Category: The History Show

The belief in the involvement of terrorists and foreign secret services in the Romanian anti-communist revolution of December 1989 has become a national obsession that has dominated public perception of the most important event in the country’s recent history. The bloodshed in December 1989, the painful changes and the disappointment that followed have given rise to negative feelings about this event. We asked the historian Adrian Cioroianu from the Faculty of History of the Bucharest University who were these terrorists that everybody talked about in December 1989?

“At the time, we all believed terrorists were involved. They may have been mercenary troops from Arab countries or the so-called ‘Soviet tourists’. What we know with a certain degree of certainty today is that many of the people who fired guns in the few days before December 25th and sporadically even after this date could have been members of the Securitate, the secret police, who were still loyal to Nicolae Ceausescu. If we believe the conspiracy theory, we may speculate that it was all a big show to create the sensation of a revolution. It’s a theory I wouldn’t want to be true because it would mean that all those people were cynically sent to their death.”

People look at historians for a clear answer about the involvement of terrorists. The cautious explanations provided by the latter, are not, however, as convincing as the conspiracy theory. Adrian Cioroianu tells us about the difficulties facing historians in establishing what really happened:

“Until we have verifiable testimonies from the people who managed the situation at the time, historians will have a difficult task. We can but only record testimonies, but their credibility is questionable. People were in shock and there was a lot of chaos at the time, so it’s hard to distinguish between what is real and what is false. Historians, on the other hand, have to look for the truth. However, it’s almost impossible to arrive at the truth if the people who were in charge of the situation are not entirely truthful. The veterans of the intelligence services, who lost the war in December 1989, speak about a plot masterminded, according to some, by the Soviet Union itself. As long as we don’t have concrete evidence we can only speculate.”

The history of revolutions is full of counter-revolutionary elements opposing the revolutionary wave. However, the idea that terrorists were involved in the Romanian Revolution makes it an atypical event. Adrian Cioroianu does not agree:

“I don’t believe the Romanian revolution is atypical. What’s certain is that it was different from what happened in other East European states, such as Czechoslovakia, Hungary and the German Democratic Republic. We must accept that the existence of a national-communist regime, something Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia did not have, predisposes us to believe that there were people who plotted against Ceausescu and people who defended Ceausescu. With hindsight, this polarisation and division into two conflicting groups is to be expected. Romania’s case is somewhat similar to what happened in former Yugoslavia, which also had a national-communist regime and where it took a long time to break with Miloshevich’s communist regime. National-communism has always created such problems and led to such internal conflicts.”

Is it possible that Romanians will once start having more positive feelings about the anti-communist revolution of 1989? Adrian Cioroianu believes they will:

“I’m convinced that more and more Romanians will reach the commonsensical conclusion that, at least in its extraordinary unleashing of energy, what happened in December 1989 can be described as a revolution. We have tried to refer to it in neutral terms as ‘the events of December 1989’ precisely because we want to avoid using a generic term. However, I believe we should call it ‘revolution’ because it had the consequences of a revolution, regardless of the goals of the forces who may or may not have masterminded the coup against Ceausescu. In the future, we may also be able to discuss about the involvement of our neighbours. Normally, in any situation of this kind, when events of such magnitude happen in a country, the secret services of the neighbouring countries will be on the alert. It is to be assumed that the secret services of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Hungary paid close attention to what was going on in Romania. It was their duty to pay attention. Of course, it’s one thing to pay attention and an entirely different thing to become involved. It’s still not clear for us to what extent the Soviet Union was involved in the Romanian revolution. I’m convinced, however, that time heals all wounds, even in history.”

The Romanian revolution of December 1989 put an end to 45 years of communist dictatorship.

If there is a city that symbolizes the Romanian Revolution of 1989, it is Timisoara. On December 16th, its citizens decided that Romania had to change, that it could not stay the same while elsewhere in the communist bloc changes could not be stopped. With courage, determination and sheer heroism, people took to the streets to shout out their desire for freedom and a better life.

