sofia a pleasant village. How lucky he was to get there in time—before modernity. Fermor arouses in me for the first time an interest in Bulgaria, whose gentle charm for me has been an acquired taste. I acquired it in the end but only now do I feel an interest in the place.
Reading Fermor's jeu d'esprit about Greece before and during the war, Roumeli, in memoriam just after he died has made me decide that Greece is still worth visiting, despite the affluence and tourism that have altered it out of recognition from the shepherd strewn Balkan kingdom he knew. I shall try to find the profound Greece, if it still exists, far from motorways and airports. The profound Romania is everywhere and I must visit it much more before it too goes. I have been telling family and friends for fifteen years to come to Romania before it is spoilt but I have not followed my own advice and have seen far too little of the provinces. From now on I shall stop jetting around the globe and stay around here.
22January 2014
LONDON—For years, Europe has tried to set the global standard for climate-change regulation, creating tough rules on emissions, mandating more use of renewable energy sources and arguably sacrificing some economic growth in the name of saving the planet.
But now even Europe seems to be hitting its environmentalist limits.
High energy costs, declining industrial competitiveness and a recognition that the economy is unlikely to rebound strongly any time soon are leading policy makers to begin easing up in their drive for more aggressive climate regulation.
On Wednesday, the European Union proposed an end to binding national targets for renewable energy production after 2020. Instead, it substituted an overall European goal that is likely to be much harder to enforce.
It also decided against proposing laws on environmental damage and safety during the extraction of shale gas by a controversial drilling process known as fracking. It opted instead for a series of minimum principles it said it would monitor.
Europe pressed ahead on other fronts, aiming for a cut of 40 percent in Europe's carbon emissions by 2030, double the current target of 20 percent by 2020. Officials said the new proposals were not evidence of diminished commitment to environmental discipline but reflected the complicated reality of bringing the 28 countries of the European Union together behind a policy.
"It will require a lot from Europe," said Connie Hedegaard, European commissioner for climate action. "If all other big economies followed our example, the world would be a better place."
But the proposals were seen as a substantial backtrack by environmental groups, and evidence that economic factors were starting to influence the climate debate in ways they previously had not in Europe.
Friends of the Earth, an environmental group, described the proposals as "totally inadequate" and "off the radar of what climate science tells us to do in Europe to avoid climate catastrophe."
Wednesday's proposals came from the European Commission, the Brussels-based executive arm of the bloc, and would next require approval by the group's member states and the European Parliament.
The energy and climate debate, which is playing out across Europe, reflects similar trade-offs being made around the world on mending economic problems today or addressing the environmental problems of tomorrow.
The political and policy response to climate change has failed to keep pace with increasingly dire warnings from scientists about the cascading effects of increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide and other global warming pollutants in the atmosphere.
What progress has been made has come largely from cost efficiencies adopted by businesses and consumers primarily for financial reasons—the switch from coal to cheaper natural gas for electricity generation in the United States, for example, and the cumulative effect of years of increasing efficiency in buildings, vehicles, appliances and manufacturing around the globe.
In Britain, despite public protests, the government is pressing ahead on proposals for fracking, which has helped the United States drive down its energy costs. Germany's plans to shift away from nuclear power by 2022 and to encourage the development of alternative sources are running into complications including higher energy costs for industry and consumers.
José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, defended the new proposals as a hard-fought compromise and proof that it "is possible to make a marriage between industry and climate action."
He said the measures showed that Europe was still playing a global leadership role in reducing carbon emissions.
That drew a tart response from Friends of the Earth, which accused the commission of putting the immediate interests of industry ahead of Europe's broader welfare.
"Barroso and his commissioners seem to have fallen for the old-think industry spin that there must be a trade-off between climate action and economic recovery," Brook Riley, the group's climate and energy campaigner, said in a statement. "This position completely ignores the huge financial cost of dealing with the impacts of climate change and the 500 billion euros the E.U. is spending every year on oil and gas imports."
The British government, a frequent critic of what it sees as moves by the European Union that inhibit economic performance, welcomed the proposals. It singled out for praise the scrapping of national targets for renewable energy in favor of an overall goal of producing 27 percent of Europe's energy from renewables by 2030, an approach that will leave countries battling among themselves over who should do more.
"If you set rigid, inflexible targets, that is likely to result in greater costs," said Edward Davey, Britain's secretary of state for energy and climate change. "We believe our existing approach will enable us to meet these objectives without having to take more action, but we believe other countries will have to take more action."
Before Wednesday's announcement, business groups lobbied hard against more stringent targets that they worried could endanger Europe's still very feeble economic recovery and slow the job creation needed to bring down an overall unemployment rate of nearly 11 percent.
In a letter sent to the European Commission this month, 14 executives at large companies called for "one single, realistic target" and warned that "the high-cost of noncompetitive technologies to decarbonise the power sector" will strain businesses already hit by Europe's high energy prices, particularly for electricity, which costs twice what it does in the United States.
Ms. Hedegaard on Wednesday acknowledged that Europe needed to bring down its energy prices but said that the shift to renewable sources played a "negligible" part in the problem. But she also took a swipe at what she suggested were unrealistic demands by environmental activists, noting that "we are trying to do something that is achievable, that is doable and practical for 28 governments to back."
Greenpeace has called for a 55 percent cut in carbon emissions by 2030, and activists argue that Europe could and should have gone further than the 40 percent carbon emissions proposal because the bloc is already well on track to meet existing objectives.
In 2007 the European Union said it wanted to cut carbon emissions by 20 percent in 2020 and was even prepared to reduce them by 30 percent by the same date if other big economies also took significant action. It also set national targets for adopting renewable energy.
According to the commission, total greenhouse gas emissions from the 28 members had by 2011 fallen to 16.9 percent below the 1990 level, and to 18 percent lower by 2012. That suggests that the 40 percent reduction target by 2030 should be attainable.
But the 2011 and 2012 reductions partly reflect the drop in industrial output in Europe after the financial crisis, which plunged almost all of the bloc's nations into recession—something policy makers are desperate to reverse.
Europeans have also been disappointed that other big polluters have failed to follow the lead they set in 2007.
"The European Union said it wanted to lead globally, but it quickly discovered that other countries were not willing to engage in a race to the top," said Andrew Jordan, a professor at the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research, part of the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England.
Andrew Higgins contributed reporting from Brussels.
13 January 2014
Shepherds have a special place in Romania's history and in its culture, and their lifestyle has not changed much in centuries—until now. Social media has turned at least one of them into a celebrity, writes Caroline Juler.
On a dank Monday evening some weeks ago, a Romanian shepherd called Ghita left home with his sheep. He wasn't in a lorry but on foot, accompanied by several angajati, or hired men, some shaggy dogs, and seven donkeys loaded with gear. Ghita was off on his autumn transhumance, heading north for his winter pastures. It would take him six weeks.
For a country whose defining myth revolves around shepherds, Romania isn't all that keen on its pastoralists. The Ballad of the Little Sheep (Miorita) tells of a herdsman who lets himself be murdered by two rival shepherds even though one of his lambs, who has miraculously acquired the power of speech, warns him in advance. Miorita is sometimes taken as a metaphor for Christianity, another way of showing Christ's courage in turning the other cheek. It's also said to mirror the experience of the Romanian people who have endured numerous invasions, occupations and humiliations without, it is claimed, ever losing their identity.
When Romanians were agitating for independence in the 19th Century, Transylvanian shepherds were seen as the rugged pioneers of the nationalist movement. Long before then, they had established shortcuts over the Carpathian Mountains to seasonal grazing in what is now Hungary, Serbia, Bulgaria, the Caucasus, southern Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, Poland and the Czech Republic. Having crossed from Hungarian and Habsburg lands into Ottoman Turkey and Russia, they returned home to their more isolated communities with information, ideas and ambitions fired by the world outside.
A shepherd's CV has to offer some crucial USPs: caringness, self-reliance and dedication. He—and it's almost always a he, although in real life women did the same job—is synonymous with the kindly ideals of Christianity and for that matter Islam—but for all that, he is a humble, often solitary, sometimes rootless figure.
During Communism, certain Romanian sheep farmers did rather well. People still talk about Mr B from Poiana Sibiului who asked Ceausescu's permission to buy a helicopter. Mr B's flocks were hefted over several mountains, and he argued that being able to fly would let him keep track of them more easily. His request was refused, but Poiana is famous for other reasons—many of its shepherds built luxurious mansions at a time when most people had to stand in queues to buy food and lit their homes with 40 watt bulbs. Inaccessible to big machinery, many mountain farms escaped collectivisation, and the men and women who commuted there from the less exclusive plains, spoke of "going to America".
Like farmers worldwide, Romanian flock masters enjoy a good grumble. But things have got tough for them since 1989. Once guaranteed, prices for wool have plummeted. Although there is an international market for Romanian lamb, and sheep's cheese sells well, "slow food" has not made enough of a difference to the shepherds who find it healthier—and cheaper—to walk their sheep to far away winter pastures rather than keep their animals inside.
With its origins in the Bronze Age, if not earlier, transhumance is a form of semi-nomadism. It sounds romantic but in the past, Romanian shepherds occasionally resorted to transporting their animals by train, something they could never afford to do now.
Romanian shepherds still look archaic. They wear a long sheepskin cloak called a cojoc or sarica. With the shaggy fleece on the outside, it's also their bed, so when shepherds call the cloak their house, they aren't joking. When they sleep at all, it's outside, in all weathers. The hired men earn between 200 or 300 euros a month. They also receive daily meals, work clothing, and a cigarette allowance.
Romanians are generally learning more about their shepherds thanks to television.
In August this year, a well-known phone company began an advertising campaign that highlighted real people doing real jobs. One of them was Ghita.
Dressed in his cojoc and rimless pot hat (another must-have piece of shepherding rig), sitting by a campfire and dancing with sheep, Ghita Ciobanul, or Ghita the Shepherd, has taken Romania by storm. Ten days after the phone company put him on Facebook, his page had clocked more than 200,000 likes. A month later, they had doubled.
In the past, Ghita has had to move his sheep illegally, during the night. Given the hazards of crossing Romania's rapidly urbanising, motorised countryside, it's the only way. Accidents and shootings have cost him scores of sheep and many dogs. Maybe this year, thanks to his new-found celebrity, Ghita will be luckier.
10 January 2014
A man walks past a graffiti on a board during a HIV Street Art event in downtown Bucharest January 10, 2014. According to the organisers, Romania's health ministry and various non-governmental organizations (NGOs) launched HIV Street Art, a national information and education campaign to raise awareness about human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). Romania had 12,119 registered HIV positive cases by the end of last year, health ministry data showed, a fraction of the roughly 2 million patients overall in Europe and Central Asia. Picture: REUTERS/Bogdan Cristel
31 December 2013
Dancers from Romania's northeastern region of Moldova perform the bear dance, a ritual for good luck in the New Year, during a traditional parade in Comanesti, 300 km (186 miles) northeast of Bucharest. Picture: REUTERS/Bogdan Cristel
30 December 2013
Dancers from Romania's northeastern region near Moldova performed the traditional bear dance, a new year's ritual for good luck, during a parade in Comanesti, about 200 miles northeast of Bucharest. In pre-Christian rural traditions, dancers would go house to house in villages while singing and dancing to ward off evil. Bogdan Cristel/Reuters
27 December 2013
LONDON (AP)—They're portrayed as pickpockets who will steal British jobs. There are predictions they will beg, the unruly young ones will stir up riots, and some will even try to sell babies.
For months, Britain's tabloids have repeatedly warned of the horrors they believe will ensue after Jan. 1, when work restrictions will be lifted across the European Union for migrants from Romania and Bulgaria—two of the trading bloc's newest members. Those changes, the papers claim, will unleash a mass exodus of the poor and unemployed from the two eastern European countries to Britain.
"In January, the only thing left will be the goat," a Daily Mail headline proclaimed, referring to a remote Romanian village where, the paper claimed, everyone was preparing to move to Britain for the higher wages and generous welfare benefits.
"We're importing a crime wave from Romania and Bulgaria," another headline declared, quoting a Conservative lawmaker who told Parliament that most pickpockets on British streets hail from Romania.
The alarming stories about a possible Romanian and Bulgarian influx, and a government scramble to tighten welfare rules, are part of the latest chapter in an increasingly bitter debate about Britain's immigration policies and its uneasy relationship with the EU. Right-wing politicians have won over voters by arguing that foreigners, particularly eastern Europeans, are flooding Britain's job market with cheap labor and exploiting the country's benefits system.
The upstart UK Independence Party, known as UKIP, has seized on the anti-immigration mood to undermine support for the Conservative Party led by Prime Minister David Cameron. In response, Cameron has recently stepped up his rhetoric on immigration and rushed to impose curbs on the ability of new migrants to claim state benefits.
He also angered fellow EU leaders when he challenged the established concept that there should be a free movement of workers throughout the economic bloc, arguing that it should be amended to stop mass migrations from poorer to richer member states.
"The politicians are doing it for popularity," said Father Silviu Petre Pufulete, a priest at a Romanian Orthodox Church in London. "It's been unfair to the Romanians and it's just been blown out of all proportion."
How big exactly is the potential problem?
Romania and Bulgaria joined the EU in 2007 and more than 100,000 migrants from the two countries already work in Britain, albeit under work restrictions that limit their access to jobs and state benefits like health care.
The work restrictions use quotas to limit the number of low-skilled Romanians and Bulgarians who can take jobs in Britain and requires them to obtain a "worker authorization document" before taking a position. Those who work without proper papers, and employers who hire them, face fines and prosecution.
Those restrictions—similar to those in place in several other EU countries—will be lifted Jan. 1, giving Romanians and Bulgarians the same rights as other EU nationals to live and seek work freely across Europe.
Britain is bound by EU regulations to let the migrants work, and is powerless to extend the restrictions. That feeds frustration among those who feel Britain has given too much power to bureaucrats in Brussels. The turbulence comes as Cameron has promised a nationwide referendum on Britain's continued membership in the EU if his party wins the next general election in 2015.
The relaxation of work rules has become a hot button issue in Britain, but has not provoked similar passions in Germany, France and other European countries, despite occasional tensions over the large number of migrants and complaints that the new arrivals are linked to a rise in street crime in major cities like Paris.
Nobody knows how many Romanians and Bulgarians will actually come to Britain, and the government has refused to provide an official estimate. But many Britons believe that the migrants will choose Britain over other EU members because it is seen to be a generous welfare state.
"The biggest issue is that some see Britain as a soft touch," said Victoria Honeyman, a politics lecturer at the University of Leeds. "They assume people will want to come here because they'll get an easy ride here."
Much of the anxiety can be blamed on the British experience in 2004, when Poland and other former communist countries joined the EU. Officials had mistakenly estimated that several thousand would come, but more than 1 million Poles moved to Britain.
Arguments that the influx of Polish workers has helped Britain's economy have not calmed worries of a second wave of eastern invasion, especially now that the British economy is much weaker than it was a decade ago.
"It's the fear of it rather than reality," said Simon Usherwood, a specialist in European politics at the University of Surrey. He said studies reveal that most EU migrants tend to be young, healthy and employed.
The Center for Economics and Business Research said this week that continued immigration is one factor that will help Britain eclipse Germany as the biggest economy in Europe by 2030.
That hasn't stopped British media from focusing on the poverty and unemployment in parts of Romania and Bulgaria. A favorite topic is the impoverishment of the Roma, or Gypsies, a minority that has endured centuries of discrimination in Europe. Roma are scattered across Europe, with the largest population in Romania.
Tabloid stories have accused the Roma already living in Britain of a wide range of things, from trying to sell babies to eating cats.
Police statistics suggest that Romanians in the U.K. do not constitute a major crime threat, though social tensions have occasionally flared. In June, British police evicted dozens of homeless Romanians who had set up a makeshift camp in a former soccer field in London. That and similar incidents prompted police to travel to Romania, in part to try to discourage locals there from moving to the U.K. without guaranteed work.
UK Independence Party leaders say this tactic will surely fail.
"The only real solution is and has always been to take back control of our borders by leaving the EU," says UKIP Deputy Leader Paul Nutall on the party's website.
Its "common sense" video states that qualified migrants are welcome but that "foolish" EU rules allow "anyone from the entire region of 500 million people to walk right in to work, or not to work, to claim health care and housing." It warns that Britain's 2.5 million unemployed will have their chances of finding work undercut by new arrivals willing to work for low wages.
The impact of the rule changes won't be clear for several months, but in the end Cameron may have the most to lose. In appeasing hardline Euro-skeptics among his Conservatives and trying to win back UKIP supporters, he has upset relations with the EU.
"He's annoying his European partners, and he's also annoying the rank and file in his party because he's not tough enough," said Usherwood. "He's trying to make everyone happy, but in the process making nobody happy."
A Barrier to Emigration Falls for Bulgarians: On the first day of 2014, labor restrictions will end for Bulgarians and Romanians in nine European Union member states. Boryana Katsarova for The New York Times
26 December 2013
SOFIA, Bulgaria—Ervin Ivanov, a fourth-year medical student, is sure he'll leave Bulgaria, and he is sure that most of his classmates will too
"Probably most of them are thinking of working in other countries, working in European countries, but not in Bulgaria, definitely," Mr. Ivanov, 22, said while standing in the hallway of a Soviet-era medical school here.
Even though he is debt-free because the state subsidizes much of the cost of education, he dreams of practicing in Switzerland or Germany because those countries offer far higher pay and more advanced and specialized medical systems.
"I think of myself as European," said Mr. Ivanov, an aspiring oncologist.
On the first day of 2014, nine European Union states, including Germany, France, the Netherlands and Britain, will lift labor restrictions for Bulgarians and Romanians. But already, skilled and even many unskilled laborers have found many ways to work in those countries. A look at income data shows why Bulgarians and Romanians might continue to seek greener pastures.
The wealthiest one-fifth of society in Bulgaria and Romania, which joined the European Union in 2007, have a lower median income than the poorest one-fifth of society in Britain, France, Germany or other wealthy European states, according to a review of income data obtained from Eurostat, the statistics office.
Obviously, this does not necessarily mean that being poor in Britain, France or Germany is better than being in the top income bracket in Bulgaria or Romania: The cost of living is vastly lower in Sofia than in London.
But the lure of higher pay cannot be ignored when barriers come down, particularly as Bulgaria's unemployment has increased sharply over the last half-decade. After bottoming out around 6 percent at the end of 2008, it has steadily risen to 13.2 percent in October.
Interviews in December with residents of Sofia, Bulgaria's capital, revealed widespread frustrations with the succession of governments, corruption and the country's inability to shake off its Soviet roots. It has also been unable to lift itself from being Europe's poorest nation. (Bulgaria's output, per capita, is last among the European Union's 28 states, according to data from the International Monetary Fund.)
A common joke here goes like this: "There are two ways out of Bulgaria's problems: Terminal 1 and Terminal 2," referring to the two terminals at Sofia's airport.
Despite that, many said they wanted to stay home, in part because joining the European Union brought a measure of hope. Some mentioned the unrest in Ukraine as a cautionary tale.
Polina Naydenova, 24, who is studying international law, said she wanted to stay where she had "my friends, my family and my life." She hopes she will "somehow have the chance to change things constructively" in her native country. Another law student, Petar Kyosev, 24, said he hoped to move to Amsterdam, but also would eventually return. "I'm trying to do my best to stay here, but my country is not doing its best to make me stay," he said.
Liliya Vlaeva, 26, an economics student, said she would stay. "The living standard here in Bulgaria is not so high as in Great Britain, in London for example," she said. "The salaries for young people are enough, in my opinion, to live well—not as rich people, but to live O.K."
But she said many of her classmates who study abroad opt not to return. "I know about 10 or 15 people from the last year that did this, in different countries," she said. "They are people who are not coming back, but it is a personal decision."
Bulgaria also has a large and often impoverished minority of Roma, or Gypsies. "I don't see any hope in the coming 20 years; the only way is working abroad," said Minko Angelov, 57, a Rom who was laid off at a local Coca-Cola bottler, speaking outside a state employment center. Since he speaks only Bulgarian and Russian, he is reluctant to travel through Europe. "The language is a big problem," he said.
The pending rule change has set off alarm particularly in Britain, which was flooded with Polish immigrants over the last decade. The circumstances are not entirely parallel. In 2004, Britain threw open its borders to the Poles and also altered its work rules to make it easier to get employment. This time, nine countries are easing their work rules simultaneously because of European rules, but their borders have already been open to visiting Bulgarians and Romanians.
Projections range widely, suggesting nobody really knows what will happen after the rules change. On one extreme is a recent claim by the right-wing Democracy Institute, based in Washington and London, which predicted at least 385,000 new migrants from Bulgaria and Romania would come to Britain over the next five years, though the group kept its methodology secret. By contrast, the Bulgarian and Romanian governments have said there will be no perceptible change in emigration.
Bulgarian officials argue that there have been ways for workers to find jobs in Europe already. "I don't think January 1 is a very bad day in which we'll have thousands and thousands of people leaving Bulgaria. This will not happen," said Petar Chobanov, Bulgaria's finance minister.
"If someone wants to leave, they already left," he said.
Daniel Kalinov, executive director of a private employment agency in Sofia that helps people find work abroad, agreed. He said most of the people who sought access to the labor market, even unskilled workers, could find ways through the red tape of the existing system. And the number of applications he has received ahead of the rule change has not increased. "It's not going to be buses coming in, pouring over and congesting the country," he said of Britain.
Unconvinced, the British government recently made it harder for immigrants to receive state benefits. "By addressing the factors that drive up immigration, we are doing everything within our power to discourage immigration from the European Union," Mark Harper, the immigration minister, said in a statement.
Perhaps most worrisome for Bulgaria is the brain drain of its doctors. "They simply go, and this is very, very bad news," said Dr. Marin Marinov, the head of the Medical University of Sofia's medicine department. He said past surveys showed about two-thirds of the school's graduates planned to leave the country.
"You educate these people for six years, you invest money, invest intellectual potential, you invest everything you have to teach them and to make them good doctors," he said, "and they disappear afterward."
Finding frustrated people in this city is not hard. Daily demonstrations have been taking place since the current Socialist-led government made an abortive attempt at appointing a loyalist media mogul as security minister this past summer. Among the protesters outside the Parliament building on a chilly December morning were two 19-year-olds, Emil Nikolov and Teodora Shalvardjieva. They wore hoodies; he blue, she pink. He also had a small yellow button with a black fist on it. She held a megaphone at her side.
"I could've gone to France to study, but I decided to stay here," Ms. Shalvardjieva said. "If it doesn't change eventually, maybe one day I'm going to be forced to go somewhere else."
"We have no future here. We cannot have a nice job here in this country," Mr. Nikolov said. "This is why all the young people from Bulgaria go."
Milen Enchev contributed research from Sofia, Bulgaria
18 December 2013
When it comes to the Oscar for best foreign-language film, Romania is a country that can't get no respect. The Romanian "new wave" is one of the most significant developments in world cinema over the last decade, and Romanian films regularly walk away with top prizes at festivals like Cannes and Berlin. But no Romanian film has ever been nominated for an Oscar, and only one, Cristian Mungiu's "Beyond the Hills," released last year, has even been shortlisted.
This time out, the Romanians have submitted "Child's Pose," a drama directed by Calin Peter Netzer that won the Golden Bear, the top prize, at the Berlin Film Festival in February. To be more specific, it is an intense psychological drama: after Barbu, a man in his 30s, has a car accident that kills a child, his mother, Cornelia, uses all of her many social and political connections to try to get the state bureaucracy to drop the manslaughter charges—and to reassert her control over her son's life.
As played by the esteemed Romanian actress Luminita Gheorghiu, who has appeared in prize-winning Romanian films like "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu" and "4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days" as well as Michael Haneke's "Code Unknown," Cordelia is an utterly amoral harridan. It's a juicy role, one that, though Mr. Netzer was not familiar with the reference when asked, recalls the Joan Crawford of "Mommie Dearest," smothering her children by trying to mold them into what she wants them to be.
Mr. Netzer, 38, wrote the script for "Child's Pose," his third feature, with Razvan Radulescu, co-writer of "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu." Mr. Netzer's previous film, "Medal of Honor," also looked at interactions with the government bureaucracy, though from an absurdist viewpoint and without the "pathological" element that pervades his new film, as he explained in an interview last month. Here are excerpts.
Q. Is your film based in some fashion on a real situation?
A. In a way, yes. It's based on the relationship between me and my mother and the co-writer and his mother.
Q. Wow. That's not at all the answer I was expecting. I was thinking more along the lines of a court case that may have been in the news in Romania.
A. We were inspired by the news because accidents like this do happen in Romania. So we put it together with this pathological mother-son story. It's like a catharsis, therapeutic if you will.
Q. It's interesting to see this film working on at least two different levels, familial and also the larger society. How did you and Razvan decide on that approach?
A. We decided on the social thing, the corruption, because we needed some extraordinary thing to happen to speed up the relationship. Because the film is taking place over five or six days, that was the point. But the mother-and-son relationship, that's the main story, the main interest for us.
Q. Bureaucracy is so often a theme in Romanian films, almost a trademark. Why is that?
A. More even than a trademark, it's an obsession. It's the experience of the country. You face these things and they are getting into you. These are things you want to bring out. It's like therapy, you have to pull it out of yourself, to escape from these things.
Q. Was the story written with specific actors in mind?
A. Yes, Luminita was in my head when we wrote the script. But once we finished and went to production and casting, I was looking for someone else. Because Luminita is a very well known actress, and I tried to discover somebody else, maybe a fresher face. But after a few weeks of casting, I realized that she was far and away the best option.
Q. What made her the logical choice?
A. She's a little bit a Cornelia in her life. But she is a very good actress, she is very professional. She was afraid of this story, since it is about a high-society lady, and she didn't know about this milieu because she always played people from other classes. She was afraid of that, and also that I wanted to change her looks a lot. She was fine about that in the beginning, but then she was afraid and didn't want to play the role anymore. It was a big fight. But I ended up taking her to a place to have some Botox put in her lips.
Q. What do you mean when you say she's a bit like Cornelia?
A. She's bossy and domineering.
Q. Does that mean the shoot was difficult?
A. There was a tension between us. For example, she greeted me in a way before and during the shooting like Cornelia was treating Barbu. That's how deep she was going into the character. Of course I had to play Barbu because I couldn't spoil her game.
Q. How do you feel about this label of the Romanian new wave. Are you comfortable with it? Or is it something that was invented by critics?
A. I think there is a wave. It really started with Cristi Puiu's "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu." Then Cristian Mungiu changes his point of view on cinema, because his first film, "Occident," was something else, and he approached cinema in a different way after that. And Corneliu Porumboiu ["12:08 East of Bucharest"] as well. So I think there is both a movement and a leader, in Puiu.
Q. And when people ask you to explain how it happened in your country and not elsewhere, what do you say?
A. That's a question I can't answer. Of course I think there is a talented generation, that's for sure. But I think the most important thing is that in our films we are trying to be as honest as we can. And also, there is competition between us, and I think it's healthy.
Q. This is your first experience competing for an Oscar. Have any colleagues given you advice?
A. Not really. There has never been a Romanian nominee until now.
Q. Why should that be the case? Romanian films win prizes everywhere else. Is there some kind of disconnect with Hollywood?
A. Probably. The Academy members are looking for films that are closer not to mainstream, but something lighter. Our films are very dark, and I don't know whether most Academy members care whether you win a Golden Bear or not. You have to make a little campaign, and have something they know. For example, "The Hunt" has Mads Mikkelsen, and that's something for them. Plus we get no support, and you have to have some money. Other countries get money from the government to promote it, and we're not getting that, that's a problem.
The Dacia Duster at the Frankfurt Motor Show in September. Uli Deck/European Pressphoto Agency
17 December 2013
PARIS—The hottest car in Europe this year is not a BMW, a Benz or a Bentley. It is Renault's low-cost brand, Dacia, born in Romania.
Dacia's sales through November are up 21.1 percent from a year ago, to more than 260,000 vehicles, according to the European Automobile Manufacturers' Association report released Tuesday, well ahead of equal second-place finishers Mazda and Jaguar, each with 15.6 percent gains. Not bad for a brand that only reappeared in 2004.
With unemployment in the euro zone above 12 percent and economic uncertainty high, Dacia has found a foothold with prices as low as 7,700 euros, or about $10,600, taxes included, for its no-frills Logan sedan.
For someone used to driving a Mercedes or a BMW, a Dacia would be "awful," Jens Schattner, an analyst with Macquarie in Frankfurt, said. "But if you just need to get from Point A to Point B, it's simple, reliable technology, and you get a three-year warranty. It's all you need."
Dacia is one of the bright spots in the European market, which has undergone a wrenching contraction since the financial crisis. Auto sales rose slightly in November in Europe for the third straight month, according to auto registration data released on Tuesday by the association, but they are still headed for another year of declines. Sales were down 2.7 percent for the first 11 months of the year in the European Union compared with the same period in 2012.
Dacia's success, and the continuing strength of the luxury segment, reflect a bifurcated sector in which the extremes are doing well while much of the market in the middle stagnates. The brand has also been a boost to Renault's bottom line as competitors have struggled with the downturn in Europe.
Renault bought Dacia in 1999, a rusting artifact of the Communist regime of Nicolae Ceausescu, who had started the Romanian car company in the 1960s with a stripped-down old Renault 12 design that the dictator declared was "good enough for the idiots."
Louis Schweitzer, Renault's former chairman and chief executive, recognized that mass-market cars made for the developed world could not be sold profitably in Europe's emerging markets, so he sought to make Dacia a place to build a new car platform, called the M-zero (or M0), that would be economical, reliable and cost just €5,000.
While he did not meet his price target, his gamble paid off when Dacia successfully debuted in 2004, targeting buyers in Eastern Europe and Turkey. To the industry's surprise, it also caught on in Western Europe, especially after the financial crisis hit: Dacia's European sales nearly doubled in 2009 from 2008 to more than 214,000 cars. Today it boasts a full range of pickup trucks, SUVs, and station wagons. Its newest model, the Dacia Duster crossover, starts at €11,900.
"Anyone can say we took advantage of the crisis," said Arnaud Deboeuf, the Renault executive who oversees the company's entry-level segment around the world. "But there's been a change in buying attitudes in Europe; people don't want to spend so much money on a car now."
Mr. Deboeuf said the experience gained by developing a low-cost car from scratch had been hugely beneficial. "You can't offer a car to your customers at an aggressive price if you don't put pressure on your engineers, on sales, marketing, to control and reduce costs," he said.
Dacia spends little on marketing, and distribution costs are relatively small, because the cars are sold through existing Renault dealers. And there is no discounting.
A big part of keeping costs down is the fact that none of the Dacia models that are sold in Western Europe are made there. Renault's investment in the decrepit business transformed the company and created thousands of new jobs in Romania. But even Romania may be getting too expensive for Renault to hold the line. In April, the company warned the 10,000 workers at its factory in Pitesti, about 70 miles northwest of Bucharest, that it would move some jobs to Morocco if they did not moderate their wage demands.
Carlos da Silva, an analyst at IHS Automotive, said that a key reason for Dacia's success in Western Europe was that it had created a new class of customers, people who would previously "have bought a five-year-old car, but now they can get a new car for the same price."
Carlos da Silva, an analyst at IHS Automotive, said that a key reason for Dacia's success in Western Europe was that it had created a new class of customers, people who would previously "have bought a five-year-old car, but now they can get a new car for the same price."
Renault has been careful to keep the brands separate in Europe, he noted, as Dacia's image is not as prestigious as the parent company's. The danger now, he said, is that Dacia sales could eventually begin to cannibalize sales of Renault's own lower-end vehicles, eating into profit margins. "It's a tricky equation," he said.
While Dacia has been a boon for Renault in Europe, the M-zero platform on which it is based has been even bigger in non-European markets including Brazil and India, where the cars are sold under the Renault brand. That helped Renault last year to record more than half of its car sales outside of Europe for the first time. Mr. Deboeuf said that there were no plans to enter the United States and Chinese markets, but that Renault is aiming to introduce Renault-brand M-zero cars next in Indonesia.
Mr. Schattner said Dacia now "has a monopoly" on the entry-level market in Europe, and will likely hold it for at least three to five years, because its rivals have not decided how to respond.
Though the Dacia brand's reliability ratings are mixed, it performs modestly well in safety tests carried out by the European New Car Assessment Program, a consortium of governments and consumer groups.
Mr. Schattner estimated that Renault's margin on profit before interest and taxes, a key metric of profitability, was around 8 percent across the M-zero cars worldwide. In terms of profitability, he said, that puts them "in good company, on a par with the German premium carmakers."
That has not escaped the attention of rivals. Executives of Volkswagen, Europe's biggest carmaker, have said that plans for a low-cost VW brand would be revealed within the next year, assuming such a car could be produced profitably and to the company's standards.
Dave Wright, who lives in Preston, about 30 miles north of Manchester, England, said that he bought a Dacia Duster for 12,995 pounds, or about $21,200, plus £495 for the metallic paint option, earlier this year because he was attracted by its "tried and trusted technology with no frills or superfluous gadgets."
The first one he ordered had a steering problem and, after some frustrating encounters with customer service, was replaced by the dealer. "All is good after three months," he said.
"So long as this vehicle remains reliable," Mr. Wright said, "I look forward to future Dacia models. I like the Dacia ethos, it fits in with my own mind-set. It's simple no-nonsense value for money. A niche the big manufactures have failed to fill."
Jake Cigainero contributed reporting
On this day...
Bran Castle was at one time the summer residence of Queen Marie, the wife of the then Romanian King Ferdinand I and one of the granddaughters of our own Queen Victoria
11 December 2013
The British connection with Romania goes back a long way. Prince Charles, no less, has claimed a distant kinship with Vlad Tepes—the 15th-century ruler of Wallachia, who had a penchant for impaling his foes on wooden stakes and provided the inspiration for Bram Stoker's fictional character, Count Dracula.
There is a more recent blood link, too. Bran Castle, in which the count allegedly developed his vampirelike predilections, was at one time the summer residence of Queen Marie, the wife of the then Romanian King Ferdinand I and one of the granddaughters of our own Queen Victoria.
The current heir to the throne is clearly also drawn to Romania. "You could say I have a stake in the country," he once quipped.
