Radio România Internațional

Tag: communities

  • A taste of Dobruja

    A taste of Dobruja

    There are 14 ethnic minorities living together in Dobruja, a region located between the Danube and the Black Sea. Dobruja is also home to the largest Turkish-Tartar minority in Romania, due to the fact that this province had been under Ottoman rule for more than four centuries. The area is also home to communities of Lipovan Russians and Ukrainians, who live in a number of localities here.



    Our story begins on the bank of Golovita Lake, near the Romanian Black Sea coast, in a village called Vișina, which stands out due to the cultural events held here. It all started after Bianca Folescu, who used to live in a city, decided to buy a holiday home in the village of Visina. Quite unexpectedly, this new home opened her taste for local traditions. Bianca Folescu and she tells us more about it: ”This was not a sudden decision. Everything happened in time. The first step was to buy the house in the village of Visina for me and my children, a quiet place to relax on weekends. Little by little, I fell in love with this place, its traditions and customs and I started to understand what living at the countryside meant and, more importantly, that the simplicity of life here was a treasure I was about to discover. That was the moment when I first considered moving here for good. Of course, the entire household was extended, so spending a lot of time here was not only something I loved doing, but something that was needed. It was not an easy decision to move from the city to the countryside, and it brought along many changes, but I think it was one of the best decisions of my life.”



    Bianca Folescu gave up the comfort of the city for a simple way of living. She learned to make the fire in the stove, got to know her neighbors better and learned everything she could about the community. She has central heating now and the other villagers took her example: ”This was not a village with any notoriety so I tried to steer the activity of a Bulgarian dance ensemble that was till keeping traditions here in the village, to make it more visible. Things have developed in time. It is a very beautiful ensemble, made up of women and children, so I had great interaction with an important part of the villagers.”




    Bianca Folescu also became a promoter of local gastronomy: ”I took part in certain events and I organized events centered around local gastronomy. There is a mix of ethnic communities here, so I did not stop at Bulgarian gastronomy alone, but I also included Tartar and Romanian dishes. The challenge was, however, to find all sorts of products, with various names, which are easy to make. Dishes based on vegetables and pies are such examples.”




    Refurbishing her own house, the interior in particular, gave Bianca Folescu the idea of opening a small museum in a house close to hers: ”The museum has five rooms, each with its own specificity. The village of Visina is in the middle, then there is the Bulgarian room, then the Lipovan room, the Dobruja room, because the Romanian community forms the majority, the Oriental room, for the Turks and the Tartars and, finally, the Aromanian room. Each room is decorated in the particular style of the ethnic groups it represents, combining original objects, found in the respective communities, with new objects, that imitate the original ones. ”



    The furniture objects, the curtains, kitchen towels and tools exhibited in the household were donated by the villagers. Bianca Folescu learned a lot from the local craftsmen, from embroidery to pottery and traditional architecture, and she started collaborating with folk art museums in Constanta and Tulcea. (EE)



  • FOCUS, a project for children

    FOCUS, a project for children

    Many Romanian rural communities have been in the attention of NGOs lately, that tried to ease the access of children to education. Thus, teachers have been sent to areas where they were needed the most. This gave the PATRUPETREI team the idea to hold a number of short film workshops for the children in Calarasi county, as part of a project dubbed FOCUS.



    Andrei Dudea, the leader of the PATRUPETREI team, has given us details: ”The FOCUS project consists in fact in several documentary film workshops, for children aged 10 to 14. We hold theory workshops, because we want to develop their critical spirit. This means that we get together, watch films or other media products children usually like, such as music videos. Children particularly like vlogging and mainstream music. When we watch documentaries, we try to analyse them, discuss the lead roles, the topic approached and the way the film was made. We discuss general staff and not get into technical details given that most children participating in these workshops are aged 11 or 12. We try to show them that editing, and music can influence a lot a media product. We are trying to make them understand this, because an important part of this project is to develop their critical spirit. ”




    After the theoretical approach, the practical part follows. Andrei Dudea: “We hold some practical workshops, which means that we go to them with the camera and teach them to film, to pick a theme for their project. As an example, the most frequent themes are about football. All boys wanted to make films about football in the communities we visited. After we help them pick a theme, we teach them how to work with a camera and let them take cameras home and work independently. So, they work with the mentor first to learn the basics and then do it by themselves or in small teams. This is important, because this also helps them become more responsible.”



    Andrei Dudea has said the idea is mostly to develop children’s self-confidence: ”Our main interest is to make them learn about responsibility. In this case, participants in the workshop learn about building a project and how it can be carried out. I believe it is important for the project to be completed, no matter how interesting or uninteresting it may be. We also work on building their confidence. We have held three workshops so far and the fourth one follows. We have found two very talented children among the ones we worked with. ”



    The second edition of the FOCUS — film workshop for adolescents was held during the pandemic, which prompted some changes in how the project unfolded, part of it being held online. A mini-documentary was made on this topic, about how the young people delt with the changes around them and the challenges they faced when schools were closed and they started online classes. Children learned how to tell their own story by means of cinema, with the support of their mentors, Andrei Dudea and Ruxandra Gubernat.