Prince Charles made his first trip to Transylvania in the late 1990s and was "totally overwhelmed by its unique beauty and its extraordinarily rich heritage". Other visitors have been similarly blown away by the scenery—a mix of flower-filled meadows, virgin forests in which it is still possible to see bears in the wild, and the rugged Carpathian Mountains.
Then there are the gothic treasures bequeathed by the "Saxon Germans" who were originally invited to come and defend the region against incursions from the east—in particular the cities of Brasov, Sighisoara, and Sibiu (a European City of Culture in 2007).
In a very British way, the Prince has invested in property in Transylvania: two stylish dwellings which have been painstakingly renovated and which, when not in royal use, are open to visitors.
During a stay at his property in Zalanpatak last year, I bumped into two travellers who declared it "almost perfect. We feel we have died and woken up in heaven."
While it is undoubtedly the jewel in Romania's crown, Transylvania is not the only place to which curious British visitors might be drawn. Here are a few others:
The Bucharest bequeathed by Nicolae Ceausescu is never going to win any beauty contests, but there is something genuinely awesome about the Palace of the Parliament (after the Pentagon, the second largest political building in the world) and the surrounding boulevards. And while the city is unlikely to regain the "Paris of the Balkans" status it enjoyed between the two world wars, it is beginning to recapture some of its outdoor coffee culture charm.
Another rural idyll, in the far north of the country. Best known for its magnificent wooden churches.
Transfagarasan Highway
The extraordinary 60-mile stretch of tarmac through the Fagaras mountains is full of twists and turns and eccentric loops that make it look as though it has been constructed as part of a Scalextric set. Another Ceausescu creation, it was described by Jeremy Clarkson as "the best road in the world".
Danube Delta
The end point of one of Europe's greatest rivers—a mass of waterways and islands—has a genuinely other-wordly charm. It is home to otters, minks, boars and frogs—and a vast array of bird life.
Vama Veche
The stretch of coastline around the village of Vama Veche near the border with Bulgaria may have lost some of the laid-back hippie-nudie charm it had in communist times, but it is still a fun place to lounge and party on the beach—and hugely preferable to the brasher Black Sea resorts to the north
More on Romania:
A blackened oak body decoration with silvered brass couplings, from the ''Sur—Faces'' collection. Catalin Olteanu
9 December 2013
LONDON—Carla Szabo is a born-and-bred urbanite. A native of Oradea, in western Romania, she attended university in Bucharest and has lived ever since in the capital, which at first sight can resemble a concrete maze.
Yet much of her work focuses on nature. In her current collection, "Articula," spheres of walnut linked with beads of fossilized carbon are fashioned into structures resembling the joints of insects and crustaceans.
"I like the world of animals. Clearly, I feel familiar with it," Ms. Szabo, a designer and entrepreneur, said recently by telephone from Bucharest. "Ever since my childhood, I've been interested by the earth and all of its creatures."
When she was invited to accessorize a friend's fashion collection a decade ago, she came up with small buttons shaped like insects, butterflies and snails. Shown at one of the city's earliest craft fairs, those were the first objects that helped steer her career in interior design toward conceptual jewelry.
Ms. Szabo calls her works "objects of body decoration" rather than jewelry, a term that, to her, is already loaded with meaning. Her objects are not limited to jewelry in its usual sense: they can decorate the body, a table or even a wall. "I conceived them for the pleasure of illustrating a concept. That's it," she said.
Her work is subtle and puts the wearer before the jewelry. One pendant design in the "Articula" collection hides or reveals its diamond, at the owner's choice.
But Bucharest has little time or space for such niceties. After enduring decades of shortages under Nicolae Ceausescu's isolationist regime, Romanians embraced consumerism almost instantly after 1989. The collapse of Communism brought liberty, democracy, capitalism—and the mass-produced goods that people had been longing for.
Shiny malls have mushroomed, with the same offerings that can be found in shop windows across Europe. Fashion brands are dominant, squeezing independent, home-grown design into an intermittent, quasi-underground existence, showing up at occasional fairs and tiny showrooms dispersed about the city.
Still, Ms. Szabo says the independent design market has gained some ground during the past decade. She has enjoyed growing promotion for her work and some support, including from the state. Two of her collections were shown at Berlin Fashion Week to critical acclaim.
While many young artists have left for more promising opportunities abroad, Ms. Szabo has stayed put and says she has no plans to leave.
"In my mind, there is no alternative," she said. "I find it a nice thing to build in the desert."
A natural contrarian, Ms. Szabo finds subjects for her pieces in unlikely places.
A shelter for abused horses on the outskirts of Bucharest, for example, inspired her 2012 collection, "I AM."
The collection juxtaposed heavy and spectacular necklaces with delicate bracelets and rings. Horses, in gold or silver-plated brass, jumped an invisible obstacle on earrings and pendants. One of the centerpieces showed a horse's profile, carved in colored resin on gold-plated brass, mounted on a braid of horsehair ending in two long tassels that reached down to the waist.
Fine, almost translucent, pieces in the collection spoke to the sense of interior beauty and the discovery of self, she said—another theme that is central to her work.
A part of the support structure that helps to keep Romanian design alive is "Autor," a twice-yearly fair that shows work by contemporary jewelers, including Ms. Szabo.
The fair recently celebrated its 10th edition in five years. But Dan Piersinaru, its creator and organizer, was barely elated.
"There is no design market in Romania, in the real sense of the term," he wrote in an email. "What is happening now is the beginning, with all its challenges and beautiful energy."
"Consumer culture rises and falls depending on what is on offer," he added. "If you provide quality and ethical things, the culture goes in that direction. If you provide something weak and fake, people get used to it quickly and easily."
Mr. Piersinaru, who has known Ms. Szabo and her work for years, says he is still surprised by her constant search for new techniques and solutions.
"She has been one of the first designers here to have, perhaps instinctively, a strategy and an image," he said.
The daughter of an architect, Ms. Szabo grew up among technical drawings, and has a disciplined approach to design. Her workshop, in an old townhouse that she shares with a fellow designer, has a flawless display of tools and materials.
"Talent without discipline is like a good cheese in dog skin," she said, using a graphic popular expression.
Producing two collections a year that display a relentless drive for innovation, Ms. Szabo is one of a handful of pioneering independent designers in Romania. It is a sometimes lonely business, without a broad market base, and she has had to be enterprising to survive.
To finance her small workshop and showroom, she creates mass promotional objects for companies, and uses the profit from that parallel business to finance her jewelry collections.
"If you ask me what I've wanted to do until now in my life, I'd say, to express myself as a person, as a feeling," she said. "I simply wanted to make beautiful things, this is all I've wanted. And I've done it."
Today, she is working on a new concept that should require less financing. Unlike her past collections, the next one will be offered online, featuring about a dozen basic minimalist designs.
The pieces will be customizable around "an invisible, or barely visible object, that underlines your personality," she said.
5 December 2013
Moldova has endorsed Romanian as its language.
The country's Constitutional Court has ruled that the "Moldovan" language will be replaced by Romanian as the former Soviet republic's official tongue.
Moldova's 1991 Declaration of Independence stated that Romanian was the new country's language, but the Constitution of 1994 changed that to "Moldovan."
Constitutional Court Chairman Alexandru Tanase ruled on December 5 that the Declaration of Independence takes precedence over the Constitution.
Moldova's communist opposition has criticized the decision.
Moldova was part of Romania until 1940, when it was annexed by the Soviet Union, which renamed the region's language "Moldovan."
Romanian President Traian Basescu called the Constitutional Court's ruling "an act of justice."
The decision comes a day after U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry paid a short visit to Moldova.
Last week Moldova's pro-European government initialed an Association Agreement with the European Union.
On December 1, for the first time, Moldovan President Nicolae Timofti attended Romania's National Day festivities marking the country's unification in 1918.
Secretary of State John Kerry toured a winery in Chisinau, Moldova, on Wednesday. Pool photo by Pablo Martinez Monsivais
4 December 2013
CHISINAU, Moldova—In a lightning visit to Moldova, Secretary of State John Kerry pledged American support on Wednesday to help this former Soviet republic develop closer political and economic ties with the European Union.
During his three-and-a-half-hour visit, Mr. Kerry did not announce a significant new aid package.
But his presence—the first by a secretary of state since 1992—and the possibility of future American assistance provided a measure of encouragement for a Moldovan government that is trying to maintain public support for its outreach to the West as it prepares to face the voters next year.
"The U.S. is still the world leader," Prime Minister Iurie Leanca said in an interview.
"To have the U.S. secretary of state, to have his focus on the developments here," he added, "is something extremely important for us."
A small landlocked nation of 3.6 million, Moldova is situated on the fault line between the European Union and nations like Ukraine whose leadership still looks toward Moscow on sensitive decisions involving relations with the West.
Last month, Moldova signed a pact affirming its intent to complete a free-trade agreement with the European Union.
Moldova's look West had not escaped the attention of the Kremlin. Russia has already shown its dissatisfaction by banning the import of Moldovan wine, Moldova's major export, a move Moscow justified on the grounds that the wine contained impurities but that most observers saw as politically motivated. More ominously, the deputy prime minister of Russia has delivered thinly veiled threats that Russia might stop supplying Moldova with natural gas, no small matter for a nation that is almost entirely dependent on Russian energy supplies.
Mr. Kerry, who has sought to cooperate with Russia on Syria and Iran, avoided criticism Wednesday of the Kremlin's heavy-handed pressure on Moldova and its policy of encouraging Ukraine to distance itself from the European Union.
Instead, Mr. Kerry asserted that economic development in the two countries would be good for Russia as well as the nations' populations.
"The United States believes deeply that European integration is the best road for both security and prosperity in Moldova," Mr. Kerry said during a tour of the Cricova winery near Chisinau, the capital.
"To the people of the Ukraine we say the same thing—you too deserve the opportunity to choose your own future," Mr. Kerry added in a pointed criticism of the abrupt decision by the Ukrainian president, Viktor F. Yanukovich, to spurn concluding political and trade accords with the European Union.
To drive home the point, Mr. Kerry skipped a long anticipated visit to Kiev he was to make following a NATO meeting he attended in Brussels to meet with officials here.
Moldova's desire to lessen its energy dependence on Russia, and the possibility of an American and European Union effort to foster economic development in Moldova, a nation with the smallest economy in Europe, were among the topics of Mr. Kerry's talks here, officials said.
Mr. Leanca said that he had asked Mr. Kerry to consider extending the free-trade arrangements that the United States is now negotiating with European Union to Moldova now that it is moving to complete its own free-trade agreement with the union.
"Having a free-trade area with the E.U.," Mr. Leanca said, "hopefully should bring more investment."
Responding to the Russian ban on Moldovan wine, the European Union has lifted limits on the tariff-free import of Moldovan wine. Mr. Kerry said Wednesday that the Obama administration would sponsor a Moldovan trade mission so it could develop a market for its wine in the United States.
To guard against Moscow's use of trade as a political weapon, Moldova has begun to build a pipeline to receive gas from Romania. But it will take several years before Moldova can meet a significant amount of its energy needs, electricity as well as gas, from Romania.
Mr. Leanca also received assurances in Kiev last month that Moldova would be able to obtain natural gas from Ukraine if Russia cut off its supply. But some observers wonder if the Ukrainian president's recent shift toward Moscow would undermine this understanding.
Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister who met on Wednesday with Mr. Kerry in Brussels, made no mention of the secretary of state's Moldova trip.
But Mr. Lavrov defended Ukraine's "sovereign right" to back away from signing political and economic pacts with the European Union, blamed protesters in Kiev for "aggressive actions" and criticized NATO for passing a resolution that condemned the Ukrainian authorities for using "excessive force."
"I hope that Ukrainian politicians will be able to bring the situation into a peaceful vein," Mr. Lavrov said. "We encourage everybody not to interfere."
Vintage Style in Bucharest: The old center of Bucharest, Romania, highlights vintage style and nonconformity in local fashion. Victor Placinta, an architect, said his wardrobe is inspired by British style.
4 December 2013
Recently, Victor Placinta was strolling in the old center of Bucharest, Romania, an area known for its historic architecture, and, in more modern times, as a cultural hub where coffee-guzzling intellectuals gather. Wearing a tailored green blazer, a pinstriped shirt, a yellow tie and cuffed jeans, he described his style to an interviewer as classic.
"The neighborhood tends to be a vintage area, whether you look at clubs, pubs or people's clothing," said Mr. Placinta, who draws style inspiration from the old-time feel of the city's center. "I tend toward vintage clothes."
Mr. Placinta, an architect, has noticed how the neighborhood inspires people to dress differently than other areas in the city. "Nonconformity: I think it's the only area in Bucharest where we find this," he said. "It's the only one that highlights both architecture and fashion."
"I always know what to wear in the morning," he said. "It's never difficult to pick my clothes."
His favorite piece? A polka-dot pocket square. "It's a gift from my father and I feel good wearing it."
On this day...
28 November 2013
November 28, 2013 6:58 AM BUCHAREST, Romania (AP)—He is one of Romania's greatest writers, but his work couldn't be found in bookstores. Now, they are finally getting their place back on the shelf.
Virtually unknown outside Romania, novelist Mihail Sadoveanu is renowned in his home country for classics such as "The Hatchet" and "The Jderi Brothers," tales of ordinary folk beset by hardships and dramatic circumstances, read by Romanians for the more than 50 years since his hey-day in the 1960s.
But the works have been largely out-of-print and unavailable for the last two years following a long and complicated custody battle, complete with accusations of piracy and price-gouging. Critics have accused the copyright holder, Dan Herford, of taking the works hostage.
Herford's father was married to Sadoveanu's granddaughter and he administered the rights until his death in 2006. But Romania's copyright institute claimed it should have the rights and sued Smaranda Herford after her husband died. Dan Herford helped her battle the complicated case and after a five-year legal battle, Romania's High Court finally found in her favor. In 2011, she handed Herford the copyright.
The pan flute musician and teacher refused to allow publishing houses to print the writer's works, claiming they had pirated them in the ensuing years in disrespectful, cheap-looking copies. So people have purchased his works from second-hand bookshops, and students required to read the book borrowed their parents' dog-eared paperbacks and even illegally downloaded copies of "The Hatchet" from the Internet.
But this week, Sadoveanu's books began to reappear in shops. Herford, who lives in the Netherlands, has set up his own publishing house, which will exclusively print the books until they enter the public domain, 70 years after Sadoveanu's death.
Herford is unapologetic about the wait, insisting he had no choice.
"I was forced to resort to this radical solution because of the pirating," Herford said. He declined to name publishing houses he believed illegally published Sadoveanu, saying the lawsuit had settled the issue. He is considering licensing the books for electronic sale as soon as technical issues are resolved.
Sadoveanu has been criticized for his support for the Soviet Union and high-ranking positions he had in the communist apparatus. Though he is mandatory reading at school, his emphasis on justice and responsibility and lack of humor can be heavy-going.
Tania Florescu, 13, read "The Hatchet" this year said Monday she found it tough, but ultimately enjoyable. "He should be published by every publishing house."
At the Ion Creanga book store, a sales assistant opened a fresh box filled with copies of "The Hatchet" and recalled having to tell customers it wasn't available.
"I'm happy that we're finally able to sell Sadoveanu's books," Zaharina Petre said. "He is part of our legacy."
On this day...
|27 November 2013
New York Times
The Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Romanian Film Initiative are presenting the 8th edition of the film series "Making Waves: New Romanian Cinema." The series runs Nov. 29-Dec. 3. This year's festival opens with the period film "Closer to the Moon," featuring Vera Farmiga (pictured), about a group that robbed Romania's National Bank and made it look like a film shoot. Credit: Ithaca Films/Romanian Film Initiative
The festival will include a retrospective of the work of Corneliu Porumboiu, including his film about the 1989 Romanian Revolution, "12:08 East of Bucharest" (pictured). Credit: 42KM Film/Romanian Film Initiative
Luminita Gheorghiu in Călin Peter Netzer's "Child's Pose," the Romanian selection for the Oscar for best foreign language film that deals with a mother going to great lengths to protect her son. Credit: Cos Aelenei
From left, Sergiu Costache, Adrian Titieni and Gheorghe Ifrim in Adrian Sitaru's ensemble film "Domestic." Credit: 4 Proof Film/Romanian Film Initiative
"Three Exercises of Interpretation," from Cristi Puiu, is a trilogy that looks at a group of friends in conversation. Credit: Mandragora/Romanian Film Initiative
21 November 2013
The Republic of Moldova is the poorest country in Europe, almost entirely dependent on its agricultural produce, with wine accounting for over 25% of agricultural exports.
Small wonder a recent Russian embargo on imports of Moldovan wine, the second in under 10 years, has left the country reeling.
It was as a member of the former USSR that Moldova was encouraged to specialise in wine making—for decades it provided most of the Soviet Union's wine and Russia remains its biggest export market at 28%.
Moldova's Agricultural Minister Vasile Bumacov explained that Moscow cited a trace of plastic contamination found in several barrels of devin, the Moldovan version of cognac, as the reason for the ban.
He said: "In our devin was a 0.16 trace but in the water in Russia they are allowed 0.2, in the EU 0.3. We had less than in the mineral water."
If Moldova's wines are safer than European bottled water, it begs the question, what really lies at the heart of the Russian ban? Many suspect it is more about politics.
The European Union is currently expanding its reach east. Closer relations with Moldova, Ukraine, Armenia and Georgia are all on the cards at the Eastern Partnership Summit in Vilnius this month.
The tension between Russia and Europe is palpable in tiny Moldova, with the Russian trade embargo suggesting the former mother country is irritated by the EU's expansionism.
However politicians in Chisinau, Moldova's capital, are reluctant to blame political motivations for the current ban.
When pressed on the subject, Mr Bumacov chose his words carefully. He said: "In our discussions with Moscow I was assured that this has nothing to do with politics, so what can I say?"
"We appreciate the Russian market but when we negotiate agreements with the EU, they say, 'OK guys, we tell you to open your markets for the EU products, but we will come with finance to support improvement and modernisation.'"
If you look closely, pockets of European money are now in evidence across Moldova. Sixty kilometres out of Chisinau in the small rural commune of Farladeni local councillor Ion Gangan is delighted to show a Western audience his glossy EU-funded plans for a new covered market.
"Soon we will have EU standards and conditions for our products and a new school is going to be built too," he said.
But it is in the same modest market—selling bric-a-brac, pork, and cheese—that the tug of Russia can be tangibly felt.
Farladeni is on the eastern Moldovan border, and many vendors have travelled in from separatist Trans-Dniester.
Trans-Dniester is the product of a bloody civil war in the early 1990s after the Republic of Moldova declared independence from the disintegrating USSR.
Unlike Moldova to which it still officially belongs, Trans-Dniester is very much in the pocket of Russia. It is subsidised by Moscow and Russian is the first language.
Many vendors clearly preferred the motherland to the EU. One woman clutched my hand and then her heart and explained she depended on the pensions supplements from Moscow. Her story was a common one.
The EU has its work cut out if it's serious about countering Russian influence in this region.
Moldova's Communist Party also supports a pro-Russia line and views the Eurasian Union between Russia and former Soviet countries such as Belarus and Kazakhstan as a preferable option to closer EU relations.
Mr Gangan's Moldovan constituents had mixed opinions about a European future. They conceded life was tough with a punitive "internal" border, guarded on the eastern side by soldiers from Russia and Trans-Dniester. Unlike neighbouring Trans-Dniester they don't get financial support from Moscow.
However, despite the pro-EU noises of their political leaders in Chisinau, for many Russia's proximity and power are too great to ignore.
In Farladeni, I met Aurelia who is one of the hundreds of thousands of Moldovans who spend most of their year working illegally in Russia.
Due to her Romanian heritage, Aurelia considers herself a European—Moldova was part of Greater Romania between the two world wars—but unlike some 300,000 Moldovans she doesn't have a Romanian passport and therefore cannot work in the EU.
It is easier to catch a train to Moscow where she can earn seven times more than at home in Moldova. But her tears suggest the process is not easy and Russia has recently made a point of sending many Moldovans home.
Back in Chisinau the imposing white structure and tinted windows of the Russian embassy—the largest in the capital—speaks volumes about the imbalance of power between Moldova and its giant neighbour.
Russia's ambassador Farit Mukhametshin didn't mince his words when it came to underlining Moldova's dependency on Russia.
"About half a million Moldovan immigrants are working in Russia," he said.
"Yearly they send about $2bn back home, which is one third of Moldova's [gross domestic product]. We therefore inform and we tell the Moldovan authorities that when they choose a European path, there will be changes and so they should be aware and prepare for some future adjustments."
It's not difficult to read between the lines—Moldova can flirt with the EU but it needs to remember who the main power is in this part of the world.
Moldova's agricultural minister is unlikely to forget. When challenged over Moldova's tolerance of Russian bullying he replied: "I would like to ask you to look at a map of the world and see Russia and see Moldova and I think you would not ask me this question anymore."
But while Mr Bumacov, like his country, has little control over what happens with Russia. He was keen to point out the embargo may have backfired.
"This Russian wine ban has helped promote our wine elsewhere—it has helped us find new markets in Europe," he said.
Several wine producers made similar comments—their tone remarkably upbeat given they have just lost 28% of their market.
But then they are used to Russia controlling affairs from the east. The difference now is that the EU is emerging as a counter-balance in the West.
An opening at the Paintbrush Factory, a central hub of the Cluj art scene. Frank Herfort
12 November 2013
Lacking a famous art school, government support or even a location most people can point to on a map, the small medieval city of Cluj, Romania, has become an unlikely breeding ground for the next generation of art stars.
Two years ago, the painter Adrian Ghenie was in his friend's studio, having a coffee with some former classmates—all Romanian artists and gallerists in their mid-to-late 30s—when it sunk in: they had made it.
"I realized that Mircea was having a show in Salzburg, and Cipri, right next to him, was going to show at Tate," Ghenie recalls of his friends Mircea Cantor and Ciprian Muresan. "We're having shows at MOMA San Francisco. And Plan B"—the gallery Ghenie started with the artist-turned-dealer Mihai Pop in Cluj in 2005—"was going to Basel. I realized I don't have to go out to Paris or London to find out what's going on in art, because we are it right now. And we were still in Cluj having coffee like normal people!"
In the last decade, Cluj-Napoca, better known as Cluj, an Eastern European university town of about 325,000 permanent residents, has become an unexpected art world hothouse, its homegrown talent pool earning rapturous praise on the international stage. Ghenie is represented in New York by the powerful Pace gallery, and his work has caught the eye of major collectors, including the Christie's owner François Pinault. At two separate Sotheby's auctions in the last year, his sales tripled and then doubled their respective estimates.
While Ghenie and Victor Man are the best known of the group, success has come to each in his own right, as if lightning struck multiple limbs of the same tree. It was the Italian critic and Flash Art founder Giancarlo Politi who in 2007 first called them the Cluj School, in the manner of Dresden and Leipzig. Already known abroad for his 2005 video "Deeparture," depicting a wolf and a deer left alone in a Parisian white-cube gallery, Cantor won the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2011, which came with a solo exhibition at the Centre Pompidou last fall. Muresan, too, first gained wide notice for a video: "Choose," showing his young son mixing Coca-Cola and Pepsi in the same glass. The work landed him a place in the 2009 New Museum show "The Generational: Younger Than Jesus," as one of the world's 50 top artists under 33. Last year, he had a show with the Polish artist Anna Molska at the Tate Modern in London.
"I found it somehow miraculous," Ghenie, 36, adds of the group's success, coming from a state with paltry, temperamental support for the arts and a university with no reputation abroad. "This thing happened in such a short time from that place, which had little tradition. There was a month when if you opened Artforum, every three pages was an ad with a Romanian—and from really big places like MOMA or Tate to smaller, private galleries."
"Nobody bet on such a successful artist from this small scene—maybe one, but not five," Muresan, 36, agrees. "This is weird."
Why this flowering? Well, the best explanation is the artists' work and, perhaps, their work ethic, a trait they often attribute to cultural cross-pollination from the Germans and Hungarians who settled in the area years ago. Romania is still recovering from decades of isolationist and brutal rule under Nicolae Ceausescu, and this fall the country's justice system began the first trial in decades of one of its own for abuses during the Communist era.
Twenty five years after Ceausescu's lightning-quick trial and execution on Christmas Day, when most of the artists were in grade school, they retain a special brand of pragmatism, cynicism and dark wit. Their output—somber, intellectual, haunted by history and laced with gallows humor—reveals the psyche of a country sentenced to grapple with its past for decades to come. Ghenie's thickly worked canvases depicting what look like melting faces have drawn comparisons to the work of Francis Bacon, but his titles making reference to pie fights lend the works a layer of slapstick. Muresan's video of dog puppets evokes the human potential for brutality. The Romanian critic and curator Mihnea Mircan, 37, summed up their generation as "allergic to utopia."
In this spirit, they navigate success in a post-Communist environment, where for decades most any achievement required working with the regime. "I trust myself better than I trust others," Serban Savu, 35, says, explaining the self-reliance he and his colleagues have developed. "Nobody helped us to construct the art scene."
It's mid-August, and Savu is piloting his black Volvo sedan through Manastur, the area where he grew up. Originally intended as a Le Corbusier-inspired modernist project, the green space between the blocks was filled in with additional units as Ceausescu shunted Romania onto an industrialist track and crowded peasants into towns and cities. Savu's social realist-style paintings, which have drawn comparisons to Jean-François Millet, Edward Hopper and Pieter Bruegel, offer gentle, complex depictions of Romanians generations on—agrarian families uncoupled from their homes and still uncomfortable with the transition decades later.
"It's our generation's task to start building," says Mara Ratiu, 35, a senior lecturer and vice rector at the University of Art and Design of Cluj-Napoca, where many of the Cluj set studied. "I'm doing this at my university with my colleagues. Mihai is doing that in his gallery program." She's just returned from the Venice Biennale and is sitting in Cluj's Museum Square, a cobblestone plaza in the old city.
"I hate sometimes living in Romania," she admits. "It's crazy to live here because you have to deal with so many difficult things. On the other hand, what's very fascinating is this pioneering work, the idea of building something." With its centuries of history and culture, Cluj is fertile ground.
But in 2005, when Ghenie and Pop decided to start Plan B, Romania's second largest city seemed more like a place they couldn't escape. Ghenie had just returned penniless from living in Vienna and Catania, Sicily, where he had begun doubting his ambition to be an artist. Ghenie's brother introduced him to a friend, a stockbroker who had recently purchased a big house in Cluj with empty walls and offered him a tidy sum to help start an art collection.
Meanwhile Pop, who was running an exhibition space at the university as a graduate student, was frustrated with interference from the administration. The two found a space in the city center with damaged parquet floors and called it Plan B. Then they used the money to mount a Victor Man show.
It may have started as a fallback plan, but Plan B quickly became the catalyst for a new scene. Juerg Judin from the gallery Haunch of Venison in Zürich flew in to see Ghenie's first solo show on the advice of the British curator Jane Neal. When Judin arrived at the airport in Cluj, Savu and Ghenie showed up late to pick him up in a red Soviet-made 1982 Lada. The work, however, impressed him, and on returning to Zürich, he mounted a show in 2006 called "Cluj Connection," curated by Neal, presenting works by Cantor, Ghenie, Man, Muresan and Savu, among others, as a group for the first time. Ghenie's paintings sold out, and Judin added him to the gallery's roster.
In 2007, Plan B was the only Eastern European gallery with a booth at the Armory Show in New York, and Pop took the reins of Romania's national pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Plan B opened a second exhibition space in Berlin shortly thereafter.
After it lost the white-cube space in Cluj, Plan B joined with the nonprofit gallery Sabot in 2009 to renovate an old paintbrush factory in the light industrial district close to the city's center. They envisioned a complex of performance spaces and studios. "It's a factory, and I really feel that I am coming here as a worker," says Daria Dumitrescu, 36, the gallerist running Sabot. When the Paintbrush Factory opened in October 2009, more than 1,000 locals from Cluj turned out to see what the artists and gallerists there were up to.
Cluj's artists tend to share a pessimistic streak, and as a result, they seem primed for their moment in the spotlight to elapse, but seven years after the original Cluj coming-out in Zürich, the city continues to draw interest. At the end of 2012, Cluj was included in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art show "Six Lines of Flight: Shifting Geographies in Contemporary Art." Until January, Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton in Paris is showing artists from Cluj as part of the show "Romanian Scenes," and the Arken Museum of Modern Art outside Copenhagen just concluded a show called "Hotspot Cluj—New Romanian Art." Phaidon included Cluj in a new book published in September, "Art Cities of the Future," alongside the likes of São Paulo and Istanbul, metropolises 30 and 40 times its size.
It's a frantic pace, and the gallerist Pop, 39, can't help wondering how long Cluj will hold onto its stars. Cantor has long worked out of Paris, for instance, and Ghenie is spending more time at his studio in Berlin. Pop is also preparing for the moment when the art world's eyes shift to the next big thing. "The shows about Cluj, I find them O.K., but I know quite soon they will be gone," he says, sitting on a bench at the botanical garden on one of the hills overlooking the city. "The people who are organizing these shows, they like to map territories," he adds. "And when they already know who's good, who's not, they go further to map another territory and another territory."
"In our case in the East, it's important to constitute something," Pop continues. "From the very beginning the idea was that if we open Plan B, it will be a long-term project. In the West, everyone is always asking you 'What's your next project? And what comes next? Next, next!' There's no next. Next is to sustain yesterday's project."
On this day...
Romania's former King Michael waves during a ceremony celebrating both his 92nd birthday, which fell on October 25, and his name day at Elisabeta Palace in Bucharest, November 8, 2013. Credit: Reuters/Bogdan Cristel
8 November 2013
(Reuters)—Hundreds of Romanians feted former King Michael's 92nd birthday on Friday and streamed into his palace in the capital Bucharest to pay respects to the monarch who was forced to abdicate by Soviet-backed communists more than six decades ago.
Some 1,500 people chanted his name as Michael waved from a balcony of the white Elisabeta Palace - built at the end of a leafy avenue in the 1930s, blending Moorish and other styles.
The former monarch, who was accompanied by his daughter, Princess Margareta, and his nephew, Prince Nicolae, opened the palace to the public to celebrate the occasion.
Restoration of the monarchy is not an issue in the European Union's second-poorest state, but Romanians respect Michael as they grow increasingly disillusioned with the country's political class which they link with poverty and corruption.
"Our political leaders are not role models, but the royal family is," said 29-year-old marketing specialist Ioana Patrascoiu, who took a day off from work to see the former king.
"King Michael worked hard to support his family after he was exiled and people look up to him because he deserves their respect, not just because of his royal blood."
Born in 1921 in the Peles castle in the Carpathian Mountains, the former king is a descendant of the German Hohenzollern dynasty and a cousin of Britain's Queen Elizabeth.
Michael played a major part in changing Romania's fate in World War Two, participating in a 1944 coup against fascist wartime leader Marshal Ion Antonescu, after which Romania broke with Nazi Germany and switched to the Allied side.
After communism fell in 1989, politicians fearing Michael's influence blocked his first few attempted visits after decades of exile in Switzerland, Britain and the United States.
He finally returned to Romania in 1992 and regained citizenship in 1997. He made various appeals for monarchy restoration in the early 1990s, but then-President Ion Iliescu, a former communist, responded by deporting him on several occasions.
(Reporting by Ioana Patran; Editing by Luiza Ilie, Michael Roddy and Pravin Char)
|Love Building is the most successful independent film ever released in Romania
2 November 2013
Child's Pose - The Golden Bear-winning Romanian drama is released in UK cinemas this weekend. While it was the winner at the Berlin film festival Alison Frank found a wealth of Romanian films were riding high at the recent Warsaw film festival. Is this the start of a new era for Romanian film?
The Romanian New Wave was declared several years ago, as The Death of Mr Lazarescu (2005) and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007) triumphed at international film festivals, opening doors to subsequent Romanian films such as California Dreamin' and Tales from the Golden Age.
All waves eventually break, but those who sounded the end of Romania's may have spoken too soon.
At the recent Warsaw Film Festival Romania tied with Poland for the largest number of films in competition with four, coming just behind the Czech Republic.
While none of the five Czech films won any awards, Romania secured one prize and a statement of appreciation.
Romania's dominance in Warsaw was more than a matter of quantity. Romanian debuts such as Love Building and Little Spartan demonstrated originality where other first-time directors offered a pale imitation of cinema's masters.
Against a background of films filled with cruel individuals and empty violence, the Romanian directors' better-developed characters, playful sense of humour and thought-through conclusions were refreshing.
The Romanian films had their share of death, illness, loneliness and betrayal, but offered closure as they typically found a witty, sometimes absurd way to deal with life's imperfections, compromises and disappointments.
Broad Appeal
Romanian comedy Love Building got a standing ovation at its first Warsaw festival screening but also received special praise from the critics' jury.
First-time feature director Iulia Rugina has been surprised at the broad appeal of her low-budget comedy, which had a successful Romanian box office run before making its international premiere in Warsaw.
"Love Building was very well received in Romania by the audience. That was important because it is rare. There is a very big group of population who refuses to go watch Romanian films and makes a statement about this," Rugina explains.
As to critical favour, Rugina says: "I know it is not often that audience-friendly films are critically acclaimed. And the other way round. That is why to have both is unexpected."
Love Building is the story of three relationship therapists who set up a week-long couples' retreat in the countryside. Yet most of the comedy comes from the therapists' own, much bigger, relationship issues.
If there's one problem with Love Building, it's that there are too many characters: it's hard for audiences to keep track of some 14 couples, and even harder for an 85-minute film to give all of them sufficient screen time.
But the film's very existence depends on its crowded cast list. Every year, professional actors Dragos Bucur, Alexandru Papdopol and Dorian Boguta (who play the film's therapists) run a summer acting school, which normally ends with the making of a short film.
Last year, Iulia Rugina suggested that they try to make a full-length film instead. Where filmmakers normally decide on the script first and select their cast second, here the process was reversed.
Faced with a large group of mainly non-professional actors, Rugina had to come up with a story set in countryside with enough roles for all the students.
One of the most common questions from audiences is why there are two lesbian couples in the film, but no gay couples: it's because more women than men took part in the acting school that year, Rugina explains.
The most successful Romanian film in Warsaw was The Japanese Dog, directed by Tudor Cristian Jurgiu. It won the 1-2 Competition for directors making their first or second feature.
The film revolves around an elderly man who lost his wife, home, and most of his belongings in a flood, and is estranged from his only son who moved abroad years ago.
Unexpectedly, his son comes to visit with his Japanese wife and seven-year-old son. Grandfather and grandson immediately bond over photo albums and a toy - the robotic Japanese dog of the film's title.
There is little dramatic tension, and the dog feels like a bit of a gimmick, but the film nonetheless offers a beautiful and sensitive portrait of the Romanian countryside, of cross-cultural and cross-generational bonding, and directs attention towards the increasingly common and devastating problem of flooding.
Bizarre Hybrid
While The Japanese Dog was to some degree typical festival fare, Little Spartan was a film that many critics were at a loss to describe. Sure enough, it is a bizarre hybrid of a film in every respect.
Billed as a mockumentary, Little Spartan is the result of a collaboration between first-time feature director Dragos Iuga and Gabriel Dita, an engineer who suffers from a lack of growth hormone receptor in the pituitary gland.
Making use of interviews, mobile phone footage, surveillance cameras, home videos and even fantasy, Iuga shot the film over the course of 17 years, exploring various aspects of the life of Dita, nicknamed Little Spartan.
Endlessly surprising and full of eclectic elements, the film might be dismissed as just another pseudo-documentary, albeit an odd one, if it weren't for the vein of the fantastic snaking through the film.
This is a daring addition and sure enough, the fantasy element in Little Spartan knocks it off balance, yet such is its whimsy and magic, it is hard not to be charmed.
In his uncle's workshop, Dita and his brother as children look on while the carpenter makes whimsical wooden lamps that mysteriously power themselves. While it did not win any awards, Little Spartan was aptly placed in the festival's Free Spirit category for its uninhibited and experimental approach.
The Romanian New Wave in its early days was marked by social realism and a clear-eyed approach to both its Communist past and its neo-liberal future. According to this definition, The Japanese Dog fits most clearly into the New Wave lineage, while Love Building corresponds partially as a satire of the new aspirational middle classes.
But could the more eclectic approach of Little Spartan and the popularity of Love Building's comedy mark a new stage in the evolution of Romanian cinema? Iulia Rugina thinks so.
"The Romanian New Wave is still high up, but I am not able to predict what will happen next...there might be an alternative type of films coming out - a lighter type of cinema, more glossy, more audience-friendly, a little distant from the Romanian realism that international festivals have got used to."
International audiences came to know Romania's cinema through stark realism; the coming years may be marked by a more popular, but no less fresh and innovative Romanian New Wave, embraced both at home and abroad.
UK audiences will get a chance to experience a selection of these films at the 10th Romanian Film Festival in London that starts 28 November. The festival is entitled Turning the Page, indicating how the films on show look forward beyond the New Wave in terms of content, social analysis and storytelling.
"The windows have been thrown open! We're turning the page!" is the festival's tagline.
1 November 2013
A tree is silhouetted by the setting sun outside Bucharest, Romania. Romania is enjoying a hotter than usual weather for the month of October with temperatures above 68 degrees Fahrenheit Picture: AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda
1 November 2013
Anca Petrescu was the architect who designed the People's Palace - Nicolae Ceausescu's monstrous monument to totalitarian kitsch
Anca Petrescu, who has died following a road accident aged 64, was an architect known as the "Albert Speer of Communism", responsible for the Romanian dictator Nicolai Ceausescu's "Palace of the People" in Bucharest—the world's greatest monument to totalitarian kitsch.
Ceausescu conceived the idea of building the palace in 1977, when an earthquake struck Bucharest leaving more than 1,500 dead and large areas devastated. He saw the disaster as an opportunity to build a new "civic centre", and in the summer of 1977 two competitions were launched—one for the overall master plan; the other for the "House of the People", as the Palace was then called, to house Ceausescu and his entourage, along with key government departments.
Anca Petrescu, a junior employee at the state design institute, had only just qualified as an architect, so at first she did not enter the competition. But because Ceausescu took so long to decide what he wanted it was still going in 1981, by which time she had finished second in one of the aborted heats and had met the dictator. "He was a good listener, a very patient man," she recalled. "He wasn't a vampire!"
Although Anca Petrescu failed to make the final shortlist in 1981, she refused to give in and, resigning her job, she spent three months building a scale model of her design—bombastic, ornate and smothered in gilt. She then wrote Ceausescu a letter saying that she would like to present it to him. At first she was fobbed off, but her persistence paid off, and in the end her model was presented alongside those of the other finalists.
Legend has it that Ceausescu walked into the room and was bowled over by the glitzy interloper—but there were also rumours that he may have taken a shine to its creator. In February 1982, at the age of 32, Anca Petrescu was appointed chief architect of a project whose raison d'être, in Ceausescu's tautological phrase, was to be "a grandiose edifice that reflects the epoch of the time".
The construction, which began in June 1984, was a project akin to the pyramids. During the five years leading up to Ceaucescu's execution one million Romanians, including military conscripts, political prisoners and a team of 700 architects, worked round the clock to put it up, painstakingly carving huge oak, elm and cherry doors and sculpting giant crystal chandeliers for marble rooms almost as big as athletics fields. Even nuns were forced to work, weaving acres of carpets and embroidering gold-threaded curtains. There were never fewer than 20,000 workers on site at any one time; deaths were common.
The project had a huge impact on the Romanian capital. Three historic districts in the centre of Bucharest—four square miles of the city—were demolished, along with 27 churches and synagogues. Around 40,000 people were given only two days to leave their homes, and some had no alternative but to leave behind their possessions for the bulldozers.
Elsewhere, two mountains were hacked down for the one million cubic metres of white and pink Transylvanian marble required, while entire forests were destroyed for panelling, floors, furniture and doors (Ceausescu insisted that all materials used should be native to the motherland). The cascading chandeliers alone accounted for 3,500 tonnes of crystal; the largest, measuring nine metres in diameter and weighing five tonnes, had 1,000 light bulbs.
By the time the palace was completed, it could burn more electricity in three hours than all of Bucharest's two million inhabitants consumed in 24. Between 1984 and 1989, while the Romanian people were struggling to survive with limited heating and meagre rations, the building consumed 30 per cent of Romania's national budget.
Ceausescu took a close interest in its construction, terrifying the workforce with impromptu visits to the site and frequent changes of mind which resulted in the building featuring a mishmash of styles. Anca Petrescu recalled how, on one visit, he claimed to notice that some carved flowers decorating columns inside the building were not equal: "I never noticed that," she recalled. "I was exhausted and the others were petrified... We all swore that it was OK." But he ordered someone to climb a ladder and measure them, and determined that one flower was one centimetre shorter than the others. The columns had to be made all over again.
The tyrant visited the palace for the last time in November 1989, to witness the first completed room—a month before he and his hated wife Elena were executed on live television by firing squad.
The end of communism brought work to a halt as Romania's new leaders pondered what to do with the building. Suddenly Anca Petrescu found herself being treated as a pariah, and in 1990 a group of architects led a campaign to see her stand trial for misuse of national assets; she was even accused of genocide. She denied all charges, and the cases against her fell apart. But she was ostracised from her profession, received death threats and her house was set on fire. Later that year she left for Paris (at the invitation of President Mitterrand, she claimed), where she won commissions to build hotels for Club Med.
In the early 1990s the debate over the future of the unfinished palace, now open to the public, became heated. Some wanted it demolished; others suggested it could be turned into a museum of communism, a Dracula theme park, or even the biggest casino in Europe. Meanwhile, looters set to work, removing bags of cement, marble, doors, and furniture.
Four years after Ceausescu's execution the government decided to act. They rebaptised it the "Parliament Palace" and, in 1994, resumed work. In subsequent years an international conference centre was opened inside; the lower and upper houses of parliament moved in, along with a new museum of contemporary art, the Romanian Constitutional Court and the South-east European Law Enforcement Centre.
Although one travel book described the palace as "one of the world's worst eyesores", over time public aversion waned. Indeed, many Romanians began to claim that they liked the building; and even those who did not took pride in the exquisite workmanship involved.
In 2002, when the decision was taken to add a Reichstag-style glass cupola in the centre of the building, Anca Petrescu was brought back in from the cold and asked to supervise the job.
At 84 metres in height, 270m long, 245m wide, and stretching 92m underground, with 13 floors, 7,000 rooms, three kilometres of passages and a total floor area of 450,000 square metres, the "People's Palace" occupies seven times the cubic volume of the Palace of Versailles, and is the second-largest public administration building on earth after the Pentagon. But it still has problems: among other things, Ceausescu vetoed the installation of air conditioning, fearing chemical attacks through the ventilation system, while the monstrous staircases, cut to fit the dictator's tiny feet, are notoriously difficult to walk up and down.
The daughter of a surgeon, Mira Anca Victoria Marculet Petrescu was born on March 20 1949, a year after the communists came to power in Romania. She was brought up in Sighisoara, a Transylvanian fortress town north-west of Bucharest. After graduating in 1973 from the Ion Mincu Institute of Architecture in Bucharest, she joined the state design institute.
After her return to Romania Anca Petrescu became involved in politics, and in 2004 entered parliament on the lists of Romania's opposition nationalist Greater Romania Party. The following year she stood for election as mayor of Bucharest but won less than four per cent of the vote.
When interviewed about her role in building the People's Palace, Anca Petrescu tended to lapse into evasive, Soviet-style doublespeak, cutting off interviewers brusquely if they enquired about her relationship with Ceausescu. When asked by one western journalist how she justified the suffering Romanians went through as a result of her work, she retorted: "That is a question originating from someone who can only understand a system based on profit as motivation." Her favourite novels, she revealed, were the "sick works of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, because they fit my soul".
Anca Petrescu, born March 20 1949, died October 30 2013
Anca Petrescu (Associated Press/Vadim Ghirda)
31 October 2013
BUCHAREST, Romania (AP)—Anca Petrescu, the chief architect of Bucharest's "Palace of the People," a massive government structure that has been described as a huge Stalinist wedding cake, died Wednesday. She was 64.
Petrescu, who had been in a coma after a September car accident, died in Floreasca Hospital in the Romanian capital, hospital spokesman Dr. Bogdan Oprita said. Her landmark Bucharest palace is the world's second-largest administrative building after the Pentagon. It spans 350,000 square meters (3.77 million square feet) and is perhaps the most visible legacy of Romania's late dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu. Appointed the building's chief architect in 1978, Petrescu worked at the still-unfinished palace until her accident. She told The Associated Press in an interview last year that Buckingham Palace in London and the Palace of Versailles outside Paris were her artistic inspirations for the building, not North Korean architecture as was widely reported.
Petrescu recalled Ceausescu, who was tried and executed Dec. 25, 1989, and never got to use the palace, as being obsessed with detail and constantly inspecting the site. She said that were he alive to see what had become of the palace, which even hosts weddings and balls today, he "would make the sign of the cross"—as in he'd be horrified.
After communism ended, Petrescu was criticized for her role in creating the grandiose building, on which 1 million Romanians worked round the clock. Some 9,000 homes were demolished, churches and synagogues were razed or moved, and two mountains of marble were hacked down for the 84-meter (275-foot)-high palace to be built.
But Romanians have come to appreciate the palace; its tenants include the Parliament, the Constitutional Court and the Southeast European Law Enforcement Center, which fights crime, smuggling and fraud. Ceausescu had intended for it to house the presidency along with other government units.
The late pop star Michael Jackson moonwalked in front of the palace, and former U.S. President George W. Bush, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have made speeches there.
A general view of Pungesti village, where U.S. energy major Chevron plans to search for shale gas, 340 km (211 miles) northeast of Bucharest October 19, 2013. Credit: Reuters/Bogdan Cristel
27 October 2013
PUNGESTI, Romania (Reuters) - The small hilly town of Pungesti in eastern Romania could be sitting on vast reserves of shale gas and U.S. energy major Chevron wants to find it.
But the people of Pungesti want nothing to do with it.
Though most of them live off subsistence farming, social aid and cash from relatives working abroad, they would rather stay poor than run what they say is the risk of ruining their environment.
Villagers have set up camp outside the empty lot where Chevron aims to install its first exploratory well, blocking access and forcing the company to announce last week it was suspending work.
"Our kitchens are filled with homemade jams and preserves, sacks of nuts, crates of honey and cheese, all produced by us," said Doina Dediu, 47, a local and one of the protesters.
"We are not even that poor," she said. "Maybe we don't have money, but we have clean water and we are healthy and we just want to be left alone."
The decision to stop work at Pungesti - which was to have been Romania's first shale gas exploration well - matters because of the message it may send about how welcome shale gas is in eastern Europe.
Large parts of wealthier western Europe have shunned shale gas exploration because of fears about possible water pollution and seismic activity from the hydraulic fracturing or "fracking" process used to release it.
The industry says the risks can be avoided.
While Britain decided this year to support shale gas exploration, France has a total ban citing ecological concerns and Germany is reviewing its position on shale.
In poorer, ex-Communist parts of the continent the need to bring in tax revenues, cheaper fuel supplies and jobs has shown signs of trumping the concerns, but to what extent is not yet clear.
Chevron, which has all the necessary permits for the exploration well at Pungesti, says it adheres to the highest safety standards.
The exploration phase would last around five years and not involve fracking, the process whereby large amounts of water mixed with chemicals is forced into rock formations under high pressure to crack them apart and release natural gas.
Company executives met Romanian Prime Minister Victor Ponta on Monday while he was making a scheduled visit to Washington.
"Emphasis was placed on continuing activities responsibly and safely for the environment, while at the same time giving communities the chance to have a conversation grounded in scientific data," Chevron said in a statement.
Asked to comment on local concerns, the company said it tests groundwater before and after drilling to make sure it is not affected, carries out geological seismic surveys and keeps the community informed at every stage.
In a detailed statement, it pointed to the widespread use of fracking in the United States and elsewhere and said it "is a proven technology that has been used safely for more than 60 years".
But it is struggling to convince the people of Pungesti.
Three public meetings held over the summer with Chevron and environment agency officials turned into shouting matches. Deputy mayor Vasile Voina says he believes people "were not sufficiently informed".
Sprawled along a bumpy road, the town of 3,420 people is made of eight villages with narrow houses behind short, chipped picket fences, fat orange pumpkins dotting small plots of land and apples drying in the sun behind window panes. It does not have central heating or a mains water supply.
Even in this remote town, 340 km (210 miles) northeast of the Romanian capital Bucharest, the global debate about the impact of "fracking" has permeated.
Several people said they had gone on YouTube to watch excerpts of the 2010 U.S. documentary "Gasland," which purported to show the environmental damage caused by shale gas production.
The energy industry disputes allegations made in the film, but it, and other sources, including activists and local clergy, have influenced opinion in Pungesti.
People say heavy equipment will ruin their roads. They fear fracking will cause earthquakes and pollute their water, risking their health, their cattle and their vegetable gardens.
"If they put wells they will destroy farming," said Andrei Popescu, 22.
Prime minister Ponta has spoken of potential shale benefits, especially for a poor area like Vaslui county, which includes Pungesti. It receives heavy subsidies from the state.
"Without investment, we can't pay wages and pensions. Projects can be improved ... but we cannot block investment," Ponta has said. He toppled a previous government in May 2012 partially on an anti-shale message but his government has since thrown his support behind the project.
Chevron said studies by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Ground Water Protection Council had confirmed no direct link between hydraulic fracturing operations and groundwater contamination.
It says direct benefits include jobs and payments to contractors and suppliers and, during the production phase, taxes and royalties.
Some local people say they doubt the project would generate many jobs, or that they are qualified for them. If there is to be progress and investment, they say they would prefer a vegetable processing plant, abattoir or wind energy park.
"They could do anything else, why settle on underground gas," said Daniel Ciobanu, a 40-year-old farmer.
For all the concerns in Pungesti, many people in eastern Europe welcome shale gas. Governments in Poland, Lithuania, Romania and Ukraine are all keen to encourage exploration, although in Bulgaria it is banned.
In Poland, the industry's biggest shale gas hope in mainland Europe, exploration drilling is underway on several concessions. The country, with a history of conflict with Moscow, sees shale gas as a way of reducing dependence on Russian gas imports.
Yet even in Poland, some local people, backed by environmental campaigners, have staged protests. At one of Chevron's Polish shale gas concessions, near the village of Zurawlow, local people occupied a work site when contractors started trying to erect a fence.
Around 800 locals, neighbors, activists and the clergy gathered for a protest next to Chevron's concession in Pungesti last week. In sunny but icy weather, they carried banners that read Stop Chevron, Resist and God is with us.
Clad in his black habit, Father Vasile Laiu, an Orthodox priest from the nearby city of Barlad and one of the most outspoken local opponents of fracking, asked people to kneel, then led them in prayer.
Up to 50 villagers that have been taking turns staging a round-the-clock vigil, blocking access to the lot, said they were preparing for a long haul. They have pitched tents and dug a lavatory pit.
"Can we live without water?" one of them asked the crowd on a microphone. The air carried faint smells of incense.
"No," the demonstrators replied.
"Can we live without Chevron?"
(Additional reporting by Dmitry Zhdannikov in London and Tsvetelia Tslova in Sofia; editing by Christian Lowe and Philippa Fletcher)
A Touch of the Old Country: Moldova, in the Midwood section of Brooklyn, is the first restaurant specializing in Moldovan cuisine in New York City. Photograph by Victor J. Blue for The New York Times
Note: Moldova takes up the bulk of the historical region called Bessarabia, which was taken from Romania after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in 1940.
25 October 2013
In the heart of old Brooklyn, on a prosaic stretch of Coney Island Boulevard that runs through Midwood, among auto body shops and fast-food joints and commerce catering to Orthodox Jews, you will find what looks like a village house in the old country, with a forest in back and a quaint monastery in the distance.
To many Americans, such a presence may evoke Romania or Poland or some other Eastern European location. Those from the tiny Republic of Moldova would know better. It is a restaurant, succinctly named Moldova; it is the only one dedicated to Moldovan cuisine in New York, and one of only a few outside the Moldovan homeland itself.
Moldova, nestled between Romania and Ukraine, is a landlocked state in the northeast Balkans. It is a picturesque, largely rural nation once known as the garden of the Soviet Union. It also is considered the poorest country in Europe and has one of the highest emigration rates in the world, particularly since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.
Of the tens of thousands of Moldovans who have arrived in the United States since then, relatively few have ended up in New York. One immigration organization estimates that there are around 5,000 Moldovans in the city; Radu Panfil is one.
Mr. Panfil, 35, immigrated from Moldova in 2005, leaving his cellphone store in Chisinau, the capital city, for better opportunities in America. He began working in various New York restaurants—first as a waiter, then as a manager—and a dream developed. While there is a sense of community among expatriate Moldovans in Brooklyn, there was no authentically Moldovan place for them to gather. Thus the restaurant Moldova was born.
"From the beginning," Mr. Panfil said, "it was set that it is going to be the place where people from our country get together, to feel that they are at home, not to forget the customs and traditions from our country—and the smell of hot mamaliga."
With the help of many fellow Moldovans, Mr. Panfil opened Moldova in July 2012. As you enter from the busy avenue, the convivial feel of the old country is immediate. Inside the "casa mare"—a Moldovan concept roughly translated as "big room"—are plaster walls of wedding-cake white juxtaposed with dark floors and roof beams; intricate rugs hang alongside indigenous artifacts and curios. The waiters and waitresses wear traditional hand-stitched shirts; jaunty folk music pipes through the sound system. On holidays and during banquet events, musicians perform in the elaborate back room, canopied by lush vegetation to resemble a Moldovan forest. A 240-square-foot mural of the country's famous monastery, Tipova, covers the back wall.
The menu at Moldova is a tribute to Balkan staples: hearty soups, smoked and fresh fish, grilled and braised meat, stuffed cabbages. Cornmeal appears often, most treasured in the side dish known as, yes, mamaliga, a distinctly Eastern European take on polenta, served alongside grilled house-made sausages, peas and onions.
The restaurant has drawn local Eastern Europeans, culture hawks and curious foodies from Brooklyn and beyond, and, naturally, fellow Moldovans.
Galina Frunz, 25, left Moldova in 2008 but still misses her homeland. While spending time in Coney Island, she saw a sign for the Moldova restaurant. "I got so excited," Ms. Frunz recalled. "I had told my friends all about our culture and cuisine, and this was a chance for them to see for themselves. Me and all of my friends fell in love with this place."
Intent to capitalize on what seems a potent desire for Moldovans to eat mamaliga among their compatriots, Mr. Panfil opened a sister restaurant last August in Philadelphia, where there is a large expatriate and Eastern European population. Not to mention a majority of Americans unfamiliar with the tiny Republic of Moldova.
"Who knows," Mr. Panfil said, "maybe I'm not going to stop here. In U.S.A. there are many beautiful cities, and Moldovan culture has definitely a lot of things to show."
24 October 2013
A popular holiday in the West, Halloween has also been enthusiastically embraced by Romanians in recent years.
For a few years now, Halloween has also been celebrated on October 31st in Romania. This fact has caused changes in how tourism agencies handle business, adapting to the new circumstances. They included in their offers haunted houses, bonfires, period balls, and traditional dance shows. Clubs in the big cities, such as Cluj, Brasov, Sibiu and Bucharest have already put up posters for special events, mostly involving vampires.
This year, the celebration is on a Thursday, and so the events extend to the weekend, on November 1 and 2. One excellent place to visit is Bragadiru Palace in Bucharest. This beautiful building, erected in 1905 based on the designs of the Austrian architect Anton Shuckerl, hosts a dinner with the Addams family. You are invited into the WonderUnderWorld hall, where you can party until dawn among graves, skeletons and spider webs. Outside in the palace garden there is an exhibition of costumes, where professionals stand ready to paint your face in patterns typical of this holiday.
You find the best Halloween celebrations in the heart of Transylvania, at Dracula's castle, according to the organisers of the first edition of the Horror and Fantasy Film Festival, as Anca Gradinaru, a journalist and film critic explains: "Dracula is a hugely popular brand, of which Romanians have not managed to take advantage properly. In addition, there are very few horror and fantasy festivals in Romania, considering how dedicated and enthusiastic the audience is. We thought it would be a brilliant idea to have such a festival in Dracula's castle, it has tremendous potential."
Initially designed to last three days, the event now stretches over five. It is a big festival, with over 40 films, Anca Gradinaru says:
"It starts on 30 October, with Crypt animation live, animated horror, and a live band. It continues with a Halloween party and screenings of classic films as well as new productions and Romanian and foreign short films, a silent movie with a new soundtrack, and a lot of theme parties. We also hold an event in Bran castle, where we show the first Dracula film ever made, Nosferatu, followed by a Halloween party. We try to blend film, entertainment and music. We have two parties, one right on Halloween, with the Aria Urbana band, and another in the cellar of horror, a place especially created for the festival. We'll make it really scary, but attractive at the same time. On Saturday we have another party at Bran. We have a tent set up there, which will also serve a lot of different foods. We encourage people to come in costume. We will also have competitions for best character, best vampire, and best zombie, alongside all kinds of other competitions with prizes."
Brasov is usually teeming with tourists this time of the year. They come in all year long, but Halloween is especially popular. According to Anca Gradinaru, they come thanks to Dracula's popularity:
"Hotels offer special packages for this festival, even though this is the first edition. We hope that more and more people will hear about this festival, banking on a well-known brand name, but also on the fact that we have a great variety of offers from the very first edition. Even a tourist who is not a horror film fan has lots of things to do. There is enough time to visit the area, which is magnificent, and is getting more and more popular. If we go abroad and mention Transylvania, it's hard to meet someone who doesn't wish to visit. It's a magical land, and if people come to the festival, they can travel during the day and then catch a film at night, then join a party and get to know people. Around this time at Bran we promote tourism and socialising, which seems to me the perfect combination."
David Jalea, a programme coordinator with a tourist agency in Brasov, has an alternative proposal:
"Around Halloween we have two special packages, two tours, one is four days, and the other is seven days. Foreign tourists especially are invited to come and discover Romania, both its cultural and historical sites, and its natural sites. Of course, during this time we offer them a lot of information about Vlad the Impaler, both history and legend. The highlight is the Halloween party. We believe that Transylvania is the ideal place to spend Halloween, especially in a medieval castle. Therefore we offer them a party in Corvinus Castle in Hunedoara, built in the 14th century. This is a private party exclusively for the members of the group. It has a medieval atmosphere, with knights, dances, light and fire shows, and a medieval dinner, just like the knights of yore used to have. Both tours include trips to Bucharest, Curtea de Arges, the castle in Poenari, the city of Sibiu, the fortifications of Sighisoara and Brasov, Bran Castle and Snagov monastery. These are the highlights of the tour."
Wearing a Halloween costume is not obligatory, but recommended. There will be prizes for the best costumes. And, because this year's party is in the third edition, we asked David Jalea about the feedback he got from the participants in previous years:
"Most of the people who visited us and used our services left with a great impression of Romania, were delighted with Romania's tourist and cultural potential, and said their impression changed radically compared to what they expected before they got here. They loved the historical sites, the fact that we showed them the castles, the painted monasteries in Bukovina, cities such as Cluj, Sibiu, the Danube Delta, the Carpathian Mountains, local traditions and cuisine. During Halloween we have guests from the US, Canada, the UK, places where this holiday is traditional, but we also get tourists from Germany, Spain and South America."
22 October 2013
BUCHAREST, Romania (AP)—Babies often receive flowers at their christening.
But Britain's Prince George will receive a wildflower meadow in the Transylvanian hills, a friend of his grandfather Prince Charles said Tuesday.
"If we sent flowers they would wilt, so this is a symbolic gift," Count Tibor Kalnoky told The Associated Press.
"Wild flowers are fragile like
newborn babies. This gift will protect this area and contribute to
raising public awareness so that rare flowers can be protected,"
said Kalnoky, a conservationist and a friend of Charles, who looks
after the prince's property in Transylvania.
Charles is enamored with the rural life in Romania and visits the country every year.
Moldova is caught between moving toward integration with the European Union or back into the Russian economic sphere. James Hill for The New York Times
22 October 2013
CHISINAU, Moldova—It was not enough for Dmitri O. Rogozin, a deputy prime minister of Russia, to warn darkly that it would be "a grave mistake" for Moldova to seek closer ties with Europe.
Mr. Rogozin, wrapping up a visit here last month, let fly a threat about the coming winter in this impoverished former Soviet republic, which is entirely dependent on Russian gas for heat. "We hope that you will not freeze," he said.
The squeeze was just beginning. Next, the Russian Orthodox patriarch, Kirill I, in a rare personal appearance here, denounced Western Europe, "where religion is simply disappearing." And three days later, the sharpest blow: Russian officials, citing vague health concerns, banned Moldovan wine, one of the country's most important exports.
The bullying, which the Kremlin denies, is not directed at Moldova alone. Ahead of a conference next month where the European Union plans to advance political and trade accords with several ex-Soviet republics, Russia has been whispering threats and gripping throats, bluntly telling smaller neighbors that they would be better off joining Russia's customs union with Kazakhstan and Belarus.
The frantic push to retain influence, with its echoes of cold war jousting, reflects the still-palpable fury among Russian officials over NATO's expansion into the former Soviet sphere and a desire to halt a similar, eastward extension of European economic power. The heavy-handed tactics have wreaked economic chaos throughout the region in recent months.
In August, Russia suddenly stopped all Ukrainian imports at the border for stepped-up customs inspections. It lifted the restrictions after a week, but a senior economic aide to President Vladimir V. Putin said that they could become permanent if Ukraine, as expected, signs agreements with the European Union at the conference next month—a step that the aide, Sergei Glazyev, said would be "suicidal."
In September, Armenia, which is heavily dependent on Russia for security reasons, simply capitulated. After a meeting with Mr. Putin in Moscow, President Serzh Sargsyan abruptly declared that Armenia would join the Kremlin's customs union, scrapping years of work toward agreements under the European Union's Eastern Partnership program.
Mr. Sargsyan's unexpected move shocked many Armenians and set off a protest in Yerevan, the capital, by several thousand people who noted that their country does not share a common border with any of the customs union members. It also startled the Europeans, who began scrambling to prevent further defections.
This month, Russia took aim at Lithuania, which has already joined the European Union and whose capital, Vilnius, is the site of next month's conference. Russia briefly stiffened customs inspections on Lithuanian goods, and has banned milk and other dairy imports.
Nowhere, however, is the pressure more intense than here in Moldova, a tiny, landlocked nation of 3.6 million people wedged between Romania and Ukraine that is by far the poorest country on the Continent, with annual economic output of about $3,500 per person—less than half that of Albania.
In addition to the ban on Moldovan wine, there have been rumors that tens of thousands of Moldovans who work in Russia would be expelled in an immigration crackdown, cutting off a financial lifeline for many families. There are also fears of a ban on apples or other produce, which would be devastating if imposed during harvest season.
Rather than intimidating leaders of the country's fragile coalition government, however, Russia's tactics have only cemented their resolve to complete the political and free trade agreements with the European Union.
"The signing of these agreements is the only chance that Moldova has in order to develop itself as a European country and in the European spirit," President Nicolae Timofti said in an interview.
Mr. Timofti said it was clear that the ban on wine imports was about politics and Russia's increasingly unrealistic goal of reuniting the former Soviet republics in an economic alliance through the customs union.
"We realize Russia has geopolitical interests in this area but there is also a saying here—'You cannot enter the same river twice,' " the president said. "It is impossible to recreate the union that used to exist. However, Russia does take action to keep its influence over this region."
In interviews, Mr. Timofti and other government officials said the Russian approach was backfiring, both politically and economically, leading businesses to reduce their reliance on the Russian market.
When Russia imposed a similar ban on Moldovan wine in 2006, officials said, exports to Russia accounted for more than 70 percent of the industry. Today, it is less than 30 percent, and several winery executives said they had ceased doing business with Russia entirely.
"We stopped working with the Russian market in 2009," said Andrei Sirbu, whose family owns the Asconi Winery in Puhoi, a village 20 miles southeast of Chisinau (pronounced KISH-e-now). "It's a very attractive market when you look at the sales opportunities, the size of it. Just in Moscow, you can do so much business, but when you put the politics into it, that's the problem—the political risk."
"To be honest, it's all politics," Mr. Sirbu added. "Why should we suffer because of politicians?"
Moldova's official response has been to request clarification of Russia's concerns about the wine so that they can be addressed quickly, and to ask that any new technical requirements be specified in writing.
European leaders have condemned Russia's efforts and undertaken countermeasures, like lifting limits in the current trade rules on tariff-free imports of Moldovan wine.
"We will keep telling our friends in Moscow, it is unacceptable that our partners are being subject to any kind of pressure," Stefan Fule, the European commissioner for enlargement and neighborhood policy, said at a recent news conference here with Prime Minister Iurie Leanca.
Mr. Fule said that the agreement under consideration "has clear benefits not only to our neighbors, Moldova, but to our neighbors' neighbors."
Despite being the only former Soviet republic where Communists regained power, controlling Parliament and ruling the country from 2001 to 2009, Moldova has long set its sights westward, so much so that in 2004, it renamed its foreign office the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and European Integration.
For parts of the 19th and 20th centuries, Moldova was part of Romania, and its language is virtually identical to Romanian. Early this month, Mr. Rogozin, the Russian deputy prime minister, posted a Twitter message suggesting that Romania had a secret plan to annex Moldova, after supporting Moldova's integration into Europe.
Some Moldovan officials have also accused Russia of fomenting unrest in the country by inflaming the dispute with Trans-Dniester, a breakaway territory that has declared independence and where about a thousand Russian troops remain stationed, and also by financing political groups aiming to topple the ruling coalition.
The Communist Party, which still has the single largest bloc in Parliament and currently opposes the political and trade pacts with Europe, this month began demanding early elections in an effort to dislodge the current government. On Tuesday, Parliament for the second time in two weeks rejected a vote of "no confidence" in the government proposed by the Communists.
The government nearly fell apart earlier this year after a bizarre series of events that began last December when a businessman was accidentally killed on a hunting trip involving some of the country's top officials. Vlad Filat, then the prime minister, was ousted in the ensuing controversy.
The current prime minister, Mr. Leanca, said that while the government was pursuing overhauls, including anticorruption measures and an overhaul of the judicial system, in hopes of eventually joining the European Union, the outcome was not yet certain. "There are still threats, and it comes from the fact that we have not reached yet the irreversibility of our development, of our future path," Mr. Leanca said.
In an interview, he described Moldova as at a crossroads. "We could go one way, which would mean embracing democratic values and on those values to build a viable society, and a functioning society with a prosperous economy," he said. "Or we can stay forever in this gray area, where there is no rule of law, where people do not have confidence in their future and therefore they leave the country."
Iulian Groza, a deputy foreign minister, said that focusing on Europe, a market of 500 million people, was an obvious choice—and one that Moldova made long ago—and that Russia should accept Moldova's policy decisions. "We want to be treated by our bigger partners, if not equally, at least with respect," he said.
President Timofti said he believed that Moldova would join the European Union, and even predicted good relations with Russia in the future. "Perhaps at some point in the future, Russia itself will become a member of the European Union," he said. "And we will be together again."
13 October 2013
It is almost impossible to walk the streets of Bucharest for more than five minutes and not encounter a stray dog.
According to official estimates there are 65,000 of them—one for every 30 residents of the Romanian capital.
But this situation is about to change, if the government gets its way. Or, if a growing number of alarmed international protesters get theirs, it will not.
The government wants the dogs rounded up and, if not claimed within two weeks, put down.
While this proposal has plenty of support in Romania, protests have rapidly spread around the world, with critics deploring the impending "massacre".
There have been demonstrations outside Romanian embassies in some European capitals, and celebrities like Brigitte Bardot and Pamela Anderson have made forceful representations against the law.
This outside interference has incensed supporters of the law, who say "animal lovers"—used partly as a term of abuse—are distorting the truth by, in some cases, disseminating pictures showing cruelty against stray dogs taken in other countries, while claiming to originate from Romania.
Stray dogs are nothing new for Bucharest or for Romania in general but the canine population has grown, especially since former communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu ordered in the 1980s the demolition of vast areas of houses in Bucharest and other cities, and their replacement with concrete blocks of flats, forcing the owners to abandon their dogs.
Child's Death
Attacks are frequent: in the first eight months of 2013, almost 10,000 people in Bucharest were treated for dog bites by the Matei Bals Institute for Infectious Diseases.