    According to Andrei Dudea, children know more than we would expect about films: “Children are today much more exposed to the media, they have mobile phones, they make videos, go on TikTok, Instagram and they know how to express their ideas. ”



    The short films made by children were turned into a documentary that also shows glimpses of rural life during the pandemic and the reaction of villagers to lockdown.The project will continue this year in a Rroma community in Calarasi.

  • Interethnic Cohabitation in Greater Romania

    Interethnic Cohabitation in Greater Romania

    In 1918, the newly-formed Greater Romania incorporated minority communities accounting for 28% of its total population. These communities would cohabitate with the majority based on the system of legal provisions, but also on traditional, unwritten customs. For half a century, the relationships between the ethnic minorities and the majority population in Romania unfortunately covered the whole range of possible forms, from tolerance to genocide.



    Historian Ioan Scurtu reviews the relationships that the Romanian majority population had with the ethnic minorities in the first half of the 20th century, actually until the end of World War Two. His overview begins with the circumstances in which the World War One peace treaties were signed.



    Ioan Scurtu: “At the Peace Conference held in Paris in 1919-1920, the underlying assumption was the observation of the national principle, in the sense that the states that emerged from the debris of the Hapsburg and the Russian Empire were supposed to be nation states. But as reality proved, no state could be a pure entity, in terms of its ethnic make-up. Romanias ethnic structure comprised fewer minorities than, for instance, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, which had a substantial percentage of national minorities. Over the centuries, all sorts of minorities had settled on the territory of 1918 Romania. In Dobruja, Turks, Tartars and Bulgarians had been brought by the Ottoman Empire, which governed that region from 1417 to 1878. In Bessarabia, in the east, the Russian Empire brought in Russian, Jewish, Ukrainian, Bulgarian and Gagauz settlers. In turn, Transylvania had been colonized by Saxons and Szecklers, in Bukovina Germans, Jews and Ukrainians arrived, so a complex national structure had taken shape in the long run. Romanians had taken in and hosted minorities that were persecuted in their countries of origin, as is the case of Jews, who were persecuted and subject to massacres known as pogroms in Poland and Russia. There was a mosaic of nationalities, but none of them accounted for even 10 percent of the total population.



    One of the minorities turned into a bone of contention was the Hungarian one. Ioan Scurtu specifically focused on the issue of the optants of Transylvania.



    Ioan Scurtu: “The optants were those inhabitants of Transylvania who, under the Treaty of Trianon, were given the right to choose the Hungarian citizenship and moved to Hungary. Following the enforcement of the agrarian reform in Romania through expropriation of big farms and the distribution of land to peasants, Hungarian landowners lost their land, just as the Romanian landowners did. The land was distributed to Hungarian and Romanian peasants, as well as to Ukrainians, Russians, Bulgarians or other nationalities. But the optants claimed they had been wronged and sued the Romanian state. They were backed by the Hungarian government, and they filed a complaint to the League of Nations. This was nothing but a form of instigation by the Hungarian government, which sought to make the European public believe that there were problems in Transylvania after it joined Romania. Under the Hague Convention of 1932, the optants were awarded damages, to be paid by the Hungarian government out of the amount that the Hungary had to pay to Romania as war reparations.



    The second exception from the generally good cohabitation between the ethnic majority and the minorities in Romania involved the Bulgarians.



    Ioan Scurtu: After the 1913 Treaty of Bucharest that ended the Second Balkan War, Romania annexed the area known as Cadrilater, a region inhabited by a large Bulgarian community. There was no ethnic majority in Cadrilater, where Romanians, Bulgarians and Turks were living together on equal footing. The Bulgarian authorities however claimed not only the Cadrilater region, but the entire region of Dobruja, in the southeast, and used the Bulgarian peasants there as agents to support these claims. The same propaganda was used by the Bulgarian Communist Party, in the 3rd Communist International, in which Gheorghi Dimitrov had an important role. So basically the goals of the Hungarian and Bulgarian revisionists converged, and in 1940 Romania actually lost some of its territory.



    The Jewish minority had to suffer the most because of the interwar political climate, with most Jewish communities being literally exterminated, although Ioan Scurtu says that until the mid-1930s the relations between the Romanians and Jews had been normal.



    Ioan Scurtu: “I believe there is excessive emphasis these days on the idea of conflicts, pogroms and so on. I cannot agree with that, there are no documents writing about conflicts between Romanians and Jews in the interwar period. It is true that after 1934-1935, against the backdrop of the increase in far-right movements, especially after Hitler came to power in 1933, Romania saw a rise in nationalism, which was aimed at strengthening the Romanian nation and eliminating the other national minorities, at making Romania a country of Romanians, as the nationalists claimed. What happened after 1940 was not the result of normal developments in the Romanian society. During the military far-right regime of Antonescu, measures were indeed taken against the Jewish community. In 1941 the authorities reached as far as to take actions aimed at the physical destruction of the Jews. These were the most reprehensible actions of the Antonescu government. They forced the Jews from Bukovina and Bessarabia to leave their homes and go to Transdniester without any justification.


    (translated by: Eugen Nasta, Lacramioara Simion)