In some cases, stray dogs have killed people. One of the most infamous incidents resulted in the death of a Japanese tourist in Bucharest in 2006.
But the incident which led to an explosion of popular anger was the mauling to death of a four-year-old boy, Ionut Anghel, by a pack of stray dogs on a private plot in northern Bucharest, on 2 September.
"It took this tragedy to wake me up to the fact that there are dogs on the streets," says Nadine Apostolescu, a well-known singer and dog owner herself, who is the public face of the campaign to remove stray dogs.
"Now, after 20 years when nothing was done, I took to the streets as a mother and a citizen to protest against this situation."
Demonstrations followed and parliament quickly adopted a bill, dormant for more than three years, which provides for the destruction of captured stray dogs by "humane methods" as a last resort, after 14 working days.
It also introduces mandatory registration for dogs and harsher penalties for owners who abandon their animals.
But critics complain that, besides potentially triggering a massacre of stray dogs, the law will not solve the problem in the long term, as it does not tackle the issue of uncontrolled breeding.
"The likelihood is that only tame strays will be captured, as the authorities lack the resources to capture the most aggressive ones, which will continue to breed and the problem will only get worse," says Ovidiu Rosu, a vet with the animal charity Vier Pfoten (Four Paws).
He also points out that lots of Romanians are in the habit of feeding stray dogs, which is likely to encourage their continued survival.
Lethal Injection
On both sides of the argument there is a consensus that stray dogs have no place on the streets.
Dog-lovers want a sterilisation programme instead, and more investment in dog shelters and adoption. These ideas have had only limited success in the past.
Language has become a key point of contention. Opponents object to the law's reference to "euthanasia", saying most stray dogs are healthy animals and this is not an act of mercy killing, but a "massacre".
Supporters liken the packs of stray dogs to a "plague of wild animals".
Opinion polls suggest supporters outnumber the opponents—by as much as 70% to 30%.
Bucharest's mayor, Sorin Oprescu, has promised that 80% of stray dogs will be removed within a year—half of these, apparently, by adoption.
He refused to elaborate on what method would be used to kill those dogs which are not adopted. A lethal injection seems most likely.
Whatever the outcome, in the end the question still lingers: if Romania has been unable to control its stray dog population for the past 20 years—be it through lack of political will or through corrupt diversion of funding—what is the guarantee that it will manage to do so in future, once the anger generated by the tragic death of an infant mauled by stray dogs starts to subside?
9 October 2013
Guest writer Stuart Meikle looks at the Rosia Montana gold mining issue from a different angle: what to do with all the gold, and why move mountains to fill a small room with the projected 300 tonnes of the shiny metal? And why not focus instead on Romania's real gold, its farmland?
The other day I found myself asking whether we, as a human race, really need another 300 tonnes or so of gold. After all, gold is so useful that a third of what we have managed to extract from this Planet of ours is still stashed away, sight unseen, in various storerooms around the world.
To add some context, since sometime before the Romans started digging for gold in the Apuseni Mountains, we, the human race that is, have accumulated a little over 170,000 tonnes of gold. Of this, nearly 90,000 tonnes have been utilised solely for decorative purpose. To what extent mankind has benefited from this use of gold is debatable, but I guess without it we would have found something else to tickle our collective fancy. Another third (nearly 60,000 tonnes) of our extracted gold is held in public and private 'reserves'. I am not exactly sure what we are keeping it in 'reserve' for; maybe it will someday become really useful but until then it will just lie idly around doing absolutely nothing all.
So please, can someone tell me why we really need another 300 tonnes or so of this yellow stuff?
It appears that one part of the human race can see the sense in deploying vast amounts of our collective tangible resources in moving a near full handful of mountains so as to extract some more shiny metal that, let us face it, will be just parked, sight unseen in various dark underground vaults. Hence, Rosia Montana is about consuming vast amounts of non-renewable fossil fuels and, if I am to believe the 'no' campaigners, playing around with the environmental welfare of the immediate location and, potentially, a significantly wider region. And all this will be for 300 tonnes of gold (although let us not forget the silver).
Or if one wishes to put it another way, we, the human race that is, will use a substantial part of our very finite resources to extract 300 tonnes of gold by creating one gargantuan hole in the ground only to place it in another very much smaller one. Is this an illustration of how much the human race has progressed?
Certainly some will argue that gold has a real value; as a store of wealth. It is a store that is based on the confidence of a significant part of the human race that it does have a value (mainly when worn or otherwise used for adornment) and some of that value relates to its scarcity. Extracting another 300 tonnes or so will be an extremely expensive operation and this can be 'justified' by the current price (I use the term 'price' and not 'value') of gold. But who is to say that the price will not fall as the global economic situation improves; and it has fallen nearly 25 percent in the last 12 months alone. Will the economics (using its old-fashioned, externality-ignoring definition) really add up over the mine's projected lifespan? Will it, if we return to the gold prices that were around at the turn of the Millennium (only about 20 percent of their 2012 peak)?
The proponents of the Rosia Montana project will state something like; "since 2000 gold prices have risen by 12 percent per year and the price will to continue to rise over the long-term." But this sounds remarkably like the straight-line price projections that we were seeing for the property market in the mid-noughties: "the only way is up." But who is not to say that prices may not fall back towards where they were a dozen years ago? It is a possibility. Hence, is now even the right time to start mining? Even the economic rational appears tenuous as economic "success" does appear to be rather too dependent on the timing of the mining operations coinciding with a continuation of the current global economic crisis or the emergence of yet further troubles that send investors scurrying for the perceived safe haven that is gold? It is thought-provoking to suggest that a positive investment outcome for Rosia Montana relies on the negative.
An interesting footnote to this issue is created by asking just how big a hole (sorry, I mean vault) are we going to need to store this extracted gold. Now, as we all know, gold is pretty heavy matter so 300 tonnes only takes up a little over 15 cubic metres of space. I guess we should be grateful for small mercies; having moved a near full handful of mountains to get at the shiny stuff we will only need to dig another very little hole to put it in. To visual just how big this new hole has to be just take an average room 2.5 metres tall with a footprint of six square metres and fill it with gold. Still struggling? Well, that is the average bathroom.
So to finish on a positive note, I will add that for all the negatives highlighted by the 'no' campaign, it will be possible to reduce the project's environmental impact in one way. It is because any one single local village family should be able to offer sufficient (fifteen cubic metres) cellar space for storing the extracted gold. And if they do, one would anticipate that they would be more than adequately compensated for giving up their pickle-storage. But then again, you cannot eat the gold (well, a rational person would not).
And the thought of food does remind me to mention a phrase that I so often hear these days, "farmland is the new gold"; it is to the extent that it is a scarce resource but there the similarity largely ends. Farmland is a productive asset and its real, long-term value is within the food it can produce for a globally-expanding population. And farmland is something that Romania does have in abundance relative to its population size; if only it could improve the governance of agriculture and the management of its farming so as to properly utilise its land in a productive and sustainable manner. Food, not gold, is where Romania's future lies.
But ultimately, in all of this, the one term that one is left to ponder is 'fools' gold' and whether, as real as the mined metal may be, is 'fools' gold' not the most apt way to describe the gold within Rosia Montana?
4 October 2013
Andrei Pandele was a young architect when he began photographing his home country, Romania, in the 1970s. His camera captured a period of huge change under communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. For some, his stunning photos are now a painful reminder of a time of destruction, and a life lost.
"It's cool! I really like it." Born in the year of the 1989 Revolution, Paul is one of a new generation of Romanians—multilingual, well-educated and ambitious for his country.
He is understandably proud of the giant House of the People, once Ceausescu's palace. After all, it's now home to Romania's fledgling democracy and only trumped in size by the Pentagon building in the US.
We are hovering in one of its many airless, pointlessly large halls, waiting for a conference on sustainable tourism to finish in the never-ending room next door.
I don't share Paul's sentiments. The vast slabs of marble feel suffocating—we may as well be stuck in the centre of an outsized wedding cake.
Photographer Andrei Pandele is emphatic: "The Palace? Ha! It is a wall in the way of the people. A dam, even."
We have met in a tea shop in the old Jewish quarter of Bucharest. There are photographs from his collection on every wall.
They're exceptional images rarely caught on camera, but then Andrei is an exceptional man—tall, dignified and handsome at 65.
It is thanks to his fearless vision that Ceausescu's relentless attack on Bucharest can be seen stage by stage—as if peeling away the layers of an onion.
"I was an architect," he explains. "I could find plans [and] approximate what they would destroy. Not exactly, no-one knew that. They were wild, totally out of control."
Seven square kilometres of the city centre were destroyed to make way for the Palace of the People. Andrei wanted to take some pictures before old Bucharest disappeared altogether.
I've been coming to Romania for 20 years but I have never seen images like these.
A city caught in its very own Armageddon. Andrei preserved a Bucharest that no longer exists—the exquisite glass-covered market, the archways, cobbled streets, the vine-clad villas, the city once called the "little Paris of the East".
But in many of the pictures the mighty onslaught has already begun—innumerable cranes chewing their way through people's lives, the facade of the crazy palace looming up over the threatened cityscape. And then, in some others, there's just snow or dust and the desert of demolition.
Not a verbose man, in front of his pictures, Andrei becomes almost chatty.
"After two years of photographing the architectural destruction I decided that it was very bad, but it was even worse that they were ruining the lives of 22 million people. So I began to take pictures of everyday life. I think they are much more striking."
The next series of photographs showing everyday life under Ceausescu is like a haunting silent movie. We see desolate streets when there was no petrol, queues for food that never came, trams straddled by desperate commuters, useless cars buried under snow and a wedding party picking their way through the streets. No-one is smiling.
I can't decide which is more astonishing—the photographs or the photographer? How did he get away with taking pictures which so openly "denigrated the socialist reality", a crime that carried a six-year prison sentence in communist Romania?
Andrei explains that he was a part-time sports photographer, so he had a state-sanctioned excuse to carry a camera.
And he tells me I must understand the strange psychology of the state policemen: "Tessa, they are very aggressive with those who are afraid, but much less aggressive with people who are not at all afraid. I was confident. Don't hide if you don't want to get caught."
Andrei's brazen behaviour captured a vital slice of Romania's painful past.
Yet it took a full 18 years before he could show his photographs to an astonished Romanian public.
The people in power did not want to be reminded of what they had got so wrong. He had to wait.
Andrei shrugs: "I have seen women over 40 exploding in tears in front of my photographs, because they saw their life had been destroyed, but they realised it 20 years too late. And a lot of teenagers laughed neurotically—because they recognised something in the pictures that their parents had told them, but they had never seen for themselves."
My young friend Paul represents the generation that escaped that hell.
He's silenced by Andrei—his experience, his audacity, his pictures.
Later, as we walk back through the centre of Bucharest, taking in its schizophrenic appearance with fresh eyes, Paul quietly concedes: "It is a pity Ceausescu had to build the palace complex right in the middle of the old city."
29 September 2013
BUCHAREST, Romania—Remembered as a brutal sadist by inmates who managed to survive the prisons he once ran, Alexandru Visinescu bubbles with violent fury. "Get away from my door, or do you want me to get a stick and beat you?" the 88-year-old former prison commander screamed recently when a reporter called at his fourth floor apartment in the center of this capital city.
Like other onetime servants of the old Communist government, Mr. Visinescu—now a frail retiree with a hunched back—does not like being disturbed. Until recently, he was not. He was left alone with a generous pension and a comfortable apartment, surrounded by black-and-white photographs of his fit, youthful self in uniform. He passed his time with leisurely strolls in a nearby park.
His peace ended in early September, when prosecutors in Bucharest announced that Mr. Visinescu would be put on trial over his role in Communist-era abuses, the first case of its kind since Romania toppled and executed the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in December 1989.
The case has opened a flood of news media coverage here and raised hopes, however tentative, among victims and their advocates that Romania may finally be following most of its neighbors in Central and Eastern Europe in shaking off a national amnesia about its brutal past and re-examining a culture of impunity that has fed rampant corruption and constrained the country's progress despite its entry into the European Union in 2007.
In the eyes of many here, the downfall and execution of Mr. Ceausescu merely removed the leader of the old Communist Bloc's most intrusive dictatorship, leaving the system beneath largely intact. That continuity between the Communist and post-Communist elites helps explain why resistance to a serious reckoning with past crimes has been particularly strong in Romania, where there is still widespread nostalgia for the Communist era.
"We are coming from very deep and dirty waters," said Laura Stefan of the Expert Forum, a Bucharest group that campaigns to strengthen the rule of law. "Corruption has a big link to the fact that we haven't talked about our past," she said. She welcomed the prosecution of Mr. Visinescu as an encouraging sign, noting that "to even think that these people are guilty and should pay is very new."
A former work camp commander, Ion Ficior, is also under investigation and may face charges.
Still, Ms. Stefan doubts that the authorities are "really serious" about putting Mr. Visinescu and others in jail. "I am not optimistic at all," she said.
Fueling those doubts is the fact that Mr. Visinescu has been charged with genocide, which usually applies only to efforts to liquidate, in part or entirely, a religious or ethnic group, not to political repression. And the crimes he is said to have committed stretch back more than half a century, predating the Ceausescu dictatorship, which lasted from 1965 to 1989 and remains a far more politically delicate period because so many members of Romania's Communist establishment under Ceausescu maintained positions of power even after the fall of the old regime.
The difficulty of making a genocide charge stand up in a Romanian court—and then against any legal challenge at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France—has raised concerns among those who have long pushed for justice that the case could prove to be yet another false start in the country's fitful efforts to come to terms with its past.
"They have charged him with genocide just so they can close this file without a result," said Dan Voinea, a Romanian criminology professor who served as the prosecutor in the hasty Dec. 25, 1989, show trial of Mr. Ceausescu and his wife, Elena.
Romania's political and economic elites, Mr. Voinea said, are still dominated by former Communists, their relatives and allies "who want to make sure that the crimes of Communism are never unveiled and never prosecuted in a serious way."
Indeed, critics of the government say the prosecution of Mr. Visinescu was undertaken only because the prosecutor received a detailed file from the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes, a semi-government body in Bucharest that researches cold cases.
Romania under Mr. Ceausescu was the most authoritarian, Stalinist government in Eastern Europe, a paranoid nightmare in which one in 30 people worked as informers for the ruthless security agency, the Securitate. Mr. Ceausescu's repression of dissent was so complete that Romanians were forbidden to own typewriters without a police permit.
The General Prosecutor's office in Bucharest, headed by a former soldier who took part in the shooting of protesters, or so-called terrorists, during the 1989 uprising against Mr. Ceausescu, declined to discuss Mr. Visinescu's case. It has not explained why it chose to prosecute him with genocide, a crime that will be very hard to prove but may offer a way around a statute of limitations on lesser offenses.
Still, for many here, Mr. Visinescu's prosecution is significant for bringing a measure of accountability for the first time to a penal system that, according to researchers at the institute in Bucharest, not only subjected prisoners to physical and psychological abuse but, at times, also sought the extermination of the government's opponents.
That was especially the case at Ramnicu Sarat prison, 95 miles northeast of Bucharest, which was reserved for political offenders singled out for harsh treatment. Mr. Visinescu commanded the prison from 1956 until 1963.
"Evil now has a face in Romania," said Vladimir Tismaneanu, a University of Maryland professor who headed a 2006 commission set up by the Romanian government to examine Communist-era crimes in general. "It is one thing to have abstract evil, but the public needs to see an individual."
Aurora Dumitrescu, who was arrested in 1951 at the age of 16 and sent to a women's prison run by Mr. Visinescu in the town of Mislea, remembers him as "a beast." She said he delighted in sending inmates to the "black chamber," a dank, windowless concrete room used for beatings and psychological torture. "For him we were all just animals," she said.
For his part, Mr. Visinescu, who is accused of direct involvement in six deaths, told the Romanian news media that he could not be held responsible for decisions made by superiors.
Insisting that he had "never killed anything, including a chicken," Mr. Visinescu told Romanian television that he had merely been carrying out prison rules dictated by the General Directorate of Penitentiaries.
"Yes, people died," he said. "But people died in other places, too. They died here, there and everywhere. The food and other conditions were all in accordance with the program. If I hadn't followed the program I would have been thrown out. Then what would I have done?"
Even some of his victims have some sympathy for his argument and wonder why only a relatively minor figure from so long ago is being pursued.
"The chiefs are much more guilty than he is—it was the system," said Valentin Cristea, 83, the only living survivor among the political prisoners sent to Ramnicu Sarat prison.
Mr. Cristea, a retired electrical engineer who once designed listening devices for Romania's Interior Ministry, was first jailed in 1956, accused of belonging to a tiny anti-Communist group headed by his aunt and her husband. He spent six years in various jails, including Ramnicu Sarat.
Mr. Cristea said he was never beaten by Mr. Visinescu but, while held in isolation like all other inmates, heard the screams of prisoners who fell victim to the commander's violent rages. While insisting he has no thirst for revenge, Mr. Cristea says he thinks it is important that the actions of Mr. Visinescu and his chiefs be remembered.
"There should be big photographs of these people in every town so that people can know they existed and remember those terrible times," he said.
Far from that, with the exception of people directly implicated in the killing of unarmed civilians during the murky 1989 uprising, including the defense minister at the time, no significant figures in the organs of Communist power have been put on trial. Efforts to bar former officials from office have all come to nothing.
When Mr. Tismaneanu's commission reported in 2006 that more than two million people were killed or persecuted by Communist authorities, President Traian Basescu endorsed the findings and said it was time to judge past crimes so as to lift "the burden of an uncured illness."
Members of Parliament booed and jeered as he spoke. No prosecutions followed.
"They changed the name of the system and its outward features, but its nature remained the same," said Anca Cernea, who runs a foundation dedicated to the rule of law and the memory of political prisoners. "The people who are ruling now all come from this system, so they don't want to punish its crimes. They all say let's forget and move on."
Mr. Visinescu, she added, "is definitely a monster, but he is not the only one. They have thrown him to the lions to save themselves. He committed crimes but not genocide."
George Calin contributed reporting.
19 September 2013
Almost 25 years after the demise of communism in Romania, new evidence begins to surface with respect to Communist-era torturers.
"I swear an oath to the party that raised and educated me to relentlessly and mercilessly fight and strike the enemies of our hard-working people". Such was the written commitment signed by Ion Ficior, now aged 85, the former head of the notorious death camp in Periprava, an isolated spot in the Danube Delta. Ficior led the compound in the 1945-1989 period and now faces charges of genocide brought by the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes and the Memory of the Romanian Exile (IICCMER), which has taken the matter to court.
According to the investigation carried out by the Institute, between 1958 and 1963 Ion Ficor introduced and coordinated a repressive, abusive, cruel and arbitrary detention system targeting political inmates at Periprava camp. The methods employed would vary, from depriving prisoners of food and medication to tortures that today may seem hard to conceive. According to estimates, as much as 103 "counter-revolutionaries", as the opponents of the communist regime were known at the time, were subjected to harsh treatment.
Ion Ficior is the second name on a list of 35 communist-era torturers that the Institute has chosen to make public. Further revelations show that torturers were even rewarded with substantial pensions after the demise of communism. These pensions would go as high as 1,200 euros, tantamount to what an acting minister earns today.
Aware of the absurdity of the situation, the Government in Bucharest is now belatedly trying to impose a law forcing former torturers to compensate their own victims. Romania officially condemned the communist rule and all its related atrocities in 2006, 17 years after the anti-communist revolution of 1989.
However, during all this time no victim of the inhumane treatment ever received financial compensation from the state. What's more, the official condemnation of communism in Romania brought about no reparative laws, such as a Lustration Law, aimed at restraining or even preventing communist-era torturers from holding public office in Romania. Such a law was never adopted, while those responsible for the bloody events of 1989 that led to the demise of communism were never brought to justice. It is a sad reality therefore that 23 years on, Romania, now a member of the European Union and NATO, is still haunted by its communist past.
5 September 2013
3 September 2013
TARGOVISTE, Romania (AP) — More than 20 years after Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, were convicted of genocide and executed in Romania, the country opened a museum about the last two days of their lives during the country's pro-democracy uprising.
The museum is located in a military building where the trial and executions took place in Targoviste, a town 80 kilometers (50 miles) northwest of Bucharest.
Ceausescu had ruled Romania for nearly 25 years with an iron fist. Museum visitors will be able to see metal plates that he and his wife ate on, the beds where they slept, and a tiny improvised courtroom where they faced a hastily conducted trial before a special military tribunal. The place where they were fatally shot on Christmas Day, 1989, at 2:45 p.m. also is showcased.
On Tuesday, Gen. Andrei Kemenci, the former commander of the garrison located in the building, took journalists on a tour of the museum. He said Ceausescu was dissatisfied that he was only given brown bread and sweets to eat there. Kemenci also said the leader asked for a change of clothes and to borrow money to spend at a military canteen.
In 1989, Romanian forces shot and killed about 1,100 people conducting anti-communist demonstrations, most of them unarmed.
On Dec. 22, the Ceausescus fled Bucharest in a helicopter after they were booed by a crowd and hours after Defense Minister Vasile Milea apparently committed suicide. Abandoned by the helicopter pilot and most of the leader's aides, the Ceausescus then hitchhiked and ended up in Targoviste, where they were arrested by police.
On Dec. 24 provisional leaders who took over after the Ceausescus fled Bucharest decided the couple would stand trial the next day.
The trial lasted just two hours during which the defendants said they did not recognize the legitimacy of the court and called former aides attending the trial "traitors." Both were convicted and immediately executed in the building's courtyard.
The museum will open to the public later this month, with tickets costing 7 lei ($2.10).
A student holds up a sign during a demonstration against the opening of the Rosia Montana open cast gold mine in Bucharest (RADU SIGHETI. REUTERS / September 1, 2013)
1 September 2013
BUCHAREST (Reuters)—Thousands of Romanians across the country rallied late on Sunday to protest against the leftist government's support for a plan to open Europe's biggest open-cast gold mine in the small Carpathian town of Rosia Montana.
The project, which aims to use cyanide to mine 314 tonnes of gold and 1,500 tonnes of silver, has drawn fierce opposition from civic rights groups and environmentalists, who say it would destroy ancient Roman gold mines and villages.
It is led by Rosia Montana Gold Corporation, majority-owned by Canada's Gabriel Resources Ltd with the Romanian government holding roughly 20 percent.
The project has been valued at $7.5 billion based on a 2007 study that used an average price of $900 per ounce of gold, with Romania estimated to get about 75 percent of the benefits in taxes, royalties, dividends and jobs.
Gold currently trades around $1,390 per ounce.
Earlier this week the government approved a draft law enabling Gabriel to open the mine after securing a bigger stake in the project, which has been awaiting a green light for 14 years. Parliament is expected to vote on the law this month.
In the capital Bucharest, up to 3,000 protesters marched towards the government headquarters from University Square, the scene of violent anti-austerity protests early last year that toppled a previous government.
Protesters held aloft banners saying "United for Rosia Montana" and "Our children don't want cyanide". Protesters also gathered in the northwestern Romanian city of Cluj. A separate rally against shale gas exploration, drew another 2,000 people onto the streets in the eastern town of Barlad.
"This protest can get people together," said Ioana Paun, 28, who joined the protest in Bucharest. "From what I am hearing around me, this is only the beginning."
Prime Minister Victor Ponta strongly opposed the project before he took power in May last year yet voted for the draft law enabling the mine, only to tell a local television station that he would vote against the project in parliament.
Most Rosia Montana residents hope the project will bring jobs and money to their impoverished town, which suffered when a state-owned gold mine closed in 2006. Only a small number of the town's of 2,800 residents refuse to sell their property to make way for the mine.
The company proposes carving open four quarries over the mine's lifespan, work that would destroy four mountain tops and wipe out three outlying villages of the 16 that make up Rosia Montana municipality, while preserving the town's historical center.
(Reporting by Luiza Ilie and Radu Sigheti; editing by David Evans)
Apartment blocks are seen in Aninoasa, 330 km (202 miles) west of Bucharest July 31, 2013. If joining the European Union was supposed to lift Romania out of poverty, in Aninoasa, a town of 4,800 people in the mountainous Jiu Valley region, it has yet to work. Six years after Romania's accession to the EU, not only is Aninoasa still poor—it has also become the first town in Romania to file for insolvency. Picture taken July 31, 2013.
1 September 2013
ANINOASA, Romania | Sun Sep 1, 2013 10:09am EDT
(Reuters)—On an abandoned storefront, an old poster advertises one of the few career opportunities available in this Romanian town: naked webcam models wanted for Internet chatrooms.
If joining the European Union was supposed to lift Romania out of poverty, it has yet to work in Aninoasa, a town of 4,800 people in the mountainous central region of Jiu Valley.
Six years after Romania's accession to the EU, not only is Aninoasa still poor - it has also become the first town in Romania to file for insolvency.
Town officials took out a bank loan to fund investment projects, they could not repay it, they fell behind on paying other bills and over the years they got themselves so deep in debt they could not carry on.
"Our mayor likes to joke there are only two major towns in insolvency in the world, Detroit and us," said deputy mayor Adrian Albescu, brought in last year after the previous administration lost the election. "For the past year we have done nothing else but pay debts."
Aninoasa's experience raises a question: did the European Union make a mistake when, six years ago, it admitted Romania, a country with living standards and levels of governance well below the average for the bloc?
It's not just about Romania. Bulgaria joined at the same time and is still saddled with corruption and poverty, Croatia joined in July bringing problems of organised crime and the legacy of war in the 1990s, and EU candidates such as such as Albania and Macedonia have even deeper troubles.
In Romania's case the calculation was that pressure from Brussels, coupled with EU development cash, would help the country catch up. In many ways it has: Romania's economic output has almost doubled since 2006.
But in other respects, the lessons learned with Romania, as well as neighboring Bulgaria, could make the EU much more skeptical the next time it contemplates bringing in new members.
When enlargement is next on its agenda, the European Commission will view the experience with Romanian local administrations as a "negative example," said Sergiu Miscoiu of think tank CESPRI.
One of the biggest difficulties for Romania is that, while billions of euros worth of EU funds are on offer, it often fails to qualify for the money because it cannot convince Brussels it will spend it honestly and efficiently.
In Aninoasa, former mayor Ilie Botgros held the office for 20 years until he was defeated in an election last year.
During that time the town's economy declined, a process which accelerated in 2006 when the government shut down the coal mine that was the town's sole employer.
As income from local taxes fell, the town hall's revenue shrank and officials now have only 4.2 million lei ($1.25 million) per year to cover staff wages, public utility bills and much-needed projects to improve infrastructure.
Many of the roads in the town are surfaced with gravel, some neighborhoods are not connected to the sewage system or gas supply, and there are hundred-year-old buildings which have no central heating against freezing winter temperatures and are in dire need of repair.
The town currently has only two projects with European funding: one is a sewage scheme, the other a move to renovate Aninoasa's cultural centre, which should include a gym, a library and meeting hall.
Botgros went instead to the bank. In 2006 he took out a loan worth 3 million lei ($893,600) from Romania's top lender BCR, owned by Austrian Erste Bank. He said he used the money to pay off previous investments, including work on a bridge and a gas pipeline in the north of town.
But the debt was stacking up. By now, Aninoasa has debts worth a total of roughly 6 million lei. The town owes money to 70 service providers. Public lighting was cut off for months last year because of unpaid bills.
The town could have carried on getting deeper into debt, but this year Romania tightened up its rules on municipal finances.
It started enforcing a law that requires local governments to file for insolvency if they are 120 days or more behind with repayments and their debt exceeds 50 percent of revenue. Aninoasa filed for insolvency in June. A court-appointed administrator is working on a plan to tackle debts.
The new mayor has filed a criminal complaint against Botgros over his management of town finances, and prosecutors have launched an inquiry, but it is too soon to tell whether any charges will be made. Botgros denies any wrongdoing.
"Do you really think that after 20 years in office I went crazy or started stealing money or something," said Botgros, who is now a local council member and plans to run for mayor in the next election. "I say I did what was needed for the community."
Aninoasa is probably not the last town that will file for insolvency. A study from the independent Institute for Public Policy showed hundreds of towns cannot cover their running costs, let alone invest in basic infrastructure. Poor tax collection and one of the EU's highest inflation rates do not help.
As with Aninoasa, EU money is available in theory, but in practice a highly segmented local administration is too weak to be able to use the funds effectively.
Romania ranks 116 out of 144 states in an index of institutional strength, according to the World Economic Forum's competitiveness report.
The EU has set aside 20 billion euros in non-refundable development money for Romania to build roads, sewage systems and central heating facilities in its impoverished regions during 2007-2013, aimed primarily at local authorities.
The country has so far secured only a fifth.
Roughly one in two mayors that have tapped funds were penalized later for various irregularities. The European Commission briefly blocked funds last year.
"There is reluctance to talk about European funds given that it is not simple to tap them, it is not simple to implement projects," said Elena Iorga of the Institute for Public Policy.
A lack of competence is, in some cases, compounded by cronyism and corruption—adding to the EU's reasons for not allocating cash.
The National Integrity Agency, an anti-corruption watchdog, has ruled that 193 mayors, deputy mayors and councilors had conflicts of interest, falsified statements or had wealth they could not account for since the middle of last year.
A study by the agency of 2,856 local councilors from all political parties showed almost half of them or their spouses owned private service providers, several of which had been awarded public contracts. ($1 = 3.3572 Romanian lei)
(Editing by Christian Lowe and Ruth Pitchford)
Rosia Montana lies on top of one of Europe's largest gold deposits
28 August 2013
A Canadian mining firm has welcomed a new Romanian government push to let it develop a controversial gold mine.
The Rosia Montana Project in Transylvania, northern Romania, has been held up for more than a decade by a row over its environmental impact.
An open-cast gold mine was established in the communist era, but now Canada's Gabriel Resources Ltd wants to expand and modernise the site.
The mine would cut into mountain peaks and involve heavy use of toxic cyanide.
A statement from Gabriel Resources, sent to the BBC, praised new draft legislation on the Rosia Montana Project, approved by the Romanian government on Tuesday.
The Romanian parliament will consider the bill next month.
"If adopted by the Romanian parliament... this legislation will set the framework to significantly accelerate the development of Europe's largest gold mine at Rosia Montana and other mining projects in Romania," Gabriel Resources said.
The company's CEO Jonathan Henry said the government's move "represents a significant milestone for all stakeholders".
"We are extremely encouraged by this major step towards progression of the permitting process and consider it to be a clear sign of endorsement by the government for investment into Romania."
Revenue for state
The company controls Rosia Montana Gold Corporation (RMGC), which would develop the mine. But the Romanian state's stake in the project would rise to 25% from a current 20%.
The royalty rate for the Romanian state would also rise from the current 4% to 6%.
Gabriel Resources says RMGC would "undertake to preserve cultural heritage, ensure environmental protection and eliminate historical pollution".
The company says the project "will create an average of 2,300 jobs in the construction phase and 900 in the operational phase".
A local opposition group—the Rosia Montana Cultural Foundation—has support from some international non-governmental organisations and other activists, who have so far stalled the project on environmental grounds.
They fear that the mine expansion would ruin a picturesque area and wreck ancient Roman mining galleries.
The company admits that large sections of the ancient mines would be destroyed, along with the peaks of four local mountains.
Rosia Montana and Romania's
Decade-Long 'Gold War'
German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop (right) talks with Adolf Hitler (left) on his arrival to Berlin after signing the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
25 August 2013
Black Ribbon Day, also called the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism, originated in the 1980s.
Central and Eastern European refugees then living in Canada organized a series of peaceful protests on both sides of the Iron Curtain to draw attention to the rampant human rights abuses perpetrated by authorities across the Soviet bloc.
They chose August 23, the anniversary of the infamous 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany to hold the annual rallies.
On August 23, 1989, about 2 million people formed a human chain spanning more than 600 kilometers across the Baltic republics.
Known as the Baltic Way, this protest is seen as a defining moment in the Baltic states' battle for independence from the Soviet Union.
As the Soviet bloc crumbled in 1991, Black Ribbon Day demonstrations were held in as many as 56 cities around the world.
Today, Black Ribbon Day commemorates both victims of Stalinism and Nazism and, more generally, all those who died, suffered, or perished under authoritarian regimes.
In 2008, the European Parliament became the first entity to formally designate August 23 as a day of remembrance for victims of Stalinism and Nazism.
Canada followed suit in 2009 and Georgia, in the Caucasus, one year later.
Although Black Ribbon Day is not officially marked in Ukraine, the body representing Crimean Tatars in the country, the Mejlis, adopted the annual commemoration in 2011.
Crimean Tatars were among the many ethnic groups deported under Josef Stalin during World War II for allegedly collaborating with Nazi Germany.
The U.S. Congress is currently studying a resolution introduced last month to adopt August 23 as a day of remembrance for those who perished under Stalinism and Nazism.
Black ribbons are seen as a universal symbol of remembrance and have been widely used to mourn tragedies.
Black ribbons, for instance, are worn to honor U.S. military personnel made prisoner of war or listed as missing in action.
They have been used to commemorate a wide range of disasters, from the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States to the 1997 death of Princess Diana in Britain or the plane crash over Russia that killed then-Polish President Lech Kaczynski, his wife, and 95 others in April 2010.
More recently, they were handed to runners at the 2013 London Marathon to express solidarity with victims of the earlier marathon bombings in Boston, which killed three spectators and one police officer and wounded more than 260 others.
Black ribbons are also worn to raise awareness of health issues such as melanoma, eating disorders, and narcolepsy, as well as to protest against torture.
Wikipedia: European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and
The funeral procession of self-appointed Roma king Florin Cioaba passes downtown Sibiu Reuters/Radu Sigheti
23 August 2013
August 23, 2013 9:12 AM SIBIU, Romania (AP) — The King of the Gypsies arranged an opulent wedding for his 12-year-old daughter, ordering a dozen suckling pigs and buying her a lacy gown from Italy. When she stormed out, bridesmaids in tow, the furious outcry forced Romania to stop ignoring child marriage and pushed him to take a public change of heart.
Florin Cioaba, a member of the family that has led the country's embattled minority since the 19th century, went on to become a leader who helped smooth relations with mainstream Romania and modernize Roma traditions, while still preserving his community's separate culture.
Hundreds of Roma turned out for a funeral in his Transylvanian hometown of Sibiu to remember him on Friday. A banner emblazoned with his crowned visage was draped across an apartment building. Stonemasons have been carving his tomb in black marble for the last week.
Cioaba died of a heart attack Sunday at age 58 while on vacation in Turkey. Mourners were carrying his coffin—partially lidded with glass and rumored to be air-conditioned—along a seven-kilometer (four-mile) route through the city.
"He cared very much about his Roma community and he helped it a lot. He integrated it into Romanian society; he sent the members of the community to school," relative Ion Rudaru said.
But the road was bumpy. In 2003, as his 12-year-old daughter was preparing for marriage, the family openly talked about how Ana Maria would stop going to school once she was married. That may have been why she fled the church in front of 400 astonished guests—many of them members of the media invited to experience Roma culture.
She tearfully returned a few minutes later and was duly married off. The ensuing uproar over the wedding became a pivotal moment for Cioaba. The couple was separated after the ceremony and did not live together. Cioaba later pushed for education for Roma girls and began preaching that they should not be married until they were 16, aligning Roma tradition with Romanian law.
The move earned him a reputation as a leader who cooperated with officials.
Ciprian Necula, a sociologist who studies Roma, described Cioaba as a down-to-earth, moderate leader and a mediator who used his pulpit as a Pentecostal pastor to deliver many of his messages, including urging Roma not to beg on the streets and demanding more rights for the minority.
"When I greeted him "I kiss your hand, Your Majesty," he replied, "Stop that nonsense!" Necula said Friday.
Cioaba was strongly influenced in his policies by his wife, Marica, whom he married when they were both 14 and with whom he had four children, Necula said.
Before the funeral, his elder son Dorin was crowned "the international king of Roma," while his younger son Daniel was crowned "the king of Romanian Roma," succeeding him as the heads of Europe's largest Roma community.
Roma started arriving from India in the 14th century and there are an estimated 8 million in Europe, with the largest population in Romania. There are officially some 620,000 Roma in Romania, but many do not declare their ethnicity due to widespread discrimination. Roma leaders say there are between one and three million Roma in the country.
Cioaba took over the mantle in 1997 from his father Ion Cioaba, who was deported during the Holocaust to the Soviet Union.
In 2010, he set up a court to mediate disputes in the Roma community with a council of 20 members. While he preserved Roma customs, he sought to keep them in line with Romania's move toward the EU, which it joined in 2007. He counted among his friends, President Traian Basescu, who this week took a helicopter to Sibiu to lay a wreath at Cioaba's coffin.
However, Cioaba could be critical of European leaders, including former French President Nicolas Sarkozy whom he denounced for repatriating Romanian Roma from France.
Romanian Roma use a separate language, which borrows heavily from Romanian, and women traditionally dress in brightly colored long pleated skirts with headscarves, braids with gold jewelry. In eastern Europe, the former communist bloc where the Roma are concentrated, many schools are tacitly segregated, and hate crimes are commonplace.
21 August 2013
Commentator Andrei Codrescu notes the complicity of the Romanian Catholic Church in both World War II and Communist-era wrongs. Now the church is given big new construction projects to politically connected contractors.
You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
In Romania, new churches are popping up at the rate of 10 a month. That's one every three days, according to a BBC report. It also includes a vast cathedral under construction in the capital city, Bucharest.
This building boom is taking place in one of Europe's poorest countries, and it has Romanian-born commentator Andrei Codrescu wondering what's really going on.
ANDREI CODRESCU, BYLINE: Romania's phony tumble from communism to something called first, democracy, then original democracy, then just plain old Balkan morass, looks like it has finally found its form by adding churchness to the mix. Romanian Orthodox churches and priests are perfect exemplars of their country's past. In the fascist era before the Second World War, the priests were enthusiastic boosters of dictators and haters of all minorities, especially Jews and gypsies. In the communist era, a good many priests became willing collaborators of Securitate, the dreaded secret police, by reporting what they heard at confession.
Far from being the honorable opposition to communism that was the Catholic church in Poland, the Romanian church served its temporal masters with eagerness. Religion that Karl Marx called the opium of the people did its best here to live up to its name. After the revolution of 1989, the church started campaigning for a national cathedral intended to rival Nicolae Ceausescu's grandiose House of the People, the grand kitsch palace that bankrupted Romania in the 1980s.
Among the charges leveled against that dictator was his architectural megalomania that demolished old neighborhoods of Bucharest to make room for monuments to his power. Opposition to that project came from intellectuals who hoped that Romania's joining the European Union would bring with it a sense of proportion. As it turns out, joining the EU did not bring with it either architectural taste or a substantial change in living standards.
Instead, a growing mass of newly impoverished people turned to the church for miracles and comfort. Opinion polls showed that the church and the army were the most trusted institutions of post-communist Romania. So here come the monuments again and the parades. But these are not the old days. There are new opportunities: building contracts to be awarded, politicians to reward. The Orthodox Church gives the masses what they crave: churches on every block and renewed sermons about the grandeur of the nation, liberally sprinkled with good old anti-Semitism and anti-Roma sentiment and, for something extra, a dash of anti-European, anti-enlightenment propaganda. It's the unbeatable formula of post-communism: high-grade opium.
CORNISH: Andrei Codrescu wrote "The Hole in the Flag," about the mysterious events of December 1989 in Romania.
The Hole in the Flag - A Romanian Exile's Story of Return and Revolution
9 August 2013
9 August 2013
BUCHAREST, Romania (AP) — Romania's top court will examine the case of a former commander of a communist prison who is accused of aggravated murder in the deaths of six political prisoners.
The High Court of Cassation and Justice said Friday it will take on the case because of its legal complexity and also because more than 50 years have lapsed since the deaths at the notorious Ramnicu Sarat communist prison. Under Romanian law, there is no time limit on prosecuting serious crimes.
From 1956 to 1963, Alexandru Visinescu ran Ramnicu Sarat where pre-communist political leaders and intellectual elite were incarcerated.
The institute investigating communist crimes last week called for Visinescu, 87, to be prosecuted for the deaths. It said prisoners died from beatings, hunger, a lack of medical treatment and exposure to cold. It will hand a total of 35 files of former commanders to prosecutors.
Romanians were shocked after Visinescu publicly cursed a cameraman and lunged at journalists several times who were seeking reaction to the accusations against him.
The plight of the former prison guards and their thousands of victims has turned into a national debate in Romania with many questioning why former prison guards have not only not faced trial even though communism ended 23 years ago, but also receive the highest pensions in Romania.
President Traian Basescu this weekend said it was never too late for justice and said Visinescu should be handed over to the justice system. Visinescu says he was only following orders and doing his job.
More than 500,000 Romanians were incarcerated for opposition to the communist regime and one-fifth died.
Romania threw off communism during the 1989 revolution, but former communists and former Securitate secret police agents continued to wield influence in politics, business and the media, effectively protecting figures like Visinescu.
6 August 2013
Romania is in the middle of a church-building boom, with some 10 new places of worship completed every month, and one vast cathedral slowly taking shape. But some Romanians take issue with the expense, in one of Europe's poorest countries—and particularly the use of funds from the public purse.
To travel across the north of Romania from Suceava to Maramures is to be bamboozled by exquisite religious eye candy.
Everywhere you look there are churches—big, small, medieval, brand new, tin-roofed, wooden, painted—each has its own appeal.
What is particularly striking as you bump along the potholed roads that link them, are their sheer numbers. Since the 1989 revolution the Orthodox Church has been going great guns in Romania.
The vast majority of the population—nearly 90%—are Orthodox, and in the wake of Ceausescu's downfall the Church has capitalised on its pre-eminent position in the country, building new churches at a rate of one every three days, including an enormous cathedral currently under construction in the centre of Bucharest.
On completion, the plan is that the Cathedral for the People's Salvation will be the tallest religious building in south-eastern Europe and tower over its immediate neighbour—ex-Dictator Nicolae Ceausescu's enormous Palace of the People.
Romania is undoubtedly a very spiritual country, with religious rituals, icons and celebrations forming the fabric of many people's lives—on the Saints' Day of Constantin and Elena in Maramures I witnessed the congregation spill out of two local churches on to the surrounding hillside.
However questions are increasingly being asked about the funding of the new cathedral and the Orthodox Church more generally, much of which comes from the cash-strapped state.
A leading critic is the flamboyant Member of Parliament and head of the Green Party, Remus Cernea. "In Romania we have a big problem between church and state," he says. "My view is that if the church wants to build something it's OK until the money for the building of this church is the money of the people, of the state—public funds."
Recipient of an IMF bailout in 2009 and one of the poorest countries in the EU, Romania gives millions of euros to the Orthodox Church every year.
From central government funds the church receives more than 100 million euros for priests' salaries, and many more millions for the construction and renovation of church buildings.
Funds also flow in from local councils, city mayors, state companies and the parishioners themselves—though I found no-one who could confirm exactly how much money the Orthodox Church receives each year in total.
Remus, who is proposing a bill to change the way the church is funded, believes the close financial relationship between church and state is part of a bigger problem.
"In many cases politicians give public funds to churches and in exchange the priests support them in electoral campaigns. Often you see the construction companies who build the churches owned by people who are very close to the politicians. So it's a kind of circle of money," he says.
Both the current growth of the church in Romania and the Orthodox hierarchy's close relationship with the political classes are partly explained by the punitive effects of Ceausescu's extreme regime when dozens of historic churches were destroyed and many Orthodox leaders collaborated with the communists in order to survive.
"Many people were simply forced out of religion during communist times, so in a sense it was natural to return," says Liviu Andreescu, a scholar of church-state relations.
The collaboration between many church leaders and the communists helped perpetuate "the strong sense of co-operation between church and state that we see today, with many religious activities funded by the state", he argues.
Romania's Minister of Religious Affairs, Victor Opaschi, concedes that there is a close working relationship between the church and politicians during electoral campaigns, and that this is "not a good thing".
But he says there are outstanding historic problems. "The communists took from the church and it lost nearly all its property," he says. "Now the state is trying to compensate for this by giving back a small proportion of what it has taken."
Priests also receive money from their congregations, often entering parishioners' houses to ask for donations.
When Orthodox priest Casian Pandelica refused a bishop's request to raise 50,000 euros for church refurbishment from his 800-strong parish in the village of Reviga, a stand-off ensued, culminating in an aggressive dawn police raid that he believes was instigated by the church hierarchy.
Expelled from the Orthodox Church but supported by his local community, he now holds services in a makeshift chapel.
Inevitably perhaps, Pandelica is deeply suspicious of the church's financial motivations, says it does little good work in the community and even suspects church leaders of corruption.
In remote Moldavia, famous for its exquisite painted monasteries, I met the only member of the Orthodox hierarchy who would speak to me, Archbishop Pimen.
An old man with wise blue eyes and a twinkly smile Pimen is renowned throughout Romania for his spirituality.
He admits that "not all priests give as much as they should" but denies that the church does too little work in the community. "If all the money used for new churches was given to poor people would it cover their needs?" he asks. "We have an absolute need for new churches and they are being built for very little money."
However, as the Patriarch asks for yet more money for the new cathedral, increasing numbers believe that the cost of church construction is too high.
Nearly all the young people I spoke to, especially in the capital Bucharest were not regular churchgoers, and felt the money would be better spent elsewhere.
But for the time being, the scene in Maramures on the Saints' Day of Constantin and Elena is a reminder that the Orthodox religion in Romania remains a vital component of many people's lives. Its pre-eminent position in society is undeniable.
Parishioner Elena, who was celebrating her name day in traditional costume, invited me back to her modest family home where icons hung in every corner.
"We're a religious people—we're a people who believe," she says. "We don't lose our traditions and our habits. That is how it is here."
31 July 2013
CINCINNATI (AP) — All these years later, some surviving veterans still think the raid on "Hitler's gas station" was a great plan. However, not all worked out as expected, and the result was a fierce World War II battle marked by bravery and sacrifice.
The 70th anniversary Ploesti Raid reunion this week at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force commemorates an Aug. 1, 1943, assault by waves of B-24 bombers on oil refineries in Romania that provided much of the fuel for the Nazi war machine. Five Medals of Honor were among the many awards given for what U.S. military histories call the most decorated action of the war.
U.S. commanders "emphasized the importance of completing the mission; in their estimate, it would shorten the war in Europe by six months," Dale Hulsey, 91, of Fort Worth, Texas, recalled Wednesday, after reunion participants viewed a restored B-24 at the museum near Dayton.
"They tried to knock the thing out in one mission, but everything went wrong," said Bob Rans, a Chicago native who lives near Tampa at age 92, with vivid memories of being bathed in gasoline as a wall of flame roared toward him.
The raid inflicted heavy but not devastating damage, and nearly a third of the 177 planes and their 1,726 men failed to make it back to their bases more than 1,000 miles away in North Africa.
The Allies had tried bombing the oil fields before from high levels; Operation Tidal Wave was to be a surprise assault by a flying armada coming in under radar and methodically knocking out assigned targets. But navigational problems disrupted plans, and defenders on the ground were ready for them.
Sweeping in just above cornstalks—"we were so close to the ground it was like driving at high speed in an automobile," Hulsey said—the bombers were met with a barrage of firepower. Hulsey, a radio operator, remembers a continuous line of bright flashes from gunfire on the ground. Rans said anti-aircraft guns mounted on rail cars provided mobile defense against the bombers.
An auxiliary fuel tank near Rans was hit, showering him with gasoline. Fire engulfing his plane, he parachuted out. He was captured, treated in a hospital for burns, then put in a prison camp. Hulsey said his plane knocked out its target and was headed home when shot down by fighter planes. The crew was found and protected by Yugoslav resistance fighters until a British rescue operation got them out nearly a year later.
Rans and Hulsey were among 11 raid veterans at the reunion, with nearly 100 family members and friends. Air Force history enthusiasts Mark Copeland of Lakeville, Minn., and Blaine Duxbury of Indianapolis helped organize it. Copeland said after a 60th anniversary reunion in Salt Lake City, there was interest in coming together again for what likely will be the last reunion. About 70 of the mission participants are still alive, he said.
Scott Stewart came from Lincoln, Neb., to pay tribute to the mission his late father, Carroll Stewart, wrote about in a 1962 book co-authored with James Dugan. Stewart said his father spent years chronicling the stories of veterans of the battle, including Germans and Romanians.
Rans said the reunion, which will include a public memorial service Thursday, brought back memories, some tears and a sense of pride for the veterans about their place in military annals.
"When you stop to think about it, you were part of an action that nobody else could ever be in again, the most highly decorated action of the war," Rans said. "History is history."
Nicolae Feraru, who has been announced as a winner of a prestigious NEA National Heritage Fellowship, plays the cimbalom at his northwest side home. Phil Velasquez, Chicago Tribune
16 July 2013
To observe that Nicolae Feraru has an intense relationship with his instrument, the Eastern European cimbalom, would be an understatement.
"The first love for me is not my wife, it is this instrument," says Feraru, 63, sitting before his beloved cimbalom, which is similar to a hammer dulcimer, with "sticks" or mallets used to strike strings.
"I (tell) my wife: 'You are my wife, but, actually, this instrument is my wife. Because everywhere I traveled around the world, I took this instrument like it's my heart."
Feraru may be exaggerating a bit for effect, but there's no question that he has devoted his life to the cimbalom and has suffered greatly for his art. As a child in Romania, he routinely heard the cimbalom referred to as "a garbage instrument" because of its deep association with Gypsies. The increasingly harsh discrimination that he and his Gypsy family suffered prompted him to seek political asylum in the United States in the late 1980s.
Despite his travails, however, Feraru long ago emerged as one of the world's great cimbalom virtuosos, which helps explain why last month he was named a winner of his adopted country's highest honor for folk arts, the National Endowment for the Arts' National Heritage Fellowship. The award, which will be presented in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 25, comes with $25,000, though that doesn't seem to be its greatest appeal to Feraru.
"It's a lot of money–I never got $25,000 in my life," says Feraru, in his Chicago apartment. "But even if they not give me money, to give me lifetime honor is something fantastic, because they (are saying) it makes no difference between you, (an) American, and me, a gypsy from Romania.
"They say everyone is the same."
That was not the case in Romania, where throughout Feraru's years there–and long before–Gypsies had been regarded as an underclass or worse, he says. Even so, he was determined to take up an instrument that practically epitomizes Gypsy culture and gives voice to its vast repertoire of songs.
This music courses through Feraru's bloodline, his grandfather and father having been esteemed players, as well. But they knew the rigors involved in playing the cimbalom, and Feraru's father urged the boy not to heed its call.
"He would play three days, three nights on a (single) wedding, he must go seven, eight miles, walking and playing on the street," says Feraru, his father playing a smaller-sized cimbalom that hung around the neck for such roving engagements.
"When he come home, he was almost dead. He said, 'You not learn this.'"
But Feraru was seduced by the haunting tintinnabulation of the instrument, its sound ethereal and mysterious, its practitioners' mallets moving so quickly as to disappear in a blur. Moreover, like a piano, the cimbalom easily can accommodate a broad range of music, "classical, cafe, jazz, folk, all of it," says Feraru.
After begging for lessons that his father gave him starting at age 6, Feraru at 15 began studying cimbalom with one of Romania's eminent players, Mitica Marinescu-Ciuciu. By 18, Feraru was a pro, thriving in restaurants and theaters and eventually touring the world.
11 July 2013
BUCHAREST, Romania (AP)—Guards slammed doors on prisoners' fingers, beat them on the soles of their feet and burned them with cigarettes. They served rotten meat and forced inmates to eat excrement as punishment. In extremes of heat and cold, they made their victims haul crushing loads until they collapsed.
After decades of denial, chilling details are emerging about the torment guards inflicted upon political prisoners in Romanian communist-era gulags, as part of a first small step toward holding them to account. The names of 35 guards—now in their 80s or 90s—are to be handed to authorities starting next week for possible prosecution by a government institution tasked with investigating communist-era crimes, The Associated Press has learned.
The perpetrators of communist-era crimes have long been shielded by Romania's establishment, whose ranks are filled with members of the former Securitate secret police. But the movement to expose Romanian gulag guards has a powerful champion in the Liberal Party, which is now part of the governing coalition. Members of the party were targeted by the Communists in their crackdown on all perceived dissent after it came to power in 1946.
Of Romania's 617,000 political prisoners, 120,000 died in the gulags. The inmates included politicians, priests, peasants, writers, diplomats and children as young as 11. Most survivors died before seeing any chance of justice.
Those still alive—about 2,800 in all—now see a glimmer of hope as the Institute for Investigating the Crimes of Communism and the Memory of the Romanian Exile begins probing allegations against the 35 guards on the list, as well as other communist-era crimes.
The institute was founded by Liberal Prime Minister Calin Popescu Tariceanu in 2006. It's only since the party returned to government as a junior coalition partner last year that the institute has begun probing crimes committed in the 1950s and '60s—the darkest period of Romanian communism—aided by a Liberal-led interior ministry that has provided names and addresses. Like other former Warsaw Pact countries, Romania got rid of its top level communists during the 1989 revolution, but less than a handful were punished after former Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, were executed.
The institute's executive director says that has to change.
"Those who produced so much suffering and terror have to pay and even if they are 80 and 90," said Andrei Muraru. "They are not absolved of responsibility."
In the gulags, inmates frequently starved to death; many also died from lack of medical care. Punishments included eating excrement, long stretches of solitary confinement and carrying heavy weights to the point of collapse.
"It would be good for the ones who are alive to go on trial, so history will mark them down as criminals," said Caius Mutiu, 79, a former detainee who testified to the institute.
Mutiu spent eight years in five prisons for taking part in a protest supporting the 1956 anti-Soviet uprising in Hungary. He said that a guard once threatened to shoot him after he collapsed from hard labor. He spent two weeks in isolation, sleeping on a damp, concrete floor. The diet was cabbage, potatoes and barley soup.
"I counted 14 grains of barley, it was basically hot water," he recalls. He saw people die of starvation. "Their bodies swelled up before they died."
Former detainee Emilian Mihailescu, an architect, said a Romanian diplomat in his cell died when a boil on his neck became infected. "Medicine didn't really exist," he said.
One of the Romanian prison guards who will be publicly named this month is Ion Ficior, dubbed by inmates "a human beast."
"Ficior beat us every day with a wooden stick," said former prisoner Ianos Mokar, adding that the guard terrorized inmates by "jumping over us on his white mare."
In an interview with the AP, an unrepentant Ficior denied he had beaten anyone. The 85-year-old said he tried to ensure that inmates got full rations by ordering kitchen workers to get the most out of potatoes by peeling as thinly as possible.
He claims all the political prisoners under his command at the Periprava labor camp were militiamen known as Legionnaires who supported the Nazis during World War II. Historians say most prisoners were simply people who had fallen afoul of the Communist regime.
They "deserved to stay in prison to feel what their crimes were like," Ficior said. "Crimes against innocent people shot in the streets—that's what the Legionnaires did with the Jews."
He said the responsibility for the political prison system lay with Romania's Communist leaders. "The great blame lies with those who gave the orders," he said. "They are to blame."
Marius Oprea, the first head of the institute, says Romania has been reluctant to deal with its past because so many members of the old guard have remained in power since 1989.
"Do you think Romania's leaders want to punish their parents?" he told AP. "The Communist Party may no longer exist, but we still have Communists. The Securitate may be dead, but we still have former Securitate agents."
The Borca family, from Breb, applied the finishing touches to one of the 40 haystacks they make each summer. Rena Effendi/National Geographic
28 June 2013
When Rena Effendi went to Transylvania to photograph hay for National Geographic, she envisioned a fairy tale, someplace almost medieval. But when she arrived in the Gyimes valley, she was disappointed. The scenery had been spoiled, she thought, by modern architecture.
"I was greedy," Ms. Effendi said. "I wanted to find the real, bucolic, medieval type of scenery, and I couldn't find it there."
So she consulted an expert.
"I Googled two words: 'Transylvania' and 'hay,' " she said this week in a phone interview from her Cairo home.
Among the first results was Maramures, a Romanian-speaking region where one can find distilleries and mills more than 500 years old. Ms. Effendi, 36, sought advice from Kathleen McLaughlin, a photographer who had previously been there.
When Ms. Effendi arrived, she fell in love with the "Romanian Transylvanian fairy tale" she discovered.
"I found villages where almost all women know how to do embroidery and almost every man knows how to build a house from scratch," she said.
She stayed with a family of musicians in Hoteni, a village of about 800 people. She slept in a wooden house set in a meadow and ate simple meals prepared with fresh produce from an orchard and a small vegetable garden. During two trips, Ms. Effendi spent about two months in the fields, photographing the hay-making process, which begins around 5 a.m. on dry summer days.
"People spend the day in the field," she said. "They take their food, they take naps. You see these women climbing on top of the haystack in special trousers so the wind doesn't blow up their skirts."
Life moves slowly in the villages of Maramures, all of which are nestled alongside streams. It revolves around hay, which is used to feed the cows that produce the milk that ends up on the table. During hay season, the farmers work by hand, moving at a frantic pace. One couple, Gheorghe and Anuta Borca, told Ms. Effendi their honeymoon had been cut short by hay. "They had to start working straight after the wedding," she said. (They hadn't gone far, honeymooning in their village.)
One of Ms. Effendi's pictures shows three generations of the Borca family at work (Slide 8). "For them, it's a way a life," she said.
Ms. Effendi asked one family why they kept doing what they do, when they could simply go to a market. "They said, 'Well, what are we going to do with all this land, then?' " she recalled. " 'It's just going to sit there?' "
A farmer in Breb told Adam Nicolson, writing for the July 2013 issue of National Geographic, that houses there had cost six haystacks in Communist times.
"Hay is gold," Ms. Effendi said.
It is also an art: "You can even guess who the owner is by the shape of a haystack," she said. "They have their individual styles and forms."
But, while Maramures still has the look of a fairy tale, it is on the verge of vanishing.
"You see it in the clothes people wear," Ms. Effendi said. "You see small signs of this beautiful agrarian culture fading away." It shows in the architecture—old people live in old homes, while many young families live in cement houses with bathrooms and television. More and more young people are enchanted by European cities.
"Transylvania is not yet a fossil," Mr. Nicolson wrote in the magazine. "It is still alive—just—if in need of life support. But it represents one of the great questions for the future: Can the modern world sustain beauty it hasn't created itself?"
Ms. Effendi didn't want to use the juxtaposition of old and new to tell the story of Maramures, though. "I wanted to pay homage to the fairy tale," she said. "I wanted to show the purity of the landscape and the people living there."
She recalled a day she spent with a shepherd, who took her to the tent in the mountains where he spent most of his time, grazing sheep. In the past, women had left him because he was always away. But without a wife, he couldn't have a family to help him support a flock of his own.
"You know what?" he told Ms. Effendi. "If you ask me, 'What would you choose today, women or sheep?' I'd still choose sheep.' "
One woman she photographed, Maria, 23, was pregnant and working in the field when they met (Slide 7). She spoke more English than most villagers and told Ms. Effendi that she and her husband had spent a year in France, where he worked in construction. But she missed their home in the fields, which was made of cement and had a bathroom, and they returned.
In Maramures, Maria told Ms. Effendi, she has room for activity of the mind. People in France were preoccupied with the daily distractions of urban life, and they didn't have any room left for "beautiful thoughts."
Ms. Effendi cannot see herself adopting the Transylvanian lifestyle. "But escaping into that world for some periods of time is wonderful," she said. "It's replenishing."
Follow @rena_effendi, @kerrimac and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook.
See more photos at the original article's website
Photo Source: mypreciousconfessions.blogspot.com
21 June 2013
"Four days
will quickly steep themselves in nights; Four nights will quickly
dream away the time; And then the moon, like to a silver bow new
bent in heaven, shall behold the night of our solemnities."
The summer has come and we're getting closer and closer to the midsummer night. When I think about the midsummer I remember the Nordic pagan traditions which celebrate the summer solstice and the fascination on the folk tales. But, when I fall into the magic of the midsummer night, I often remember what Shakespeare wrote in his romantic comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream:
But, beyond all these I think about a very similar celebration in the Romanian tradition – the Sânziene night, on June 24.
The Sânziene is the Romanian folklore name for gentle fairies, and at the same time, the singular of the word Sânziana, is the name of a flower, but also a girl's name. What is very interesting as etymology is the fact as the word is stands from San which is the common abbreviation of Saint and Zana as the usually word for fairies. Another potential interpretation of the word is the Latin Sancta Diana, the Roman goddess of hunt and moon, the guardian angel of virgins and women and which was annually celebrated in the Roman Empire region, Dacia.
Sânziene rituals have been known for ages on the present Romanian territory implying that beautiful maidens in the white traditional dresses who pick Sânziene flowers (Lady's bedstraw, Yellow bedstraw, Galium verum) all day long on the eve of this celebration and make floral crowns. After the nightfall, the maidens wearing the braided floral crowns meet with their lovers and dance in the midnight around the bonfire. According to the folk tradition, then they throw the floral crowns over the houses and wherever they fall, it means that someone will die in that house. However, if the crown made of flowers stays on the roof of the house, then good harvest and wealth will be bestowed upon the owners. As with other bonfire celebrations, jumping over the embers after the bonfire is not raging anymore is done to purify the person and also to bring health.
Another folk belief is that during the Sânziene Eve night, the heavens open up, which makes it the strongest night for magic spells, especially for the love spells. Also it is said that the plants harvested during this night will have tremendous magical powers. The tradition says that the Sânziene fairies don't like to be heard and seen by men in the Eve night, especially when they dance in the air, blessing the bodies and bestowing health for people. So, whoever (man) sees or hears them will be maimed or the fairies will take their hearing and speaking or worse, make them mad.
On the Sânziene night, in some areas of the country, people light a big wheel of hay from the ceremonial bonfire and push it down a hill, as a symbol for the setting sun, from the solstice to come and until the midwinter solstice when the days will be getting shorter.
On the same night, when the heavens are said to be opening, strange events, positive or negative may happen, and it is believed that in forests many weird things happen in the midsummer night.
All these folk traditions related to the Sânzine night fascinated not only the common people but Romanian writers and poets.
One of the best known novels based on the Sânzine night fairy tales is The Forbidden Forest written by Mircea Eliade (historian of religion, fiction writer, philosopher, and professor at the University of Chicago, 1907-1986), where he describes paranormal events which happen in the Baneasa forest in the north of Bucharest during that night.
A Romanian novel with symbolical references to these beautiful and fascinating women is Camil Petrescu's Jocul ielelor (The Iele's play). In the Romanian mythology the "iele" are supernatural women who usually dance in the forests and other hidden places during the night and having – in many respects – similar features with Sânzienele, including their effect over men.
The Sânziene night celebration is similar to the Nordic midsummer holiday tradition of the pagan celebration of the summer solstice in June, but in Romania June 24 is a double celebration, on one hand the folk tradition of Sânziene and on the other, the Orthodox Church celebration of Saint John, who baptized Christ.
Mariana Ganea holds a PhD in Economics and she has been working in banking since 1991. Now, she is senior training consultant in banking and she is also freelancer authorized trainer in soft skills and financial banking techniques. She studied banking techniques, communication, sales, NPL, coaching and transactional analysis. She is passionate about education, travel, history, politics, music, reading, movies, cultural events and photography.
On this day...
20 June 2013
After Romania's dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was overthrown in 1989, the world learned of the shocking conditions in which many children lived in the country's orphanages. More than 20 years later, those children are adults—and for some of them at least, life is far, far better than it was.
To arrive in Siret is to arrive at world's end.
The train from Bucharest—clatter-boom, clatter-boom, through the night—goes only as far as Suceava. An historic city mauled by the communists.
Immediately after the revolution of 1989 I travelled from here to Siret in an elusive taxi.
Now Catalin—with his own car hire firm and a canary yellow cap—waits for me at the station, ostentatiously dusting down his Vauxhall Astra.
The drive, hurtling between cabbages and corn, horses with their carts and a pink sky that crashes into the Moldavian plains, is a reminder of how far you have come from the dusty fug of Bucharest's Gara de Nord.
Siret was a quiet border town, spitting distance from the vast expanse of the USSR.
Change came abruptly in 1990, when its secret was exposed on an international stage. In a four-storey former Austrian army barracks, Romania hid its largest gulag for abandoned and disabled children, far away from the capital.
Communists did not cope well with imperfection.
In came the foreign do-gooders. The broken orphans learned to cry and Siret's entrepreneurs sourced German beer for their prestigious newcomers.
Some charities lasted the course—others moved on with the rolling tide of news but amidst the global opprobrium Siret and many of its abandoned young stayed put.
They are adults now. Few were adopted—it turns out Westerners do not cope well with imperfection either.
Eventually the barracks was abandoned.
The 100-plus adults unable to live independently were moved to another austere stone building—smaller this time with wire-nettings and landings overlooking a concrete court yard.
Dribs and drabs of foreign money have paid for new sheltered accommodation for the lucky few.
But more than 20 years after the revolution the most vulnerable adults still rock back and forth in a building that resembles a human hen coop.
When they saw us the young adults ran over, euphoric, anticipating attention, touching the camera, hugging me and the other visitors, keen for a small shard of love.
A reminder of what it used to be like when the foreigners came to play.
Two decades on and the familiar smell of sweat and wet stone walls has not gone away, nor the disturbing noises of those unable to express themselves.
But there is a key difference between now and then.
He is called Tibi Rotaru—a man with his clear kind blue eyes and a crumpled shirt. He was there to meet me.
A local lad of just 17 when the first wave of foreigners came, Tibi was roped in as a translator.
The volunteers had found their first and most-important ally.
He went on to Bucharest then Germany and Holland to study psychology, before eventually moving back to Siret and taking over responsibility for the orphans.
It is this unassuming man who has turned a small community once scarred by a legacy of child abuse into an oasis of tolerance.
The young adults now wander freely about the town, they sweep the church steps, cadge cigarettes and laugh with the locals.
You can spot the ones from the hospital, they are smaller than everyone else, even the able-bodied are hunched—despite their tender years they have haggard faces and their stumbling gait gives away the horror story that was their childhood.
Tibi shakes his head. "Their lives were stolen from them, and still they don't have what they need," he says.
His young adults, and make no mistake they are his—to watch him with them is to watch a father with an unruly loving brood—now have a bright shiny new home to move into.
The undignified rows of beds will at last be history.
"Of course," Tibi reminds us, "this building has been ready for over a year, sitting empty".
He knowingly points to the crow's feet in the corners of his eyes.
"I have travelled fortnightly to Bucharest in the hope of meeting a minister.
"A lot of funds have been spent on this project, but they couldn't find the money for a boiler."
He laughs: "How can I move the young people with no heating?"
But Tibi has the patience of a man born into a system he knows he must work with, not against.
Siret's young adults have now been told their new house will finally have heating and hot water.
In a town where the winter temperature drops -30C (-22F) Tibi has once again proved that dreams can come true—so long as you are prepared to wait 23 years.
Construction workers put some finishing touches on a new bridge spanning the Danube between Bulgaria and Romania. Boryana Katsarova for The International Herald Tribune
14 June 2013
VIDIN, Bulgaria—The European Union hardly basks in popular favor these days. But in this isolated corner of the bloc's poorest periphery, leaders and locals on Friday celebrated a tangible benefit of membership—a $340 million bridge spanning the Danube that should help strengthen trade and ties between two impoverished members, Romania and Bulgaria.
Despite much history and present poverty in common, these two Balkan nations had to be prodded into negotiating the construction of the bridge, which began in 2007. Both prime ministers and the European Union's commissioner for regional policy, Johannes Hahn, attended the opening ceremony, where Plamen Oresharski, the head of Bulgaria's new government, joked: "I am sorry that this bridge has such a long history. We heard that the Romans built faster."
Romania, population roughly 22 million, and Bulgaria, about 7 million, share a 290-mile border along the Danube that, until Friday, had just one bridge connecting them.
Under Communism, neither country was rich, but the collapse of their state-run economies deepened the impoverishment on both sides of the river and hastened depopulation. Vidin, which in bygone Ottoman days was a thriving river port, shipping agricultural produce along the Danube, has suffered the worst depopulation in Bulgaria, losing 16 percent of its residents in 2012 alone.
Across the river, the Romanian town of Calafat, population 18,000, has fared little better. Its central pedestrian street, recently fitted with new paving stones, remains sleepy.
Yet it took until 2000 for European officials to coax the two very different Balkan nations into talking about the bridge, largely because they could not agree on a location for it.
Romanians speak a language they prize as descended from Latin roots; Bulgarians are Slavs and in Communist times were derided as being so close to Moscow as to be the virtual 16th republic of the Soviet Union. Each country adheres to its own Orthodox church, and for decades were simply disinterested in each other.
Their shared status in European development post-cold war has gradually brought them closer, as they have discovered more in common.
Both joined NATO in 2004, and the European Union in 2007. European Union officials have since criticized both nations, the bloc's poorest members, for corruption and organized crime—some of which originated in the Vidin region in the 1990s, when criminals helped smuggle oil and other goods into neighboring Serbia, which was under United Nations sanctions for its role in the Balkan wars that broke up the former Yugoslavia.
"The illusions we created about what enemies the Romanians are and how different they are have disappeared into dust," Gergo Gergov, the 35-year-old mayor of Vidin, said in an interview in the 15-story, Communist-era municipal building, by far Vidin's tallest.
"We have stopped acting like we are locked up alone," Mr. Gergov observed. "We have seen that there are other people around and have started to get to know them, to interact, trade, travel and work with each other."
The bridge, he said, is "the biggest event in the modern history of the region."
Vidin—which has a population of 63,000, down from 90,000 during the Communist era—could use the help. Its center, replete with decaying architecture from 19th-century glory days, offers some exotic sights for visitors who disembark every summer day from luxurious Danube cruise ships. A balmy river breeze spreads the sweet smell of linden through the city. But Vidin remains the poorest city and region in Bulgaria, the European Union's poorest member state with average monthly wages of 400 euros, or about $574.
The common market offered by European Union membership has catalyzed trade and business: trade between Bulgaria and Romania totaled 3.5 billion euros, or about $5 billion, in 2011, up from 900 million euros in 2005, about $1.09 billion at the time.
Ovidiu Cernatescu, 45, a Romanian from Craiova who started a metal construction business in Vidin two years ago and sells 90 percent of his product in Romania, is confident of further expansion and relishes the protection offered by European Union trade rules rather than capriciously applied local justice. "I've been waiting for the bridge like the coming of Jesus Christ," he said.
Ten years ago, Mr. Cernatescu said, Romanians had heard only negative news about Bulgaria as a country where former Communists still held sway. Now, Romanians enjoy it as a cheaper, nice place to visit and trade, he said.
Bulgarian businesspeople in the region like Kostas Grivov, who employs 100 workers in two factories processing nuts and dried fruit, are expecting a short-term boom in tourism, shopping and investment.
Mr. Grivov, who is also Romania's honorary consul in Vidin, said the bridge would halve his transport costs and greatly increase the speed and reliability of supplies and deliveries. The sole way to Romania had been an unreliable ferry that crosses only when it fills with cars.
In Calafat, the deputy mayor, Dorel Mituletu, sits in a restored late-19th century mansion that might be the envy of his Vidin counterparts. He welcomed the bridge, but said he feared merchants in his town would lose out to Vidin, where prices are 20 to 25 percent lower.
He also voiced concern about what he saw as difficult and complex procedures required to secure European Union financing for local projects—processes that have become stricter because of concerns about corruption and mismanagement.
"Romanians are not accustomed to begging," he said. "Despite what the rest of Europe might think of us."
14 June 2013
A long-awaited new road and railway bridge across the River Danube is opening with great ceremony between Vidin, Bulgaria, and Calafat, Romania.
At 1,791m (5,876ft), arching 43m above the water, it is one of the longest on the Danube, and only the fourth on the lower reaches of the river.
Bulgarians hope it will revitalise the neglected north-west of their country.
Romanians fear losing precious road usage tolls from lorries on old routes close to their capital Bucharest.
The new structure adds to existing bridges at Cernavoda, between Ruse and Giurgiu, and between Vadu Oii and Harsova.
For the European Commission, which provided the lion's share of funding, the new bridge is a significant piece in the jigsaw puzzle of "transport corridors" designed to stimulate growth and opportunity across an open continent.
Short cut
Ilia Iordanov, whose office is on the main road out of Vidin, has a fleet of 70 lorries, 16 Danube freight ships and four barges in his company, Fanty-G Transport.
"Crossing this bridge," he explained, "will take 500km off the route for lorries from south-east Europe and the Middle East to Western Europe."
Most importantly, he said, it will help the closer integration of rail, road, and river transport - one of the key EU objectives.
"I believe it will also encourage Macedonia and Serbia to lower their road tolls," he added.
At the moment on the old "diesel road" through the Balkans - the shortest of the options for freight from the Port of Piraeus - lorries wait for days crossing out of the EU from Greece into Macedonia, and several more days crossing back into it from Serbia to Hungary.
"So much of the cost of goods lies in the transport," Mr Iordanov said.
"I'm deeply convinced that some of the new wealth travelling past Vidin will stay here, and bring investment to the area."
He waxed lyrical about the local soil, the excellence of vegetables and fruit grown here in communist times and how the bridge would re-connect north-west Bulgaria to markets far and wide.
New business
In the bus station in Vidin, Krassimira Senova shared his enthusiasm.
Her Eurotouring company has promised its customers that the first coach on their new Vidin to Craiova route will roll over the bridge at dawn on Saturday.
Only 84km away, many Bulgarian students go to university in Craiova but until now they faced the dilemma of either an expensive ferry crossing or a huge detour, to cross the old Friendship Bridge at Ruse, then double back.
"Students will be able to get to school in little more than an hour, instead of half a day," Ms Senova said.
She was also planning new routes to Timisoara and tourist excursions to Dracula's castle in Bran.
In a part of Bulgaria where everyone counts their stotinky - the smallest unit of the leva currency - she calculated that the bridge would enable her to cut between 50 euros (£42; $67) and 100 off the price of a week's excursion per person, whether to Transylvania, or to Paris.
In the carpentry workshop he shares with his mother and father inside the Ottoman-era fortress of Baba Vida in Vidin, Ognian Evgeniev explained that taking a lorryload of his chipboard furniture to Craiova cost 350 euros before the bridge was built.
Now it will be barely more than the diesel cost for the 180km round route.
His parents Veni and Iliana make beechwood childrens' swings, cots and toys. Veni gave up his job as a television repairman ten years ago, when he saw a niche for himself in the children's toy market in Bulgaria. Now he hopes for the same success in Romania.
Sitting at a cafe, close to the pretty Danube shoreline in Vidin, with its ice-cream stalls and fish restaurants, the head of the chamber of commerce, Krassimir Kirilov, sounded a note of caution.
"It's twenty years since many people in this region had a job," he said.
"Many young people have left the area. We are not yet in a position to offer investors a skilled workforce."
He saw the best chance in turning Vidin into a transport hub. Transformed from a backwater into a road, rail and river crossroads, it could become a centre for spare parts from all over Europe, he suggested.
On the edge of town, an old industrial estate stands gaunt and empty, offering unlimited space to would-be investors.
"I don't think we should pretend that this is the missing link of a well-structured, ready-built network," said Shirin Wheeler, spokeswoman for regional development at the European Commission.
"There isn't one motorway, for example, that links Romania and Bulgaria at the moment. But it will provide a real impetus."
The main living room in the "Green House," in the village of Copsa Mare, Romania. It was the first property bought by Giovanna and Paolo Bassetti in the village.
13 June 2013
COPSA MARE, Romania—Transylvania, with its dense forests and green hills at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains, is for only the boldest of house hunters.
There are properties for sale, but sometimes they are not easy to locate. Land records can be difficult to check. It is hard to find skilled laborers for restorations. And some remote villages in this historic area in central Romania are only accessible by sport utility vehicle.
Giovanna and Paolo Bassetti say they destroyed two Land Rovers in their yearlong search for just the right property. But after visiting around 30 villages, in 2005 they finally found what they were looking for in this peaceful hamlet, which is dominated by a 14th-century fortified church and stands at the edge of a vast forest on the Tarnava Plateau.
The Bassettis paid the state the equivalent of €20,000, or what is today $26,000, for a farmhouse built around 1850. The purchase also cost an additional €6,000 for lawyers' fees and administrative and legal charges.
The building was "rotten and collapsing," Ms. Bassetti said, and renovations of what they now call the Green House took a year.
While Mr. Bassetti was doing business in Bucharest, Ms. Bassetti returned to the work site once a week to supervise the local crews. As Ms. Bassetti is an environmental consultant, she ensured that traditional but ecologically suitable materials were used.
The €200,000 renovation created a total of 450 square meters, or 4,844 square feet, of living space. The house and barn were merged, and some of the interior rooms were combined into bright, open areas. The stable, a freestanding building, became the two children's bedrooms.
From the street, the house has a traditional Saxon appearance: walls built of stone and red brick and a roof of red tile; chalk and sand were used instead of concrete where possible.
The common spaces and the compound's total of five bedrooms and four bathrooms kept much of their original features, like exposed oak beams. The rest was refurbished in pastel colors and with rustic furnishings. "We have lived in many places and houses and always liked to be surrounded by nice things," Ms. Bassetti said by e-mail. "I love harmony in spaces, light, nature and objects."
The project turned out so well and the allure of preserving an old home proved to be so strong that, over the years, the couple have bought nine other houses in the village.
Three of the structures have been refurbished as guesthouses, using many of the same local workers. But, Ms. Bassetti noted, she became more experienced and was able to have the work done for €80,000 to €140,000 per house. (Real estate and major expenses usually are priced in euros rather than lei, the local currency, even though the government acknowledged in April that it does not have a target date to adopt the euro.)
Now the Bassettis are based in Brazil and the children are older. But Ms. Bassetti returns to Transylvania a couple of times a year to check the guesthouses and supervise continuing repairs, and the family comes for a two-week vacation. The rest of the time their house and the three refurbished homes are rented to tourists, whose vacation spending has joined agriculture as an economic engine for the region.
Ms. Bassetti has the rest of the houses up for sale, but only to buyers who promise to renovate them in a traditional manner. (She is willing to manage the work for a fee, and then rent the completed residence as part of her guesthouse group.)
One of the properties is the "Red House," named for its salmon exterior. Built in 1789, as a carving in the original wooden beams shows, it has been restored completely. It has two bedrooms and bathrooms within 140 square meters, with a 2,000-square-meter garden. Official permission is being sought to permit reconstruction of the barn, which with €150,000 to €180,000 in renovations would add a living and kitchen area and two bedrooms to the structure.
Some people think of Transylvania as a place out of time. Part of Austria-Hungary until the end of World War I, its current population of about 6.5 million is mostly made up of Romanians, Saxons and ethnic Hungarians.
The mix of languages is upheld by local law, with minority populations of a certain size guaranteed that their languages will be presented alongside the official Romanian. For example, in Miclosoara, west of Brasov, the main street is labeled Strada Principala, which is Romanian, as well as Fo Utca, which is Hungarian.
The linguistic split has resonance with Count Tibor Kalnoky, who was born in Germany and raised in France after his family fled the village in the early 20th century.
In 1997 he began restoring the two dozen buildings on his family's estate here. "This has been my life ever since," the count said, speaking in Hungarian. "Battles, problem solving and constantly untangling situations."
His most well-known achievement has been in a small village nearby, at the end of a bumpy country road—a place called Valea Zalanului in Romanian and Zalanpatak in Hungarian.
There, starting in 2008, the count began restoration of three wooden cottages and a stable that Prince Charles of Britain bought that year as a nature retreat.
The prince, who is an outspoken supporter of environmental causes and the protection of cultural heritage, has been coming to the spot for about a week each year, most recently this month. The rest of the time the count rents the cottages to tourists, and the income is used to finance additional restoration. (Renovations still are being completed on one of the houses.)
Each of the painted wooden cottages, which are about 200 years old, have sitting areas, bedrooms and bathrooms; the prince's own cottage has three bedrooms with en suite baths. The stable, made of brick and stone, now houses a central living and dining room and a communal kitchen.
The count, echoing Ms. Bassetti, said it was difficult to find the right workmen for the project. For example, many local builders now use windows framed in plastic or metal rather than the traditional wooden ones, and concrete rather than red brick and stone. But over the years, he has gathered a group. "They always tell me that I am their eyes and they are my hands," he said.
Despite the complications, the count says he has enjoyed the work. And "it would be good if more foreigners showed interest" in properties in the region, he added — as long as the influx did not push up prices so severely that locals could no longer afford to live in their own communities.
7 June 2013
Writer and analyst Stelian Tanase, president of the "Orient Expres" Foundation, makes a portrait of Queen Marie:
"She was coming from England, she was half British, half Russian, with such great forerunners as the Czar and Queen Victoria. And here she comes, in the middle of nowhere, so to say, in a world that was completely unknown to her and that she didn't understand. But even so, from the very beginning we see the signs of what Queen Marie was to become."
Marie Alexandra Victoria, chosen at the age of 17 to be the future Queen of Romania, was born on October 29th, 1875, in Eastwell Park, the daughter of Prince Alfred, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, and of Duchess Maria Alexandrovna of Russia. Marie got married to Ferdinand of Hohenzollern, crown prince of Romania, on December 29th, 1892, and the two were crowned in 1914. Here is Dinu Zamfirescu, president of the Institute for the Investigation of the Crimes of Communism:
"This young woman who came to a country she knew nothing about, managed to earn everybody's respect, thanks to her powerful personality. She played a great part in persuading her husband, King Ferdinand, to be on the side of the Allies in World War I, somehow against the wishes of the late King Carol I, who had made an alliance with the Central Powers."
Queen Marie was dubbed "Mother of the Wounded" and "Mother of Soldiers" thanks to her active role during WWI, when she could be seen both on the front line and in hospitals, to ease the suffering of soldiers. Here is Dinu Zamfirescu again:
"We should also remember the important part she played in the Peace Conference in Versailles in 1919, and how she pleaded the cause of Romania in the USA, whose president, Woodrow Wilson, was not necessarily a friend of Romania."
Talking about that period, historian Ion Bulei explains:
"Marie is the one who talked to Clemenceau, the one who represented France at the Peace Conference in Versailles. Clemenceau said: 'I'll take my hat off to the Romanian people, but not before the Romanian politicians,' but Marie replied: 'How little you know us, Mr. Clemenceau!' Marie was also the one who arranged a meeting between the then Prime Minister of Romania, Ionel Bratianu, and Wilson, and in that meeting she was also their translator, because Wilson did not speak French and Bratianu could not say a word in English. At that time, in Paris, Marie played a key role for Romania."
In addition, Queen Marie was involved in the cultural-artistic life of Romania. She was particularly attached to two places, on which she left her unique mark and of which she used to say, "Balcic and Bran are my dream homes, they are my heart."
She is said to have discovered Balcic, a small town on the north-eastern Bulgarian border thanks to painter Alexandru Satmari (1872-1933) who convinced the queen to visit the place in 1924. One year later, she began the building of the property in Balcic. Historian Ion Bulei explains:
"Balcic is more than a residence built by Queen Marie. There's also a church there, called Stella Maris, where her heart is buried. She also built a cactus garden there, which is still the biggest of its kind in Europe. She basically developed that town. She saw in it what the painters saw, a town where light can change every two hours, something they captured in their canvases."
The town hall allotted land to the artists who used to come to Balcic every summer to paint, artists who started building houses there.
Queen Marie was a fascinating person, with her own individual lifestyle, as can be seen in Balcic. She collected and even created art works and would decorate the interiors and exteriors of her dwellings, being one of the promoters of the Art Nouveau style.
In 1933, when drafting her will, Queen Marie expressed her wish that, after her death, her heart be laid to rest in the small chapel, Stella Maris, that she had built on the Black Sea Coast, and her body be entombed in Curtea de Arges, next to her husband, Ferdinand, and the other members of the royal family. The chest carrying Queen Marie's heart is now in the custody of the National History Museum, in Bucharest. Fully understanding her role and mission during those times, when she stood out as a Queen deeply involved in promoting Romania, Queen Marie wrote her memoirs between 1914 and 1936. Written in English, they were published between 1934 and 1936, under the title of "The Story of My Life". The book was later translated into Romanian.
Queen Marie's ardent wish to win the respect of her people emerges from the book. Marie wanted to be loved and she was loved indeed. Ion Bulei has further details:
Marie's words in her will: 'It is not for me to judge you, I've loved you' disclose much of her feelings, of a caring person which made her become a Romanian by heart."
Queen Marie's biography also mentions a gesture rounding off her unique personality: on March 26th 1926, on Annunciation day, Queen Marie converted to Orthodoxy. Queen Marie did more for the Romanian people than hundreds of diplomats, ministers and presidents.
6 June 2013
BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP)—The mighty Danube is not the only river in Europe bursting its banks this week, but it packs the biggest punch.
Winding 2,850 kilometers (1,777 miles) across 10 nations, the Danube is the second-longest river on the continent, making its way from Germany's Black Forest to the Black Sea bordering Romania and Ukraine. Only the Volga in Russia is longer.
In the last decade alone, the Danube has been at the center of two major floods, several devastating droughts and a winter cold snap that froze the vital waterway for hundreds of miles. Its bridges have been bombed by NATO, its waters have been temporarily poisoned by toxic chemical spills, and yet it still provides drinking water for millions.
Immortalized by Johann Strauss in his "Blue Danube" waltz, the river is closer now to a murky green. From fishermen in prehistoric times to modern industries, many have harnessed its power for energy and transport, while derivatives of its present name go back to Celtic, Roman and Thracian times. It has inspired works by musicians as diverse as classical composer Richard Wagner, American satirists Spike Jones and his City Slickers and even the German industrial metal band Rammstein.
This week, however, the Danube is in its bad-boy mode.
The river reached heights not seen in over 500 years in the German city of Passau before surging downstream to crash through a levee in the southern village of Deggendorf. Dozens of village residents had to be airlifted to safety Wednesday by helicopters. On Thursday, the river smashed through another levee, engulfing entire neighborhoods in the same village.
"We would have risked our lives had we stayed at home," Deggendorf resident Hans Loefflmann said, adding that he and his wife had to leave all their valuables behind when the floods gushed into their house within minutes.
Those living in Passau, meanwhile, were glum, facing football fields of mud, uprooted trees, demolished cars and flood-wracked furnishings to clear away.
At least 16 people have died in the flooding of the Danube and Elbe rivers in central Europe this week and at least four others are missing. Tens of thousands of people have been evacuated in the region, including over 700 in the eastern German city of Dresden, where the Elbe crested Thursday at 7 meters (21 feet) above normal levels.
For residents of Budapest, the Danube River is a source of pride and wonder, its waters providing an imposing setting for the city it divides in two—Buda on the right bank and Pest on the left. But now the Hungarian capital is now in a state of emergency, bracing for the river's raging floodwaters, which have already caused havoc upriver in Germany and Austria.
The Danube is normally around 370 meters (400 yards) wide as it passes the city's imposing Hungarian parliament building. Now its waters are lapping at the back steps of the neo-Gothic structure and cover large sections of the heavily used roads on both sides of the river.
Authorities are confident that the Budapest embankments, which date to the 1870s, will withstand the Danube's current assault, expected to peak here on Monday. Yet several hundred guests at hotels on low-lying Margaret Island, a popular park in the river, have already been evacuated.
"I had to find another place for my running routine, but at least here in the city the walls on the river are high," said Monika Pele, a physical education student who usually jogs around Margaret Island. "Actually, the Danube is beautiful when it's this wide."
Hungarians are well aware of the destruction the Danube can cause. A flood in 1838 killed more than 150 Budapest residents and left at least 50,000 homeless. Memorial plaques high on city walls, some hundreds of meters (yards) from the river, indicate just high the waters rose.
In the Austrian capital of Vienna, the Danube peaked Wednesday at levels above those of the 2002 floods that devastated Europe. The city's extensive protection system held, however, although the highway to the airport was temporarily inundated.
Floods are not the Danube's only problem.
A severe drought hit the region in 2011, stranding 80 big cargo ships on the Danube at the Serbia-Hungary border and causing sunken German World War II-era ships to break the surface of the water. In Romania that year, the Danube's water levels were so low there was concern about not having enough water to cool the reactors in the nuclear power plant in Cernavoda, which produces 20 percent of the country's electricity.
In 2003, another lengthy dry spell caused by a lack of rainfall and high temperatures lowered the Danube's levels so much that the river had to be dredged in Romania to allow hundreds of stalled barges to pass.
Last year, a deep freeze produced huge ice chunks and froze over hundreds of miles (kilometers) in the Danube, paralyzing the shipping of raw materials, coal, grains and other goods.
Natural disasters have alternated with man-made calamities to threaten the river and those who depend on it.
The 1999 bombing of several bridges over the river in northern Serbia by NATO forces during the Kosovo War paralyzed shipping on the waterway. It was years before the debris was hauled out of the river and navigation fully restored.
In 2000, the Danube suffered a bout of cyanide poisoning, when a spill at a Romanian gold mine flowed into its tributaries. The toxic waste killed off most of the fish and plants along stretches of the Tisza River in Hungary. Although most of its power was diluted by the time it reached the Danube, some measurements showed concentrations of cyanide at 50 times over the maximum levels.
Another spill in 2010 of red toxic sludge—a byproduct of aluminum production at a plant in western Hungary—killed 10 people after flooding three towns and reached the Danube through tributaries. Fortunately, the highly caustic waste was greatly diluted by the Danube's abundant flow.
Now, Hungarian authorities are making sure the red sludge tragedy isn't repeated in the town of Almasfuzito, which sits on the Danube just across from Slovakia and has its own red-waste reservoir.
Zoltan Illes of the ministry of rural development said there would be round-the-clock surveillance at the 74-hectare (184-acre) reservoir until Saturday, when the flood threat is expected to pass.
"Building a red sludge reservoir on the shores of the Danube was a very bad decision made decades ago during the communist regime," Illes said after visiting the site. "Since we don't have a time machine, it's a fact we have to live with."
AP writers Alison Mutler in Bucharest, Romania, George Jahn and Noura Mann in Vienna, David Rising in Berlin and Jovana Gec in Belgrade, Serbia, contributed to this report.
3 June 2013
PARIS—In the last three weeks alone, the French police have dismantled Roma encampments in Saint-Denis, just outside Paris, and along the Var River west of Nice. In Lyon, 200 Roma were temporarily housed in a gymnasium when someone set fire to their squat in a disused factory, killing two women and a 12-year-old.
President François Hollande's Socialist government came into office a year ago promising a better deal for the Roma, also known as Gypsies, an end to the shantytowns and the rehousing and integration of those displaced. But like other promises, including a return to economic growth, reality has been a recalcitrant political partner.
Having criticized the previous center-right government of Nicolas Sarkozy for being careless with individual rights and flirting with the anti-immigrant far right, the Hollande government has done little to change policy toward the Roma. The interior minister, Manuel Valls, who has been praised for his organizational ability and toughness, has expelled at least as many non-French Roma as his predecessor and continues to order the police to dismantle illegal camps and shantytowns, without rehousing most of those displaced.
On Jan. 1, the rules will change, as Romanians and Bulgarians, seven years after entering the European Union, will have the same right to travel and work in member countries as others in the union. But that will not make them more welcome—most illegal Roma immigrants come from those two nations. Fanned by anti-immigrant and nationalist parties of the right and far right all over Europe, the coming change has led to new fears of a large influx of poor workers and criminals seeking to take jobs from citizens and benefit from lavish social welfare systems.
"In principle, things are different in France, but in practice, things are pretty much the same," said Dezideriu Gergely, the executive director of the European Roma Rights Center in Budapest. "We expected a different approach, to reduce social exclusion and economic problems, instead of taking a problem and moving it from one place to another."
The complexity and tragedy of the problem are easily seen here in Paris at the Gare du Nord, one of the busiest transportation hubs in France. Near the third glass door from the left of the older building, young Roma men hover. Small, thin, often wearing bright clothing like green pants or a pink scarf, the men are prostitutes, looking for work or waiting for prearranged rendezvous.
Some are as young as 14, though they insist they are older; some are 16 and married, sometimes with children. They come from a community around Craiova, in south-central Romania. They troll the station to earn a living, which they say gets them about 100 euros a day, or $130.
A young man named Ruset said he was 19 and had left Romania as a child. He and his friends, like Bogdan, 17, and Gutsa, 17, whose wife is pregnant, "do business" at the station, he said; they live in a shantytown in a forest east of Paris, near the Noisy-Champs station on the suburban railway line. None wanted to have their family names used.
"France is terrible for us," Ruset said, watching for the police, whom he called "superracist, hassling us all the time." Echoing many of France's estimated 20,000 noncitizen Roma, he said: "I would like to stay in Romania, but there is no chance to work there. France I liked well at the start, but today things are very hard."
Despite the coming change in the rules, expulsions from France are increasing. In 2012, an election year, 12,841 citizens of Romania and Bulgaria, nearly all of them Roma, were deported from France, compared with 10,841 in 2011, an increase of 18.4 percent; 9,529 were deported in 2010, according to the Interior Ministry.
While the Sarkozy government provided airfare home and 300 euros for every adult and 100 euros for each child to induce a "voluntary" repatriation, the Hollande government called the system perverse and wasteful. But Paris still provides 50 euros per adult and 30 euros per child, Mr. Valls has said, while emphasizing that France is instead financing "80 microprojects" in Romania "to improve living conditions."
Guillaume Lardanchet is the director of Hors la Rue, a Paris-based organization that works with young Roma and other foreign minors in trouble. "Valls reproduces the same security strategy as Sarkozy," he said. "We haven't seen a concrete difference compared with the old government."
Robert A. Kushen, the chairman of the European Roma Rights Center, agreed that Mr. Hollande "has really continued the policies of his predecessor." Under pressure from the European Union, France introduced "some cosmetic changes to the law, but the substance hasn't changed," he said.
Perhaps even odder, he said, the government is pursuing its expulsions even though the rules will soon change. Although Romania and Bulgaria joined the European Union in 2007, special restrictions were put in place requiring their citizens to obtain work permits, and only in certain industries, within three months of visa-free entry or leave France. The Hollande government eliminated a special tax on employers for each person hired, but with France in a triple-dip recession and unemployment high, jobs are scarce.
A recent joint letter to the European Council and European Commission from the interior ministers of Britain, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands asked for new penalties against those who travel across visa-free borders to "abuse" social welfare systems. Citing support for freedom of travel, the four wrote: "We are equally committed to preventing and combating the fraudulent use of the right of free movement by union citizens or by third-country nationals abusing free movement rights in order to circumvent national immigration controls" to prevent "excessive strain on the social systems of the receiving societies."
The politicians have also focused on petty crime, like pickpocketing and the theft of smartphones, which they associate with Roma. Recently, the Louvre was shut down for a day in protest because groups of young men were harassing staff members and visitors. (The museum is free for those under 18.) The Louvre now has a warning on its Web site about pickpockets.
The police support Mr. Valls. "We salute the firmness of Mr. Valls in his Roma policy," said Christophe Crépin of the main police union, UNSA Police. "These are people who sell themselves, who racketeer, who construct criminal networks, and their way of life is totally incompatible with that of our modern societies."
The legal limbo for Romania and Bulgaria has been bad for the Roma, said Alexandre Le Clève, a former director of Hors la Rue and member of Romeurope, associations that work in six countries to improve the health and lives of Roma. "Paradoxically, their situation has worsened since the entry of Romania into the European Union," he said. "The Roma lost certain rights, like state medical aid, that they had as non-E.U. foreigners."
The new rules, Mr. Le Clève said, "will put into relief all the contradictions of this government." In the United States, he said, "people talk of regularizing immigrants. Not here."
At the Gare du Nord, Ruset said he would prefer to return to Romania. "But there is no work, and here there is plenty," he said. "There you earn 15 euros a day, if that, and here at least 50 to 100."
In the forest, he and his extended family have built cabins of discarded wood. There is no running water. Asked about toilets, he laughed and said, "It's a big forest."
Mr. Le Clève, who speaks Roma and has worked with these young men, said Roma were often denied housing, in part because they are dark-skinned and so recognizable. "The problem is that they are very visible," he said. "But, institutionally, they're invisible."
Pierre Desorgues contributed reporting
31 May 2013
Already a regular in Romania's region of Transylvania, Prince Charles (in picture, right), the heir to the British throne, arrived at the Targu Mures airport in central Romania yesterday (Thursday, May 30), heading to the houses he owns in the region, according to local media. He went to Micloşoara in Covasna county, to the residence of Count Kalnoky Tibor, where he usually spends time when in Romania. According to local sources, he was to spend Friday night in the village Valea Zălanului, where he owns two restored properties.
The prince arrived by a private charter flight to Targu Mures airport, where the airport manager and representatives of the British Embassy to Romania greeted him. This is a private visit, and the prince is expected to visit the village Archita, to where the prince's foundation in Romania will move its office. The village of Viscri, where the prince also owns several guest houses, is also included in the visit schedule.
According to Romanian media, his last visit to Romania was in June last year. Prince Charles is a supporter of Romania, having recently appeared in a documentary called Wild Carpathia, and should appear in another episode of the documentary series about Romania. Prince Charles has become something of a spokesman internationally for Transylvania. During the interview, the Prince talks about his family connection with the infamous medieval ruler, Vlad Tepes, known to the world as Vlad the Impaler. Prince Charles also speaks of his great interest in Transylvania during the film.
The Prince, who has been visiting Romania regularly since 1997, started buying properties in rural Romania, restoring them and turning them into guesthouses. The property at Viscri is one of the best known.
28 May 2013
* New law seeks to pay back all dispossessed owners
* Romania trails other states in tackling past
* Old mentalities weigh on economy, frustrate investors
BUCHAREST, May 28 (Reuters)—Mihail and Valeriu Nitu spent 12 years fighting bureaucracy, corrupt officials and murky legislation to win compensation for their childhood home, which had been confiscated by Romania's former communist government.
By then, the government had suspended all payments.
The Nitus are among thousands of Romanians still waiting for the return of their property or compensation nearly 25 years after the fall of communism.
"Every government has come up with its own laws and has stalled for time," said Valeriu Nitu, 73. "I hope we will get the money in this lifetime, since there isn't much of it left."
Land ownership is still disputed, many communist-era officials remain in power, and inefficiency and corruption are entrenched. All that delays the move to a fully open economy to match other central European countries, much to the frustration of investors such as restitution fund Fondul Proprietatea .
With the exception of Poland, which deals with individual claims in court, former communist central European countries have restitution laws. Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia have all largely completed the process.
But Romania has dragged its feet, compensating only some 15 percent of all claims but spending billions of euros in the process. The European Court of Human Rights, which has a backlog of cases against Bucharest, pushed it to adopt a new law in May.
Romania aims for full restoration—further straining a tight budget after a recession—but while the new law states property will be returned or replaced where possible, it also says cash for unsolved cases will be paid in tranches from 2017.
The Nitus' case shows the system at its cumbersome worst. They filed their claim in 2000 and went to court in 2010.
The court ruled in 2012 the family was entitled to 1.2 million euros for the sturdy brick house and 3,000 square metre yard, some of which was received for their grandfather's service in World War I, which was torn down in the 1980s to build drab apartment blocks. They have one other claim pending since 1998.
"That court trial we won was just for practice, so that we won't lose our touch," said Calin Ispravnic, the Nitus' lawyer, who heads a restitution organisation.
Up to two million Romanians are believed to have been killed, imprisoned, deported or relocated under communism and the country still bears the scars of Nicolae Ceausescu's repressive regime.
Swathes of old Bucharest were torn down to make way for his colossal, marble-clad parliament building.
Though it is now in the European Union, Romania is still in transition to a market economy and governments have failed to privatise large energy and transport firms that are inefficiently run, something the International Monetary Fund wants addressed before completing an aid agreement.
Romania ranks 116 from 144 states by institutional strength in the World Economic Forum's competitiveness report, far behind neighbours Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland.
The $4.4 billion Fondul Proprietatea - managed by emerging markets veteran Mark Mobius's Franklin Templeton—has pressed heavily for reform. Set up to compensate victims of communism, it holds stakes in many state-run companies and is pushing for more sales and better governance, with mixed success.
According to the Fiscal Council, an independent watchdog, Romania had 645 state-owned companies in 2011, accounting for only 6 percent of the economy but a third of all unpaid debts.
"The political establishment here still has a very big role in these companies, so it makes it more and more difficult to reform," Mobius told Reuters. "You meet these government people, they are young people but they are sticking to old ideas."
Many communist-era officials still hold prominent positions, even though current President Traian Basescu sought to draw a line in a 2006 speech which condemned the regime.
Basescu has been accused of allegedly collaborating with the Securitate secret police and was cleared by officials after its archives were opened. That was when many Romanians found close family and friends had spied on them.
Former President Ion Iliescu—who took part in the 1989 overthrow of Ceausescu that some claim was an internal party coup—is influential in the governing Social Democrat party.
Dan Voiculescu, a former senator whose family owns a media trust, was elected despite records showing he collaborated with the feared Securitate, as have several other lawmakers from across the political spectrum.
Fighting for property is so complicated that many plaintiffs sold their claims to others, who then made a quick profit. Government data showed one case went for $35,000 to an unnamed third party and was soon after settled for $69 million.
Trajan Column Site http://columnaluitraian.ro
24 May 2013
Guest writer Ana Soviany puts the spotlight on a monument located in Rome, but which is crucially important in the history of the Romanian people: Trajan's Column.
As it is the case with almost all things related to our own ancient history, we as Romanians don't really know much about Trajan's Column. Sure, Romanians vaguely remember textbook stories on Decebalus and the Dacian wars, but the truth is that most of us never actually felt the need to ask "what on Earth is that Column thing and why should we care?"
Firstly, the facts: the Column was completed by May 113, 7 years after the ending of the war between the Dacians, the ancient inhabitants of today's Romania, and the Roman Empire ruled at the time by Emperor Trajan—who emerged triumphant from the war. The monument, which is 30 meters high and built by Apolodor of Damascus, was meant to be a visual depiction of the wars, but also to serve as a dignifying final resting place for Trajan. According to historical documents, after his death in 117, Trajan's ashes where buried in the monument's base, but have since gone missing. However, the Column is still in excellent shape. Though the rest of the Trajan's Forum (the architectural complex built in Rome after the Dacian wars) is mainly a ruin, the Column is almost intact, and it still clearly shows the bas-reliefs of Dacian and Roman soldiers.
It should be noted that the Column was erected at a time considered to be a peak of Roman art. Maybe that's why, apart from being a historically meaningful monument, the Column has had, across the ages, an enormous impact on world art.
Among the artists who studied the Column and created works inspired by it were huge figures like Michelangelo, Raphael and Rubens. Michelangelo is actually noted to have said in awe: "There is only one Trajan's Column!" Also, surrealist master Salvador Dali is believed to have said that, in order to have a better understanding of the world, people should rather study Trajan's Column than reading the all so different kind of columns, those found in a newspaper.
Since its completion, the Column has inspired the design of some of the world's best known monuments: Nelson's Column in London, Colonne Vendôme in Paris and the Washington Monument is Baltimore, USA, among many others.
Surprisingly enough, art is still influenced by the Column. Even now, 1900 years after the monument's completion, there are still artists who create works inspired by the Column. A selection of these works, made by Romanian artists, can be found here.
Why should we care about a column erected 1900 ago? Because history is part of our cultural heritage and thus part of who we are.
Also, we don't get the chance to say "Happy 1900th birthday!" too often, do we?
The Association for Contemporary Cultural Identity is organizing an anniversary gala dedicated to Trajan's Column. The event will take place on Friday, the 24th of May, at ArCuB Showroom (Batistei 14), from 6.30 PM. For more information on the Column, you can visit http://columnaluitraian.ro (Romanian only).
Ana Soviany, guest writer http://romanianletters.ro/en/about
Ethan Hawke & Julie Deply (source: Before Midnight Facebook page)
22 May 2013
American actor Ethan Hawke and film director Richard Linklater will be in Bucharest on June 26 to attend the fundraising event Before It's Too Late, organized by the charitable association OvidiuRo, and premiere their latest film, Before Midnight.
This fundraising event organized at Palatul Copiilor in Bucharest will support OvidiuRo's Fiecare Copil in Gradinţa (Every child in kindergarten) program, co-founded by the American actor's mother, Leslie Hawke and by Maria Gheorghiu. The event supports early education for all, within OvidiuRO's long-term goal of making early education a standard public policy in Romania. More about the event here. Tickets cost EUR 35 (RON 150) and can be purchased online here.
Ethan Hawke, the two-time Academy Award nominee, is a board member of The Alex Fund and a long-standing supporter of the NGO that his mother and Maria Gheorghiu founded in Romania, Asociatia OvidiuRo. He previously came to Romania on the occasion of Ovidiu Ro's Halloween Balls. Actor Hawke is also a writer and director, and is known for his appearance is movies such as Gattaca, Hamlet, Reality Bites, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, among others. Before Midnight is a third part of a series which includes Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004). Hawke plays alongside Julie Deply (both in picture). "Each of the "Before" movies is a window onto a stage of life, sharply attuned to the possibilities and disappointments of one's 20s, 30s and 40s," according to a NY Times review.
Leslie Hawke and Maria Gheorghiu started in 2001 with several programs in Bacau to help families in extreme poverty become better equipped to support themselves. They established Asociatia Ovidiu Rom in 2004 and expanded the programs to Bucharest. In 2010, OvidiuRo initiated Fiecare copil în grădiniţă program inviting mayors across Romania to apply for a grant to help them get every impoverished child in their community age 4-6 in preschool. A year later, the program expanded to 20 communities in 12 counties in Romania.
Irina Popescu, firstname.lastname@example.com
A column of Russia's T-90 tanks rumbles over the cobblestones in Moscow's Red Square on May 9 during the country's Victory Day parade celebrating the anniversary of its costly victory over Nazi Germany in World War II.
19 May 2013
World War II remains a monumental event in the collective Russian mind. It's known as the "Great Patriotic War," and Russians believe no one made greater sacrifices than the Soviet Union when it came to defeating Nazi Germany.
The end of the war is celebrated with a huge military parade in Moscow's Red Square on May 9, commemorating the millions of men and women, military and civilian, who died during the struggle.
Any criticism of the Soviet war effort is rare. But even the rare comment has Russia's lower house of Parliament, the State Duma, looking for ways to control the narrative and make sure that the Soviet role is never portrayed as anything less than selfless patriotism.
The trouble is that World War II was fought under the leadership of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, and his repressive policies continued throughout the conflict.
In the latest flap, legislators in the Duma have called for an investigation into remarks made by an opposition deputy criticizing Stalin's wartime counterintelligence agency, SMERSH.
The agency's name comes from the abbreviated Russian phrase "Death to Spies." A fictionalized version of SMERSH appeared as James Bond's main foe in the early novels by Ian Fleming.
A recent program on Russian state television portrayed SMERSH as a heroic unit that fought Russia's enemies.
However, the opposition lawmaker, Leonid Gozman, wrote in an online column that SMERSH actually belonged in the same category as the German SS and the Gestapo.
He wrote that the name should "cause horror and disgust, but not be part of a headline for a patriotic movie."
Gozman said that's because SMERSH, at Stalin's bidding, took part in the repression of the Russian civilian population as well, resulting in the killing and deportation of thousands of Soviet citizens.
Such talk runs counter to President Vladimir Putin's call for more patriotic education for Russian children.
The Russian government is currently working on an initiative to establish a "canonical" version of Russian history that will be promulgated countrywide in a single set of textbooks.
Gozman told The Moscow Times that the Duma should also check the comments of revered Russian authors such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, "because they said the same thing long before me."
The head of the Duma's Security and Anti-Corruption Committee, Irina Yarovaya, said a bill addressing criticism of Russia's wartime history could be brought up for consideration soon.
People sit near a statue of King Carol I, the founder of Romania's royal dynasty, as the moon rises in Bucharest May 5, 2012. Credit: Reuters/Radu Sigheti
17 May 2013
(Reuters)—Got 48 hours to explore Romania's capital and its eclectic mix of western architectural ideas, eastern imagery, 20th century totalitarian megalomania and buzzing nightlife?
Reuters correspondents with local knowledge help visitors map the city's shift from one of Europe's most progressive urban centres at the start of the 20th century to a chaotic maze of dusty boulevards and quaint neighborhoods bearing the scars of brutal communist policies.
4 p.m.—From the airport, take a taxi or 783 airport bus straight to Piata Universitatii and the old medieval merchant district of Lipscani, which escaped the attentions of communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who razed much of its surroundings.
The area, all but abandoned until just a few years ago, is now a dense network of cobbled streets and period buildings in various stages of refurbishment and center of the city's burgeoning nightlife scene.
It's an easy area to wander around at random but you shouldn't miss the exquisite Stavropoleos Monastery, built in 1724 and an example of Brancovenesc style of Romanian architecture, a rich mix of Byzantine and baroque motifs.
Browse the cafes, bars and small textile and antique shops before having a look at Curtea Veche, the 15th century residence of Vlad Tepes—also known as "Vlad the Impaler"—a bloodthirsty ruler who inspired Bram Stoker's Dracula.
The courtyard of Hanul lui Manuc, a 19th century merchants' inn, is an atmospheric location for an aperitif.
Keep an eye out for stray dogs, a major problem for the city but which have become an offbeat attraction for some tourists. You're unlikely to have problems in the city center, where dogs tend to be alone or in small groups and rarely fierce.
7 p.m.—There's no shortage of options for dinner in Lipscani, including French, Turkish, Italian and Hungarian food. Caru cu Bere (www.carucubere.ro) is a 19th century brewery that serves traditional Romanian fare under impressive vaulted ceilings and offers sarmale, minced meat wrapped in cabbage, and mamaliga, a polenta-like dish often served with cream and cheese.
9 p.m.—Take a stroll through the elegant Pasajul Villacrosse and find a cozy place for a nightcap.
You are spoiled for choice in Lipscani, which is packed with an ever-changing line-up of bars and clubs. Mojo has regular live music (www.mojomusic.ro). A string of trendy industrial-themed bars dot the area; Atelierul Mecanic, designed to look like a workshop, Papiota as a tailor shop and Energiea as a printing press are well worth a visit.
Or continue to Calea Victoriei, the city's most famous street, which leads you past the monumental Beaux Arts Cercul Militar and Art Deco Telephone Palace to hip club Control (www.control-club.ro). Nearby are indie hangout Panic! and Green Hours jazz bar, a long-time Bucharest favorite (www.greenhours.ro).
10 a.m.—Hop on the efficient metro (two journeys for 4 Romanian lei or $1.20; 6 lei for a day pass) to Piata Romana and stroll past Amzei market to Piata Revolutiei, lined with historical buildings including the former royal palace, now the National Museum of Art, a gallery with Romanian and European art (www.mnar.arts.ro).
The square was a focal point of the 1989 revolution and facing the royal palace is the former communist headquarters, from where Ceausescu fled the crowds in a helicopter only to be caught and executed. In the middle is a monument to victims of the revolution, which some locals derisively refer to as a potato on a stick.
Don't miss the titchy red brick Cretulescu church and pillared Athenaeum concert hall, renowned as the city's most beautiful building and venue of the world-renowned George Enescu classical music festival, before popping into the Athenee Palace Hilton (www.hilton.co.uk/bucharest) for a drink or early lunch.
Built at the start of the 20th century, the hotel was a notorious meeting spot for spies in the 1930s. Under communism, rooms were said to be bugged and many staff on the payroll of the pervasive secret service, the Securitate.
1 p.m.—Take a walk up Calea Victoriei, passing historic churches, parks and the Cantacuzino Palace, which houses a museum dedicated to Enescu, Romania's most famous composer.
Continue across the traffic-clogged square to the Romanian Peasant Museum (www.muzeultaranuluiroman.ro). The building is an essential example of Neo-Romanian architecture, a trend contemporary of Art Nouveau and Antoni Gaudi's Modernism.
The cafe at the back offers traditional Romanian food, including "ciorba" or sour soup and platters of cold meats and cheeses.
The museum has a collection of folk art, textiles and other articles of peasant life and a shop sells craftwork. A cinema screens arthouse films and often a market with woodwork, ceramics, bric-a-brac, food and wine brought wholesale from the countryside clusters around a small wooden church.
4 p.m.—Cross a small park toward Bulevardul Aviatorilor and a tangle of leafy streets behind it, lined with spectacular Modernist and Art Deco villas—many now housing embassies—that earned Bucharest the nickname "Paris of the East" at the turn of the 20th century.
Or for something a bit different, hop on the number 1 tram, which circles the city from nearby Piata Victoriei. The journey of nearly two hours takes you through residential and commercial areas just outside the center and over the new Pasajul Basarab bridge with views over the city.
7 p.m.—Try La Taifas, a bistro tucked off Piata Victoriei which serves Romanian specialties chalked up on a blackboard—staff can translate (www.bistrotaifas.ro). Metuka, not far away on Bulevardul Lascar Catargiu, offers hearty food, a friendly atmosphere and great ribs.
Head back to Lipscani if you still have energy for a night out.
10 a.m.—Take a taxi to Casa Poporului or Palace of the People, the monstrous building concocted by Ceausescu in the late 1970s. Now housing parliament, it looms over Bucharest.
Don't go by foot as you will need the energy to walk through its cavernous halls and seemingly endless corridors. Ceausescu hoped the building, made with thousands of tons of crystal, marble and wood, would become Romania's "Acropolis" but it came to symbolize the destructiveness of his social policies.
Construction of the building and demolition of huge swathes of houses, churches and synagogues, to be replaced with a new "Civic Centre", evicted thousands of residents and devoured large chunks of the state budget at a time when food and energy rationing tormented much of the population.
1 p.m.—In the back of the building, find the Contemporary Art Museum, with a cafe overlooking the city which gives a wider perspective of Ceausescu's efforts to remodel Bucharest.
3 p.m.—Head toward the Armenian Church on Bulevardul Carol II—but only walk if you want to see the outsized and lifeless streets of the Civic Centre. Once you arrive, you can stroll through a picturesque district of French-style villas, modernist apartment blocs and tiny Neo-Romanian castles complete with vine-covered turrets.
Continue north to the Gradina Icoanei park and more villas around Bulevardul Dacia, with another cluster of embassies. Try Gargantua (restaurantgargantua.ro) for a coffee, or Have A Cigar, a newly opened art pub on Strada Vasile Conta that serves great cocktails, pasta and sandwiches.
Beyond here the expanse of drab apartment blocks, Bucharest's communist legacy which are slowly being refurbished and brightened up, starts again. ($1 = 3.3413 Romanian lei)
(Reporting by Paul Casciato)
On this day...
8 May 2013
BRUSSELS (Reuters)—Addressing an audience of dignitaries in Luxembourg in 2005, Bulgaria's then prime minister extolled the virtues of European Union membership, declaring his nation ready to take its place at the heart of the continent.
"Bulgaria is returning politically to the family of European nations to which it has always belonged," Simeon Saxe-Coburg announced as Bulgaria and Romania signed the documents that would bring them into the EU two years later, in 2007.
The rhetoric was full, matching the occasion, and heartfelt, with the memories of Soviet influence fresh in the minds of most Bulgarians and particularly Saxe-Coburg, the country's child tsar before the monarchy was overthrown in 1946.
But eight years on from that upbeat spring day in Luxembourg, and as a divided Bulgaria prepares for parliamentary elections on May 12, the gap between the one-time aspirations of EU membership and the everyday reality of belonging grows wider.
Rather than feeling pulled into the heart of Europe, Bulgaria and Romania find themselves on the edge of the debate, with questions frequently raised by their EU partners about their commitment to the rule of law and willingness to crack down on corruption, organized crime and illegal migration.
Membership has not delivered a one-way ticket to democratic stability, economic growth and greater opportunity for all. Diplomats from other member states often quietly question the wisdom of allowing them in.
"The European Union was seen as some sort of golden rainbow on the horizon," Amanda Paul, an east Europe expert at the European Policy Centre, a think tank, said of the image many Romanians and Bulgarians had in their minds before joining.
"As a whole I think both Romanian and Bulgaria have benefited from membership, but they still have significant democratic deficits," she said, explaining that if citizens wanted to understand the gap between expectation and reality, they should look first to home, not to Brussels.
"They should be more disappointed in their own leaders and politicians rather than in the EU institutions and what the EU has been able to do for them."
Whether living in their home countries on the southeastern periphery of Europe or working in Brussels, Romanians and Bulgarians increasingly have a sense of isolation.
While per capita incomes have risen steadily since joining the EU—by around 30 percent between 2006-2011 for both, according to IMF data—and opportunities to move and work across Europe have increased, there is still not a feeling of being fully integrated into the union of European states.
Romania and Bulgaria remain outside Schengen, the agreement that allows for the free movement of citizens across 26 European countries, and plans to join the euro currency are on hold for the immediate future.
When either country pops up for discussion in EU debates, it is all too often about whether they are meeting targets for bolstering their judicial systems or doing enough to combat smuggling and limit the influx of migrants from further east.
"We are second-class citizens of the union and we are being left out of major decisions taken in Brussels," said Ion Miciu, a 64-year-old engineer living in Bucharest.
"Our politicians are incompetent and have not fought in the last six years for Romania to have a more important voice."
At EU summits, the leaders of Romania and Bulgaria have just the same opportunity as any other head of state or government to speak up, and often do. But when it comes to decision-making, especially during the last three years of economic crisis, Sofia and Bucharest barely figure.
"You see two countries that have to spend quite a lot of negotiating capital and goodwill on key issues for them, like Schengen membership," said one EU diplomat familiar with dealing with both and who has seen the limits of their influence.
"While they are certainly working hard, it just gives them less room to maneuver."
Another hurdle they face is getting experienced staff to drive their diplomatic efforts. As the newest of the EU's 27 member states—at least until Croatia joins in July—it takes time to generate critical mass and influence in meetings, not just at the ambassadorial table, but across all levels of the bureaucracy and the myriad policy files diplomats handle.
"When it comes to major decisions, it's a big boy's game in being aggressive to steer the little circle that makes decisions," said another diplomat from an older European power.
By way of example, they pointed to negotiations earlier this year over the EU's 1 trillion euro long-term budget, a large portion of which is spent on development funds for poorer EU countries, making it critical for Romania and Bulgaria.
"When it comes to the budget, Romania and Bulgaria only got scraps," the diplomat said, lamenting their lack of influence.
For their part, officials from both countries said their voice was always present in EU discussions, and questioned why the two were being treated like second-class citizens when it came to Schengen, probably their biggest frustration.
In Sunday's election in Bulgaria, the centre-right party lead by former prime minister Boiko Borisov is expected to come out on top, although it may not have sufficient votes to form a government on its own and has said it won't join a coalition.
That raises the prospect of further political uncertainty in the country, and raises doubts about its economic program too, both of which will muffle its voice in Brussels.
"We're effectively dealing with a Wild West country," said an EU official who handles east Europe, voicing doubts about Bulgaria's ability to enforce the law and live by democratic norms.
With a "what can you do?" shrug of the shoulders, the official said it wasn't possible to turn back history, that Romania and Bulgaria were members of the European Union. Other states had to accept that reality and make it work, however challenging it may be.
For Carmen Pop, the 32-year-old owner of a small Romanian restaurant in Brussels, EU membership is a double-edged sword. It has allowed her to work in the capital of Europe and send money home to her parents. But it is far from a perfect world.
"The advantages of the EU community are not for Romanians," she said with frustration. "You are part of the community but you can't work like other Europeans. We always carry the label of being Romanian or Bulgarian."
(Additional reporting by Ioana Patran in Bucharest and Justyna Pawlak and Luke Baker in Brussels; writing by Luke Baker; editing by Janet McBride)
2 May 2013
26 April 2013
They knew her as the slender, straight-backed woman with an independent streak and a head for numbers. She told them she had immigrated from Hungary, and her colleagues at Merrill Lynch did not pry with more questions.
What most of them did not know was that their colleague, the quiet market analyst with the Italian name and the Hungarian accent, had been born a countess and grew up in a castle. They had no idea that Ilona DeVito, as they knew her, had had little formal education before arriving on Wall Street, or that she and her family had fled to New York with no more than few small suitcases to escape the Romanian Communist government.
The death of Ilona DeVito di Porriasa last week, at 73, went largely unnoticed beyond her family and friends. But if nothing else, her story, as recounted by surviving relatives, peels back the hard shell of the city, proving, perhaps, that even the most anonymous apartment dweller can be a countess in exile.
Born in 1939 in a Transylvanian Baroque-style castle given to her parents as a wedding present by her grandmother, Countess Ilona Teleki de Szek spent the first years of her life surrounded by nannies, maids and cooks. Her mother was a baroness, her father a count who served as Transylvania's representative to Hungary; one of his cousins, Pal Teleki served as prime minister of Hungary on two occasions and was said to have been responsible for the passage of a number of anti-Semitic measures.
Pal Teleki was said to have fatally shot himself when Hitler's troops crossed the Hungarian border heading to Yugoslavia; the Hungarian Army joined in the invasion. Winston Churchill called Teleki's suicide "a sacrifice to absolve himself and his people from guilt in the German attack on Yugoslavia."
Ilona's daughter, Elisa DeVito, said this week that her mother had not expressed embarrassment about her relative's place in Hungarian history, believing, as other members of her family had, that he had not been anti-Semitic and might not have committed suicide.
But the family was vulnerable in the waning months of World War II, when the Soviets took control of Hungary and Romania, to which Transylvania then belonged.
As recounted by Ilona's daughter this week, the government imprisoned Ilona's father, whom she would not see for another 20 years, seized the Telekis' properties and eventually pushed her, her siblings and her mother out of their castle. (It is now a clinic and botanical garden.)
The Telekis moved into a converted stable with no running water. The baroness took in laundry and sewing; Ilona worked in a shoe factory, her brother Paul on a farm. Ilona wore shoes made out of her grandfather's old bedroom slippers, and her older sister's dresses were made of old curtains.
At one point, Ilona lived with her grandparents in a library her family had founded. It was so overrun by rats, she would later recall to her daughter, that they would sling wooden planks over the bookshelves at night to sleep.
As anti-Hungarian sentiment rose in Romania, the government repeatedly pulled the Teleki children out of school and opened the family's mail.
Count Teleki finally escaped and sought asylum in the United States. His family joined him in 1964 after the count had bribed the Romanian authorities to allow them to leave.
Ilona spoke no English, but she took a series of jobs—first at a hosiery factory in the Bronx, eventually as a teletypist at a financial firm.
And though her father continued to advocate for Hungarian people across Central Europe, she rarely mentioned her past.
"She didn't really want people to know, because people think of nobility as having something, and my mother really had nothing when she came here," her daughter said.
Once on Wall Street, she showed enough aptitude that despite having no college degree, she was promoted to market analyst, studying trends and making investment recommendations. She joined Merrill's securities research department in the early 1970s and stayed until retiring in 2005, developing a reputation for quick calculations and prescient recommendations—as well as a certain reserve.
"She worked very hard at it, and she didn't suffer fools," said Robert Farrell, one of her managers. "She had no trouble disagreeing about what was going to happen or voicing her own opinion."
But she never acknowledged her background to most colleagues until they read her mother's obituary in the 1990s. Some did not find out until her death.
"In all the time I talked to her every day, we talked about Hungary and everything, but she never said a word about her being royalty," said Tom Webster, a Merrill Lynch broker.
In 1975, she married Lino DeVito di Porriasa, who came from an Italian noble family.
Mr. DeVito died in 2008, a few months after his wife learned she had breast cancer. Even while ill, she loved to follow the stock market, even making a profit after the 2008 financial crisis, her brother said.
She died on April 15.
Elisa DeVito remembered hearing stories from her grandmother about the family's past and lavish lifestyle. But her mother usually dismissed such talk, saying, "That's ancient history. We never need to talk about that anymore."
As her cancer metastasized, however, the former countess changed her mind. To her daughter's surprise, she asked to have her title engraved on her gravestone.
"The last few years," Ms. DeVito said, "she started to remember good things, not just bad things—where she came from, and what she became."
17 April 2013
BUCHAREST (Reuters) - Romania expects to pass legislation this week to compensate all owners of property seized under communism, seeking to draw a line under a haunting past more than 20 years after the overthrow of Nicolae Ceausescu.
Bucharest has lagged behind other former Soviet satellites in central and eastern Europe in addressing its communist past. Some senior officials from that era remain in high office, while hardly any crimes have been prosecuted.
Long-entrenched bureaucracy and corruption still hold back an economy that is the European Union's second poorest and struggling to emerge from a deep recession.
Seizures of property began in 1945, immediately after World War Two when Soviet-backed communists set about eradicating the middle classes by abolishing private ownership. A special nationalization decree was issued in 1950.
"The law we propose aims to bring historical reparation to all those who suffered confiscation since about 70 years ago," Prime Minister Victor Ponta told parliament on Wednesday.
He asked the assembly, where he commands an overwhelming majority, to endorse the plan, a step expected later this week.
Since the 1989 revolution that led to Ceausescu's trial and execution, human rights groups have repeatedly criticized Romania for failing to restore property. An earlier restitution scheme was derailed by inefficiency, red tape and scams.
Despite prior legislation, only 15 percent of all restitution claims have been solved. Under the new bill, Ponta committed to a clear time frame and set aside 8 billion euros ($10.5 billion) to ensure all claims of victims of nationalization are settled by 2017.
The leftist cabinet had been given a May 12 deadline by the European Court for Human Rights, which has about 3,000 lawsuits on property issues filed against Romania, to pass the law.
The government said it was needed because previous legislation was too complicated and 200,000 restitution cases had yet to be solved in the country of 19 million people.
Many dispossessed owners were forced to live in tiny storerooms or bathrooms. The 1950s, under Ceausescu's predecessor Gheorghe Gheorghiu Dej, were the harshest period for land, building and industrial plant owners.
Ceausescu deepened the problem with his plan for "village systematization", under which he wiped out entire rural communities and moved people to towns - a scheme that was stopped when he was overthrown.
Ponta said Romania has so far paid 150 million euros cash in compensation for seized property, about 4 billion euros in shares of Fondul Proprietatea - a fund set up to compensate victims of communism, as well as turning over some 10,000 buildings and 1.3 million hectares of farmland. ($1 = 0.7616 euros)
4 April 2013
(Reuters)—Thousands of Romanians across the country protested on Thursday against Chevron's plans to explore for shale gas, demanding the country's leftist government withdraw concessions and ban drilling of the U.S. company's first test wells.
About 500 rallied in the town of Barlad on the eastern border with Moldova where Chevron has a nearby 1.6 million acre concession, some wearing gas masks, many chanting "Chevron go home."
Chevron has exploration rights for three blocks of 670,000 acres (270,000 hectares) near the Black Sea, and has also bought the concession close to Barlad for an undisclosed amount.
Hydraulic fracturing or fracking to extract shale gas involves injecting water and chemicals at high pressure into underground rock formations.
Experts say that if it is done according to best practice it is environmentally safe, but the technology still evokes public concern.
Many countries in central and southeastern Europe see shale gas as a way to wean themselves off Russian supplies, though Romania only imports about a quarter of what it uses due to conventional reserves.
Analysts say that Romania's shale gas deposits, added to its conventional reserves, could make the Balkan nation self-reliant in gas use—a proposition many of the protesters say is not worth the risk.
"Shale ... will only wreak havoc here," said 63-year-old pensioner Elena Arsenie.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates Romania and neighbouring Bulgaria and Hungary could have 538 billion cubic metres of shale gas between them, slightly more than Europe's annual consumption and enough to cover Romania's for almost 40 years.
In the United States, fracking has revolutionised the energy sector, bringing a drop in domestic power and gas prices. Environmental risks and denser population groupings have made Europeans more cautious.
Over the past weeks, Romanian Prime Minister Victor Ponta has softened his views on shale gas since a parliamentary election in December, which earned his ruling leftist alliance an overwhelming two-thirds majority in parliament.
But analysts say if public opposition heightens further, authorities might need to reconsider their stance on shale for fear of alienating millions of voters and thus prevent the company from setting up one of its biggest operations as the country is gearing up for a presidential election in 2014.
Chevron said in a statement on Thursday that it would only produce gas from shale using what it called were safe and proven technologies.
"Chevron respects that individuals have the right to voice their opinions... We recognize the importance of informing the public about the technologies employed in the prospecting phase, technologies which are commonly used in the conventional oil and gas industry," Chevron spokeswoman Sally Jones said.
She said Chevron will only carry out prospecting activities this year.
Romania is another emerging central European state along with Poland where officials see vast potential shale reserves as a key plank in ensuring future energy security.
But investors in Poland have grown concerned about protracted work on a tax and regulation regime announced in October as well as a steep cut in initial estimates for potential shale reserves.
4 April 2013
See photo essay at article website
To reach a surprising place, follow Route 6 south of Bucharest as it unwinds across the Romanian countryside, past fields of wildflowers and flocks of sheep. Turn west before the Danube River and head toward a grid of neatly laid streets, set down among farms.
This is Buzescu, where a small, prosperous group of Roma lives among mansions and Mercedes.
Like most visitors to Europe, Karla Gachet and Ivan Kashinsky had never heard of Buzescu nor met any wealthy Roma. They thought most Roma—often pejoratively called Gypsies—were poor and lived in slums on the fringes of big European cities. On a trip to Europe from their home in Ecuador in 2010, they learned about the Roma of Buzescu and set out to see the town.
"We wanted to break the image of Gypsies in the street, begging where the cars stop, stealing whatever they can and living in total poverty," said Mr. Kashinsky, who lived with his wife, Ms. Gachet, in Buzescu for six weeks to document daily life in the thriving community. "Here, the Roma were not the maids of Romanians, but the Romanians were the maids of the Roma. It was an amazing switch."
Buzescu itself looks fantastical, like something drawn from the pages of a remixed Grimm's Fairy Tale. Along the main street, colorful mansions rise four stories, boasting painted columns, pointed towers and sparkling metal roofs. Shiny BMWs sit in their adjacent driveways, and marble lions stand guard at the gates.
The palatial homes belong to the Kalderash, a once-itinerant group of Roma who made their fortune trading metal across Eastern Europe after the collapse of Communism.
"When Communism fell," a Roma man told the photographers, "you had to be dumb not to make money."
So the Kalderash, whose name means "coppersmith" in Romani, went to work, traveling across Eastern Europe, dismantling abandoned factories and selling the scrap metal for handsome profits. Until recently, some Kalderash also roamed the countryside in traditional horse-drawn caravans, peddling handcrafted cazanes—copper stills for brewing brandy—for hundreds of dollars each.
Today, the lavish mansions lining the streets of Buzescu, an otherwise modest farm town, are a testament to the wealth of a people deeply impoverished elsewhere in Europe and widely condemned as beggars and thieves.
The Roma have faced oppression and violence since their ancestors came to Europe from India centuries ago. During the Holocaust, the Nazis exterminated Romani people by the hundreds of thousands. In 2010, France's president at the time, Nicolas Sarkozy, deported thousands of Roma and bulldozed their encampments. His successor, François Hollande, has continued the expulsions. Roma communities face discrimination in Romania too, as evidenced by recent forced evictions across the country.
Given their painful history, many families in Buzescu are wary of new arrivals like Ms. Gachet and Mr. Kashinsky. Even after one family offered the couple a place to stay, many of the wealthiest residents refused to let them inside their houses.
"A lot of people were scared of us," Ms. Gachet said. "They thought we were thieves."
But the couple persisted, slowly gaining trust and access. Luckily, they shared a language with the residents of Buzescu. Like Ms. Gachet, who is from Quito, Ecuador, and Mr. Kashinsky, who is from Los Angeles, many Roma speak Spanish—they have been traveling back and forth to Spain for work since Romania joined the European Union in 2007.
It also helped to work as a team.
"When we do stories together, Ivan usually gets more access with men, and I get more access with women," Ms. Gachet said. "A Roma girl couldn't walk down the street with Ivan because that would have been bad for her, and I couldn't just go into a casino with a whole bunch of guys."
As the doors of Buzescu swung open, Ms. Gachet and Mr. Kashinsky said, they revealed fantastic abundance—winding staircases that led to vast rooms with marble floors and heavy chandeliers—but also great emptiness.
"They build these giant houses," Mr. Kashinsky said. "But they don't really use them."
Many parents and teenagers still have to leave Buzescu to find work or conduct business elsewhere in Europe, leaving only elders and young children to live in the outsize homes. Even when families do reunite for holidays or funerals, they tend to congregate in small rooms toward the back of their houses, using outdoor kitchens and bathrooms rather than those inside. Some of the mansions with ornate facades remain unfurnished—or even unfinished—inside.
Despite the signs of modernity in Buzescu, the Roma still abide by many of their age-old customs. Family is of utmost importance. Holidays are faithfully observed. Schooling is irregular, work is encouraged from a young age and girls are married while in their teens.
"We were there for funerals, for Easter and for their Day of the Dead," Mr. Kashinsky said. "Even though they all had BMWs and Armani clothes and are really modern in a lot of ways, they really hung tight to their traditions."
In many ways, the photographers said, the opulence in Buzescu was simply for show, a demonstration of individual pride and a communal challenge to the perception of Roma as Europe's lowest caste.
"Being Roma, they can't just go out there to the world and get a job anywhere," Ms. Gachet said. "The lady we lived with said: 'Karla, my kids are not going to be lawyers and doctors. You need to understand that. We need to give them tools to survive in our world, and that's money.' They don't get the opportunities that everybody else gets. They're so discriminated against in their own country."
5 March 2013
The reign of Josef Stalin was a time of terror, mass executions, brutal collectivization, and the most horrific war the world has ever seen.
Officially, Stalin's Soviet Union was a land of peace, progress, harmony, and—most of all—unending love for and devotion to Stalin himself. He was "the father of nations," "the gardener of human happiness." His image was everywhere.
"Centuries will pass, and the generations still to come will regard us as the happiest of mortals, the most fortunate of men, because we lived in the century of centuries, because we were privileged to see Stalin, our inspired leader," gushed one Soviet writer.
Historians around the world are still working to uncover the real story of these "most fortunate of men."
The Gulag
The Stalin era was one of rapid economic development for the Soviet Union. State propaganda lauded the huge infrastructure projects that were put up at breakneck speed, transforming a rural, agricultural empire into an industrial power. But many showcase projects—such as the Moscow-Volga Canal, the Belomor Canal, and the Trans-Siberian Railroad—were built partly or entirely by prisoners in Stalin's notorious Gulag, a network of prison camps set up across the country.
From 1929 until Stalin's death in 1953, an estimated 14 million people passed through the Gulag. About 1.6 million people died there. Those in the camps were provided meager food, minimal medical care, inadequate clothing for the often-brutal weather conditions, and a near-total lack of modern tools and machinery.
The Gulag was set up along economic lines, with most camps being assigned specific economic tasks within the framework of the industrialization drive—logging, mining, the construction of industrial projects.
After World War II, more than 1 million Soviet soldiers who had survived Nazi prison-of-war camps were shipped off to the Gulag.
After Stalin's death in March 1953, the communist state began to dismantle the Gulag system. Political prisoners began to be released in 1954, and the system was officially canceled by an Interior Ministry decree on January 25, 1960.
The Gulag Through the Years
The Soviet Secret Police archives recorded prisoners in camps and colonies on January 1 each year. However, Anne Applebaum notes in "Gulag, a History" that these numbers do not account for high turnover throughout the year. While the Gulag generally continued to grow throughout Stalin's reign, the sharpest increases came during the Great Terror, between 1936 and 1938, and in the period after World War II.
Stalin's goal of rapidly transforming the Soviet Union into an industrialized power drove the push to increase agricultural production, both to feed growing numbers of workers and to generate hard currency to buy foreign technology through grain exports. His solution to this problem was collectivization—forcing all private farmers to give up their land and work for enormous state-owned, state-managed agricultural enterprises.
Between 1929 and 1939, the percentage of farmland controlled by collective farms went from less than 5 percent to more than 99 percent.
But the Soviet peasantry resisted Stalin's drive with all its might—denouncing collectivization as "a second serfdom" and a betrayal of the Bolshevik revolution that had promised them "peace and land." In addition, the religious peasants came to believe widely that the Soviet government was the Antichrist and that joining a collective farm would condemn them to hell.
The heavy-handed mismanagement of collectivization and the active resistance of the peasants led to horrific famines in the early 1930s.Scholars estimate around 3.5 million people died in Ukraine alone in a disaster that many Ukrainians argue amounted to a policy of genocide against them. (More contentious figures, like those from the All-Ukrainian Association of Holodomor Researchers, estimate as many as 10 million died.).
More died in European Russia, Siberia, the North Caucasus, and Central Asia. Hunger and despair drove as many as 1.5 million people to emigrate to China.
The Soviet Union was—unlike past imperialist states—to be a harmonious multiethnic construction. "Friendship of the peoples" was one of its most ubiquitous slogans, and Soviet leaders claimed they had solved the "nationalities problem." However, between 1939 and his death in 1953, Stalin implemented policies of forced resettlement, or deportations, against many of the Soviet Union's ethnic minorities.
Forced Migrations
He used the brutal policy against Poles, Romanians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Volga Germans, ethnic Finns, Crimean Tatars, Crimean Greeks, Kalmyks, Balkars, Karachays, Meskhetian Turks, Koreans, Chechens, Ingush, and others.
It is estimated about 6 million people were subjected to forced migration, of whom about 1.5 million died. Most of the deportees were resettled in remote locations in the Far East or Central Asia. In some cases, more than 40 percent of a deported population died of disease or hunger.
In his famous 1956 de-Stalinization speech, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev said the Ukrainians only avoided the same fate because "there were too many of them and there was no place to which to deport them."
The policy of deportation continued on a smaller scale even after Stalin's death. In 1959, Chechens who had been allowed to return to Chechnya were forced to move from the mountains to the lowlands. Likewise, in the 1970s, several mountain groups in Tajikistan were forced to move to the plains.
The Great Terror
The period from 1936 until 1938 is known as the Great Purge (or Great Terror). During this brief time, roughly 1 million people were executed or died while in custody. During the peak period of terror in 1937 and 1938, Stalin's security organs carried out an average of 1,000 executions a day.
In its initial phases, the purges focused on the security organs themselves and then on the Communist Party. Almost all the leading revolutionary figures from Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin's time, the so-called "old Bolsheviks," were executed, many after being tortured and subjected to humiliating show trials.
Later, Stalin cast his net wider, ruthlessly eliminating intellectuals, leaders of various ethnic and religious groups, "anti-Soviet elements" from the Tsarist period, foreigners or those with foreign ties, and others.
Stalin personally oversaw the purges in great detail. Soviet archives reveal that he personally signed execution orders for 40,000 people.
He often made notations next to individual names, urging the secret police to step up the torture.
After Stalin's death, a Soviet commission declared that he had "committed a very grave crime against the Communist party, the socialist state, the Soviet people, and the worldwide revolutionary movement." During Mikhail Gorbachev's Perestroika period, many purge victims were posthumously rehabilitated.
Stalin's archenemy, Leon Trotsky, who was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929 and murdered by an agent of Stalin's secret police in Mexico in 1940, has never been rehabilitated.
The Great Terror had deadly consequences for those closest in power to Stalin. The 1924 Politburo had nine members who met a violent death or committed suicide.
World War II
World War II—called the Great Patriotic War in the Soviet Union—was a defining event of the Stalin period. The war on the Eastern Front was the most enormous and costly conflict in history and made the decisive contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany.
Of the 70 million people estimated to have died in World War II around the globe, more than 30 million—soldiers and civilians—died on the Eastern Front. The Soviet Union alone suffered more than 20 million dead.
Stalin's legacy in the war is mixed. He is criticized for authorizing the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact with Germany, which partitioned central Europe and gave Hitler a green light to begin the war knowing the Soviet Union would be sidelined.
Historians also argue that Stalin's prewar purge of the military leadership and his decision to advance forces into vulnerable positions in Poland, Bessarabia, and the Baltic States contributed to the country's enormous losses in the early months of the war.
But the rapid industrialization of the 1930s laid the groundwork for the Soviet victory. Unlike Adolf Hitler, Stalin learned from his mistakes: he gradually appointed fiercely capable commanders, and he largely abandoned Communist ideology in favor of a more motivating religious-patriotic one.
Today, many of those who still view Stalin positively cite as their main argument his role in securing the victory that left the Soviet Union a global superpower.
Stalin Today
According to polls at the time, in 1988 less than 1 percent of survey respondents in Russia said that Josef Stalin would be remembered "as a major figure of the Soviet era" in 20 to 30 years. Now, however, Stalin has the highest positive rating of any figure in Russian or Soviet history.
Forty-eight percent of Russians think Stalin played a positive role, while only 22 percent rated him "harshly negatively," according to a 2012 poll by the independent Levada Center. In polls conducted in 1988, that figure was 60 percent. At the same time, the percentage of people who admit that they "know nothing" about the Stalin period has increased from 30 percent in 1988 to 70 percent in 2012.
Sociologists explain Stalin's rehabilitation by citing the change of generations; the loss of personal experience of the Stalin period; and the generally positive portrayal of Stalin and the Stalin period in the media, films, and literature. The state has also "taken control" of the teaching of history in the schools, and the main lesson taught is that Stalin was able to create a global superpower despite some "excesses."
5 March 2013
Anne Applebaum is a columnist with "The Washington Post" and director of Global Transitions at the Legatum Institute. She is also author of the 2004 book "Gulag: A History" and last year's "Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956." RFE/RL's Robert Coalson spoke with Applebaum about the enduring legacy of the Gulag in Russia.
RFE/RL: Your book makes the argument that the Gulag was not tangential to Stalinism but was an integral part of his economic, social, and political system. Could you elaborate on that?
Applebaum: It is very hard to separate the history of the Gulag from the history of the Soviet Union. It was, in some ways, the logical consequence of so many other policies. The Gulag had two functions. No. 1, it had a punitive function. It created fear. It was very spread out, it had branches all over the Soviet Union and everybody knew about it. Everybody was aware that it existed. It wasn't some kind of hidden part of society. It functioned as something that would scare people, but it also had a very important economic function.
The Gulag actually had the task of digging coal mines, of digging uranium mines, gold mines. The Gulag was enormous at its height in the late 1940s, early 1950s, which really was its height. It was an enormous economic empire, controlling factories and whole areas of Russia. Northeast Russia was settled by the Gulag—prisoners and guards. Some of the Far Northern cities were effectively built by the Gulag—Vorkuta, Norilsk, cities like that.
It also distorted in some ways the way the Soviet Union thought about economics. So, when a large deposit of coal was discovered in the Far North, the Russians didn't, as one would have done in Alaska, they didn't send a few teams of workers to work there for a few weeks and then send them back again to recover and then go back up again. Instead, because they had free labor, because they weren't counting costs, they built enormous cities in the Far North, which basically no one else has done anywhere. So, the city of Vorkuta, the city of Norilsk, Magadan. These were large constructions, big cities built because there was free labor, because there was slave labor. So you can see the distortions that the Gulag created for the Soviet economy. You can still see them today.
RFE/RL: In your book, you write that Russia has not done a very good job of reckoning with Stalin and Stalinism. What is the state of this process in Russia today?
Applebaum: Now, at this moment, the current Russian government and the current Kremlin doesn't try to repress discussion of Stalin—as, of course, once would have been the case—but it tries to deal with it selectively. So there is very little discussion of the Gulag; there is very little discussion of industrialization even or collectivization. And there is quite a lot of emphasis placed on Stalin's victory in the second World War and on what the current Russian leadership thinks of as the most glorious moments in Soviet history. This, of course, is extremely distorting because it leaves out the context of that victory and what it really cost Russia and Russians. And it gives modern Russians a very skewed view of their past.
The danger about forgetting Stalin is not so much that it will repeat itself, because history doesn't ever really repeat itself in the exact same way. But it can leave Russians insensitive to some of the flaws that still exist in their society which are left over from that time. In other words, much of what is wrong in Russia now or what seems unfair in Russia now, these are things that are left over from the past.
There are still institutions that exist from the past. The way the prison system works; the way the judicial system works; the role of the political police, which is in some ways unchanged for the last 30-40 years. Its power goes up and down but it is always there. And the fact that Russians don't feel more sensitive about these institutions, that they don't feel a deeper desire to reform them and change them, I think, is partly because they haven't dwelled on, thought about, or absorbed the lessons of Soviet history.
And one of the reasons they haven't is that the current Russian leadership doesn't want them to. There is an active attempt to suppress discussion or to keep discussion focused only on positive aspects of the past.
RFE/RL: Some argue that Stalin was a good manager, that he won the war, that he left the country stronger than he found it. You don't have a lot of patience for such views, do you?
Applebaum: No, I would really contest that. You need to look at counterfactuals—what might Russia have been if it had been developed in a different way? You wouldn't have had millions of people—lives wasted, talent wasted, education wasted—working in slave-labor camps. All those physicists who were sent to dig coal in Magadan might have invented something faster and better. People might have lived better. You might now have a more developed infrastructure. I think to imagine that what Stalin achieved was some kind of triumph is to ignore how Russia could have developed differently.
Even the war—Stalin started the war. He and Hitler divided Europe between them in 1939 at the time of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. They jointly invaded Poland and the Baltic states. It was Stalin's decision to do that that allowed Hitler two years in which to invade Western Europe. And the Soviet Union—the Russian people—then paid the price. They then suffered when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, for which the Soviet Union was basically unprepared. The many, many millions of people who died all died unnecessarily. Had Stalin not participated, had he not had a union with Hitler at the beginning, then maybe [those people] would be alive today.
RFE/RL: It is interesting that even people like Putin who praise Stalin as "an effective manager" don't have anything good to say about Stalinism or advocate a return to Stalinism.
Applebaum: I don't think anyone wants to revive the system that Stalin created. Of course, it still exists in some places in attenuated form. North Korea, as far as I can tell, is potentially a Stalinist system, for example. But no, Stalinism doesn't hold any appeal for Putin. What he is trying to do is to cherry-pick Stalin's record, to focus on elements of the Soviet period that he wants to celebrate because he wants to rally Russians behind him; he wants to create a sense of patriotism because he wants, in some ways, to renovate himself.
He worked for many years in the KGB, which was the secret-police branch of the Soviet Communist Party, and the KGB was responsible for the Gulag and [its predecessor organizations] did create the terror of 1937 and the waves of other terror before and after that. So he is looking for elements of that past to rehabilitate. But nobody has suggested reviving the entire system. It probably, it couldn't be done now because you can't cut off Russia in the way you could before. And it would be suicidal. It is widely acknowledged that it was an economic disaster for the country.
1 March 2013
Two girls grow up together, friends and allies, in a decrepit Dickensian orphanage. When they turn 18 and have to leave, one goes abroad in search of work, while the other, after drifting for a while and out of other options, enters a monastery led by a charismatic monk and becomes a nun. After a few years the émigré returns to visit her friend and finds her changed, a bit distant.
That is the starting point of the Romanian director Cristian Mungiu's "Beyond the Hills," which won two top prizes at the Cannes Film Festival last year and opens in New York on Friday. Before long, however, the story takes a series of odd and increasingly menacing turns, as the viewer is plunged into a circumscribed world in which the word "iconoclast" recovers its original Greek meaning, and exorcism is a tool that true believers wield in hopes of keeping apostasy at bay.
"For me it was very important to see all the things this story can reveal," Mr. Mungiu, one of the leading exponents of what has come to be known as the Romanian new wave, said in an interview in New York last fall. "Actually I am speaking about people who are condemned from Moment 1," he added. "There's nothing much for them to do in life."
"Beyond the Hills" is based on a pair of best-selling "nonfiction novels" by the Romanian writer Tatiana Niculescu Bran, a former Bucharest correspondent and editor for the BBC. The books, in turn, are a dispassionate examination of a notorious real-life incident that took place in a Romanian Orthodox monastery near Romania's northeastern border with Moldova, in the spring of 2005.
In that case a 23-year-old novitiate nun began hearing voices, which she believed were the Devil talking to her. After efforts to solve her problem failed, her fellow believers bound her to a cross, gagged her with a towel and left her for three days without food in a damp and chilly room at the monastery, where she died of suffocation and dehydration.
While in New York in 2007 to promote his award-winning abortion drama "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," Mr. Mungiu saw a stage production based on Ms. Niculescu Bran's book, mounted by the acclaimed Romanian-American director Andrei Serban at the East Village theater La MaMa with her collaboration. At dinner afterward Mr. Serban, a theater professor at Columbia, said he could feel Mr. Mungiu's fascination with many of the same themes that had also attracted him.
"In the international press a big deal was made of this as an act of witchcraft in the country of Dracula, how could this behavior from medieval times happen in a European country in the 21st century, and all that nonsense," Mr. Serban said. "But what touched me on a deeper level in the book, and which is beautifully portrayed in the movie, is that everyone wants to do good, but this is not possible, and everything ends up in tragedy."
As in Mr. Mungiu's two previous films, "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days" and "Tales of the Golden Age," Romania is depicted as a deeply dysfunctional society. Under the rule of Nicolai Ceausescu orphanages like the one where the girls met were notorious for their neglect and abuse, and the modern-day health care system in which the victim was enmeshed was unresponsive and ineffectual. By the end an encounter with a byzantine justice system also looms.
"People used to ask, 'So who's guilty?,' and who is guilty are all the institutions present in the film," Mr. Mungiu said. "And there is something else about such misfortunes. When you live in a very civilized society and something bad happens, it's an awful thing, and you will react. But when you live in a very poor society where awful things happen every day, this becomes like the way things happen, and you are desensitized."
Still, Mr. Mungiu cautioned against reading the film as a condemnation of Romanian society. His real target, he said, is "any kind of fanaticism," religious or otherwise.
"I think this is a local story speaking about things that are very general," he said. "What people are asked to do in the name of love for God, for example, this is the same in a lot of different religions" and often leads to intolerance and authoritarianism. "I don't think this belongs to a society that is underdeveloped," he added. "I think this can be understood to speak about things in a more general way."
When it came time to cast "Beyond the Hills" Mr. Mungiu took a bold gamble. The role of the monk was no problem: he had written the part specifically for Valeriu Andriuta, a collaborator on two previous films who was at the time working as a gardener in Ireland, telling him to grow his beard before even beginning on the script.
But for the twin lead roles of Alina and Voichita, Mr. Mungiu chose a pair of actresses with limited experience. Cristina Flutur, 34, cast as the seemingly tougher Alina after Mr. Mungiu saw her Facebook page, and Cosmina Stratan, 28, had never made a film.
At Cannes last year the women ended up sharing the prize for best actress, with Mr. Mungiu winning the best screenplay award, so his instincts proved correct. But initially, with supporters of the Romanian Orthodox Church predicting that Mr. Mungiu intended to make an anti-religious film, they felt some trepidation about signing on.
"There was a little moment of doubt, because it's a taboo issue, such a heavy subject," Ms. Flutur said. "I'm from a religious family, with a religious background, and she's doing things that are judged very negatively by the Orthodox community. I was aware of the case, and I knew it would be a controversial character also, that many Orthodox people won't probably like, will even hate, because they will not get under the surface and to the profound level of the character."
In the movie it is clear that the two women forged a strong emotional bond in their early years, with Alina acting to protect the more vulnerable Voichita from bullies and rapists. But erotic undercurrents in some scenes suggest that the women may have been lovers, not just friends or nearly sisters.
Alina returns from Germany "because of love," Ms. Flutur said. "Because no matter what you have, no matter where you go, if you don't have love, you don't have enough. You can have a house, family, whatever, but if it's not based on love, it's nothing."
Mr. Mungiu said he deliberately cultivated the ambiguity about the women's relationship, even leaving his two actresses guessing. "They were very close together, but it's not important for the story to make precisely clear if the relationship was sexual," he said.
"Beyond the Hills" was filmed on location last winter, with Mr. Mungiu pushing his cast and himself to meet an ambitious deadline that would allow him to edit the film to two and a half hours to have it ready for showing at Cannes. As a result he shot even in the midst of blinding snowstorms, a choice that helped give the film a bleakly beautiful look that echoes the mood of the story.
"All those shots in the snow are so beautifully filmed that it reminds me of a romantic old Russian film," Mr. Serban said. "Even though the movie is cold, it has warm images, and the camera work is extremely lush, in the style of 'Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors.' "
For long stretches "Beyond the Hills" also has an air of atemporality. The monk and his followers shun most of the conveniences of modern life, subsisting in medieval simplicity and isolation and cultivating beliefs to match, so when outsiders drive up in a battered Ceausescu-era Dacia or a cellphone suddenly rings, the effect is jolting.
Ms. Flutur recalled a showing of the film at a festival in Vienna where a member of the audience "was very angry such a thing could happen in Romania in the 21st century." That, she said, is precisely the wrong lesson to take away from "Beyond the Hills."
"It's very comfortable to say, 'Oh it's Romanian, we don't have that here.' It's very easy, and you just detach yourself from something which is everywhere. Because this film is also about violence and how violence enters under the guise of good intentions. They really believed they were doing a good thing."
8 February 2013
Romanian photographer Andrei Pungovschi received an Award of Excellence and ranked fourth in the portrait category in this year's Pictures of the Year International photojournalism competition. His winning picture, of a five-year old autistic boy riding the train early in the morning to Bucharest, 100 kilometers away from his home, was shot for an autism feature in the Romanian non-fiction magazine Decat o Revista – DoR.
Pictures of the Year International, a program of the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism, only posted the wining pictures, without mentioning the names of the photographers as many images are entered in multiple categories and the judging will only end on February 26. All the portrait category winners here.
Andrei Pungovschi is a photojournalist based in Bucharest, Romania. He holds a BA in journalism from the University of Bucharest and studied photojournalism at the University of Missouri, on a Fulbright scholarship. His work has been recognized by Pictures of the Year International, College Photographer of the Year, The Missouri Press Association and Norhtwest Regional Emmy.
5 February 2013
Cabinet Minister Baroness Warsi made a half-hearted attempt on BBC Question Time (31 January) to refute the rumour that our government plans to actively discourage Bulgarian and Romanian immigrants from coming to the UK when restrictions are relaxed next year. But it was too late, the horse had already bolted.
Last week the idea crossed the continent in all its arrogant glory and Romanians duly responded with a dollop of humour. 'Half our women look like Kate. The other half, like her sister.' Under the slogan 'We may not like Britain, but you will love Romania. Why don't you come over?' the website gandul invited readers to contribute to a viral poster campaign enticing Brits to sample the delights of Romania. 'We have Dracula, you have David Cameron.' 'Charles bought a house here in 2005. And Harry has never been photographed naked once.' What else could they do? Romanians are used to coming bottom of the European pile. I know, I'm married to one. He lives in Britain, and is often told he 'sounds English' - lucky chap. For those back in Romania, life isn't as straightforward. Common obstacles include a 25% pay cut across the public sector, the lowest wages in the EU, endemic corruption and a shoddy infrastructure. Britain's xenophobic outpouring this week, driven by scaremonger headlines and Tory angst, is just the latest knock for a country that is desperately trying to find its feet.
Romanians are poor, but they are also well educated. It is a toxic mix. Believe it or not most don't want to leave their family, their friends, their culture, they do so because they are frustrated with the lack of opportunities in their homeland. Since the Revolution in 1989 its estimated three million workers have already left Romania. Britain was not their first port of call; more popular destinations include Italy, Germany, France and Spain (before the crash). In the last 20 years young educated Romanians have proved much more adaptable than their nation's sick, struggling economy. That this ex-communist country has already haemorrhaged huge numbers of people - so many, a Romanian politician wanted to pay them to come home - is 'good news' for anxious Brits. There might not be enough willing Romanians left for the predicted flood next year. But, anti-British campaign or not, there will be a trickle.
The idea that we can keep Romanians out by waggling our economic woes at a country where the average salary is scarcely 300 euros per month, (doctors are lucky if they get more than 400 euros) is deeply patronising. Our rain and recession can't argue with basic economics. Romania is broke, limping along on an IMF bailout; Britain is one of the richest countries in the world. Romania is lumbered with no democratic heritage, a mafia style political system and a closed-off communist past; Britain meanwhile boasts the 'Mother of all Parliaments' (and an unelected queen). Young Romanians look to the West not only for a way out but also for experience. How else does a fledgling democracy learn? Isn't that one of the great visions behind the EU?
Surely even Europhobic little Britain wouldn't want to alienate the second largest country in South East Europe? After all there is nothing we like more than hopping about on the military stage and Romania is a good point from which to keep an eye on the unpredictable Balkans (and has proved a willing assistant in Afghanistan and Iraq). It is also the last bastion before that vast, vague and unsettling space left behind by the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Not to mention the country's considerable economic potential. Romania boasts the sixth highest density of certified information technology specialists in a world, (Britain doesn't come close), and their plentiful primary resources make them closer to energy self-sufficiency than any European country other than Russia. They are friends worth keeping I would suggest. Indeed, with a bit of EU help Romania might even reclaim its one-time title as the grain basin of Europe. I know Britain's politicians revel in short-termism (the shimmering horizon rarely stretches more than five years into the distance) but surely it is in our interests to stay in with this tenacious, educated people and their extensive rich landmass? Jokes aside, they are quite keen to be friends with us. They speak good English. And I can confirm, their women (the thinnest in Europe), have a certain royal quality.
Tessa Dunlop's memoir To Romania with Love is published by Quartet Books.
1 February 2013
A Romanian media campaign called "Why don't you come over?" is poking fun at British anxiety about a possible influx of Romanian job-seekers next year.
The news website Gandul boasts in English: "Half of our women look like Kate. The other half, like her sister."
The pro-Romania campaign is a response to British media reports that the UK government is considering negative ads about Britain to put off migrants.
UK curbs on workers from Bulgaria and Romania are set to be lifted next year.
The last Labour government agreed transitional controls on immigration from the two Balkan countries when they joined the European Union in 2007, but these expire next year.
Kate Middleton - the Duchess of Cambridge and wife of Prince William - is not the only British royal featured in Gandul's playful campaign.
Another Gandul ad notes that Prince Charles bought a house in Romania in 2005. He is known to be a big fan of Romania's Transylvania region and its rural traditions.
Gandul also boasts that "our draft beer is less expensive than your bottled water".
Another ad refers to the hugely popular British TV show Top Gear, whose presenter praised a highway in Romania.
The campaign teases the British with the words: "We may not like Britain, but you'll love Romania".
How many will come?
Media reports say the UK government is considering restricting access to public services for future migrants, among potential responses to the easing of immigration rules.
Next year Bulgaria and Romania will enjoy the same rights as the other 25 EU member states in the European labour market.
The think tank Migration Watch, which supports tighter immigration controls, estimates that about 50,000 people from Romania and Bulgaria will come to the UK each year until 2019 and that this will have "significant consequences" for housing and jobs.
The EU's eastward enlargement in 2004 brought a huge wave of East Europeans to the UK, at a time when only two other EU countries - Sweden and the Republic of Ireland - were allowing unrestricted access to their labour markets.
Most of the new EU jobseekers in the UK were from Poland - in numbers far greater than had been predicted by the UK government at the time.
Socialist MEPs from Bulgaria and Romania have sent a letter to EU Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, voicing concern about possible UK moves to keep restrictions in place.
The letter, quoted in Bulgarian media, says: "We are facing the danger of citizens of the newest member states being prevented from exercising their rights guaranteed to them by EU treaties."
"What is more, we believe that a wave of hostile statements since the beginning of the year aims to stigmatise these citizens as second-class Europeans who pose a threat to the social systems, just because they want to exercise their basic rights to free movement and work."
The letter was supported by the chair of the Socialists and Democrats (S&D) group in the European Parliament, Hannes Swoboda.
23 January 2013
Park City, Utah (Reuters) - Shia LaBeouf and Evan Rachel Wood spin a twist on classic fairytales in their new film "The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman," a modern day love story that swaps castles in the sky for the underbelly of Romania's capital, Bucharest.
The film, which premiered at Sundance Film Festival this week, is a dark story of love unfolding between two unlikely people against the backdrop of a violent and crime-filled eastern European city.
Charlie (LaBeouf), an American, finds himself on a journey of self-discovery that takes him to Bucharest, where he meets the mysterious and captivating Gabi (Evan Rachel Wood), and puts his life on the line for love.
"Love is always the easiest answer, but somehow it's the hardest place to get for some people. I love the contrast of this world, which is filled with violence and hatred and crime, and above all there's love," Wood said.
Director Fredrick Bond picked Bucharest because he was looking for a place that has not been captured in film prominently, and would compliment the complex nature of Charlie and Gabi's story.
"Charlie has to go through quite a tough journey and a very romantic journey, so I needed a city that had an edge," he said.
Wood, 25, said the connection that Charlie and Gabi feel the moment they meet resonated with her because that is what she felt for her husband, actor Jamie Bell, when they first met at Sundance and started dating in 2005.
"It's almost this karmic connection, this kindred spirit, this soulmate of some sort, where he looks at her and he immediately falls in love. He's never said a word to her - that really happens. That's how I met my husband," Wood said.
"We fell in love immediately, because it was almost meant to be, it was fate."
"Charlie Countryman" is the feature film debut from Swedish director Bond, an award-winning creator of commercials. Bond said he was eager to work with LaBeouf and Wood, calling them the "most talented young actors of their generation."
"They have such a sense of truthfulness," Bond said. "It's a wild, crazy journey, I needed actors who could ground their performances ... Evan and Shia are about truth."
LaBeouf, a former child star who became a box office staple as the lead in the "Transformers" franchise, has been taking on grittier roles more recently, such as a bootlegger in gangster drama "Lawless."
The 26-year-old actor said he had been drawn to the role of Charlie when he read the script three years ago.
"It spoke honestly to me, it was really original. It had a Zsa Zsa Gabor narrative and it just read like 'The Graduate' with a bloody nose," he said.
Wood, who shot to fame as the troubled young lead of teen drama "Thirteen" in 2003, said she had wanted to work with LaBeouf for a long time.
For the role of Gabi, a complex Romanian cellist who has a penchant for bad boys, Wood had to perfect a Romanian accent without the help of a dialect coach, turning to her surroundings in Bucharest to draw inspirations.
"It's very stressful because you want to do it justice, and I wanted it to be spot-on because a lot of times, it can be very distracting. You can overdo the accent," the actress said.
The film co-stars Mads Mikkelsen and Til Schweiger as Romanian mobsters, with British actors Rupert Grint, best known as Ron Weasley in the "Harry Potter" movies, and James Buckley as Charlie's errant friends.
Bond said the biggest filming challenges were the action-packed fight scenes, especially because LaBeouf did his own stunts.
"Shia wants to do everything for real, so he takes hits for real ... which is fantastic, because it gives a reality to it, but you also have only so many takes, you have to be really well prepared to do it," Bond said.
"Charlie Countryman" may defy the archetype of a traditional love story with its fierce characters in a harsh yet beautiful setting, but LaBeouf and Wood said they hoped audiences would take away messages of honesty in love from the film.
(Reporting By Piya Sinha-Roy; Editing by Patricia Reaney and Mohammad Zargham)
16 January 2013
This book had its starting point in the correspondence between Mihai from Romania and Yvette from Sweden, between the years 1985-2011. This friendship made a big impact on both their lives, despite only meeting in person once for an hour in Mamaia, Romania in 1985 (in picture).
The first part looks at Communism through the eyes of two teenagers, Mihai in closed Romania and Yvette in open Sweden. Dreams about going abroad glues the second part together. Mihai wants to get out of Romania for the simple reason of living his life in a free, open and democratic society, Yvette for the lust for adventure and seeing the world. The last part is about new Europe and the new Europeans, the Eastern Europeans and more specifically the Romanians. How do attitudes towards Eastern Europe still color views in the West? The last part also brings the adult Mihai and adult Yvette into the Romania of today, which still struggles, but could be blossoming with all the resources the country has.
Below is a first extract from the book:
The family lived in Constanta, by the Black Sea. As a matter of fact, only ten minutes away from the sea. The house had 4 rooms, bathroom, hallway, kitchen,1 small warehouse in the back, 2 separate small rooms outside and you could store things between the roof and ceiling. Outside they kept a vegetable garden.
They had a few chickens, a few ducks and geese. They had plenty of vegetables: tomatoes, cucumber, green beans, hot peppers, paprikas, grape vines , herbs like mint, basil, thyme, dill, parsley. They had green spring onion, yellow onion, potatoes, fruit trees such as a fig tree, which split and went dry then died exactly on the day Stan died.
The family also had beautiful roses! Angelina made rose confiture from the big, thick petals. How wonderful that must have been, in Ceausescu's Romania, to have the joy of smelling the making of the confiture and the tasting of that heavenly jam. Some colour in the grey.
Their home had a nice outside area with a grape vine hanging over a patio. For hot summer days this was a great place to sit under, eat and talk. Summers were indeed long and could be very hot. Commonly summer was playing around +30-40 C degrees in Constanta.
Nina had a pleasant and friendly, yet very strong and focused personality. She was working and teaching up in Zamostea. The 1970s were times when Ceausescu's Communism controlled the Romanian society. For example, at work—places short skirts were not allowed among women, but the stories told by her ex-colleagues, reveal that Nina was truly revolutionary and courageous at all levels. She put her short skirts on, taught biology and all her students and all staff loved her for her omnipresent boldness.
However,one of her colleagues ratted her out to the Ministry of Education, so they sent an inspector to check on her. The inspector came, and was told by Nina, to either get out of the classroom and wait until she finished teaching the class or stay in the class and be quiet.
The inspector got so impressed by her way of teaching that instead of punishing her for wearing short skirts, congratulated her and gave her the best reference.
This was unheard of at that time. The inspector must have been courageous too.
Nina's courage was at least praised! She went her own, fierce way. Paved the way. She had a strong spine and integrity.
A window to my soul is a book for people who are interested in the the development of the new Europe and wish to build positive collaborations between West and East, for those who are interested in leadership and for those who want to be inspired by a story of a very special friendship and love.
English is chosen to reach out to as many people as possible. The author Yvette Larsson holds a Masters of Arts in English and an Upper Secondary School Teacher diploma in English. She has also lived 3 years in London and spent 6 months in Manchester on a University exchange programme.
Yvette Larsson is Swedish, born 1972 in Gällivare, Lapland. Between the years 1991-1998 she studied English, Swedish, Education, Media & Communication and Science Journalism at the University of Umeå.
Her University studies were followed by one year in Stockholm and 13 years abroad. Her first overseas move was to French Reunion Island, followed by Stavanger/Bergen, Norway; Cassis/Aix-en-Provence, France; London, UK; and now Copenhagen, Denmark.
Her continuous education constitutes of numerous courses within the field of Sports and Health and she dedicated ten years to Sports Management. When the children came she trained to become a Coach and Leadership Trainer, passionate about making individuals and organisations the best they can be, and she had her own practice for four years.
She runs the blog and a Facebook page called The Bucharest Lounge, where she displays the beauty and meaning of Romania, seen through the eyes of a Swede.
11 January 2013
ASTOR PLACE HAIRSTYLISTS has gone through many changes since it became, in the early 1980s, the renowned East Village hip haircut factory, but one constant has been Valentino Gogu, 65, who has been cutting hair at the shop for nearly three decades.
Mr. Gogu puts in 12-hour days, seven days a week, with no vacations, except for the half-dozen holidays a year that the shop is closed.
"What else am I going to do with myself?" asked Mr. Gogu, a Romanian immigrant.
After arriving by subway from Ridgewood, Queens, where he lives alone in a railroad apartment, he settles into his longtime corner stall, surrounded by hip-hop haircutters, punk-rock stylists and Latina blow-dry specialists. Amid all this is Mr. Gogu, with his old-world charm and accent, his devoted clientele of men and women, and his equally indefatigable scissors and mouth.
No one in the shop can remember the last time he willingly took a day off. Well, he once came in a little late.
"We were all waiting here wondering, 'What's wrong? You think he's O.K.?' " recalled Mike Saviello, the shop's burly floor manager, who is known as "Big Mike."
Another time, Mr. Gogu had heart palpitations and agreed to see a doctor.
"He was back two hours later, cutting hair," said John Vezza, who helps run the shop, which his grandfather opened in the 1940s.
Mr. Gogu said he had no family in America and nearly no social life. He spent a miserable week off recently, when the shop closed during the recent blackout in Lower Manhattan after Hurricane Sandy, he said.
"I couldn't sleep. I stayed home watching TV all day and night," he said.
His customers are his life, and because of his constant presence, he may have the most regulars of any barber in the shop. Of his hundreds of steady clients, dozens have been coming for nearly 30 years, including a 105-year-old woman and a billionaire real estate developer, he said.
"Customers don't have to call for an appointment — they know I'm always here," he said on Thursday, pausing to rub ointment into the narrow fingers of his scissor hand.
"I never see daylight, but I enjoy always seeing new faces in this place — it's never boring," he said. Posted above his mirror are dozens of pictures of customers and their children. Next to one shot of a mop-topped teenager is a picture of a well-coiffed Sheldon Silver, the longtime speaker of the New York State Assembly, who has been coming every month for years.
Even Mr. Gogu, who often vetoes customers' coiffure decisions, cannot persuade one of the most powerful elected officials in the state to change his hairstyle.
"Very powerful man, but a straight-ahead guy — no left, no right," he said of Mr. Silver.
If prodded, Mr. Gogu will reveal a few celebrity stories. He claims to have given a young Anthony Michael Hall a geeky cut for one of his teen films in the 1980s, and to have cropped Hilary Swank's hair for her Oscar-winning role as Brandon Teena in "Boys Don't Cry."
"When she came in here, she was this skinny," he said, sticking up his pinkie.
Now a female customer came in for a reshaping of her short haircut, and Mr. Gogu asked her: "You want Jamie Lee Curtis, or Mia Farrow?"
Mr. Gogu said that he split his fees — haircuts start at $16 — with the shop's owners, and that he sent part of his income to his family in Romania. Even a workaday life in New York City is better than living under Communism in Romania, where he grew up in a labor camp watching his parents work long hours on a farm, he said.
In high school, he began cutting hair as an alternative to factory work, and after 15 years as a barber, he drove to Germany, entered a refugee residence and was eventually sent to the United States as a political asylum seeker. Speaking no English, he settled in Ridgewood, where he could speak German, Russian and Romanian with locals. He began learning English from customers at several hair shops and finally at Astor Place.
"He flirts with every woman who sits in this chair," said Judy Rosenblatt, an actress from Greenwich Village who was now in Mr. Gogu's chair.
She told Mr. Gogu, "I'm doing a film next week so don't cut too much."
He called her "a pain in the neck," and soon they were squabbling like a married couple.
"He doesn't obey you," she said. "He says, 'Yeah, yeah,' and then he does what he wants."
"Come on," he responded. "I know your hair for 25 years."
"You see?" she said. "This is why people come from all over the world for Valentino."
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