On the opposite side of the country, another city, Iasi, was preparing for a face off with Ceausescu’s regime. In the 1980s, a protest movement had formed there, made up of writers Dan Petrescu, Tereza Petrescu, Luca Pitu and Alexandru Calinescu. On 12 December 1989, economist Stefan Prutianu, with a few other Iasi intellectuals making up the Romanian Popular Front, spread out fliers in the city, summoning the people to a large protest march in Unirii Square, scheduled on December 14, at 16:00 hours. Since they were already under political police surveillance, they were arrested 10 hours before the demonstration. The first man arrested during the Romanian Revolution was Stefan Prutianu, the author of the proclamation written on the fliers. He taught economics at Cuza University in Iasi, and he told us that he expected to get arrested that day.

Groups of police, national guards and political police filled the square, and started arresting people by the dozen. The revolution in Iasi was smothered before it started. Historian Adrian Cioroianu, dean of the School of History of the Bucharest University, told us he believed that the revolution was bound to start not in the capital, but in a city close to a border, where there was stronger motivation to imitate Romania’s neighbors. Both Iasi and Timisoara fit the model proposed by Cioroianu:

Adrian Cioroianu: “I would point out a detail that meant that anti-Ceausescu movements were bound to happen in eccentric cities, close to our neighbors. Russia was the former USSR back then. Geographically, Iasi was closer to the eastern border and the former Soviet Republic of Moldova, where things were further down the road in terms of perestroika. Timisoara was similarly placed, but at the western border, so an authentic revolution might have broken out in Iasi as easily as it did in Timisoara. After all, Iasi was a center of protest, at least intellectuals there had already shown publicly opposition to the regime, which we only found out about after 1990. But protests may not have had the critical mass in Timisoara. In that city, the multitude of ethnicities and creeds was more suited to a protest engaging various religions and confessions, including Romanians. If Romanians had not come out into the streets in Timisoara, Ceausescu would have had the excuse of saying that this was foreign interference, which he did anyhow. The fact that Romanians protested in Timisoara gave a national and global nuance to this protest. What happened in Iasi is notable, but upon deeper analysis we can conclude that the best suited city for the revolution was a western one, like Timisoara.”

Timisoara spoke to the entire world of the aspirations of Romanians, and Adrian Cioroianu told us why Iasi did not have the advantage:

Adrian Cioroianu: “It lacked the seed of discontent, such as Tokes in Timisoara. We have to accept the fact that revolutions are not started by intellectuals. Intellectuals prepare them, but if they don’t have massive popular support, they don’t have much strength by themselves. The Tokes element gave the movement in Timisoara a combination of Romanian and Hungarian forces that was joined by the Germans and Serbians in the area, and the world was much more sensitive to the matter. When I say ‘the world’ I mean Western Europe as it was back then. This brought to an end the Ceausescu regime, which had been accused for a decade of anti-Hungarian and anti-German policies, by attempting to create uniformity in the country. From this point of view, Timisoara had an advantage that Iasi and other cities in the country did not.”

The Romanian revolution in Iasi resulted from a conspiracy of people who could not stand how things were any more, and the whole of society contributed tacitly. Timisoara and Bucharest are the cities where Romanians claimed their freedom, but the city of Iasi did not hesitate to respond to the signal that Romania’s future had to change.

Heavy industry was one of the pillars of the communist system, based on mining, steel and machine building. Mining, especially strip-mining, was believed to be the hardest economic activity, with extreme work conditions and a lot of work accidents and deaths. Since miners had a high level of solidarity, they had the potential of going on strikes, creating problems for the regime. Which is why they were offered high wages and a lot of social protection, but that came at the cost of being constantly under surveillance. Labor protection had a social factor, but also one of control. Accidents happened a lot, but the communist regime swept them under the rug.

Electrical engineer Petru Gherman, who was recorded by the Center for Oral History of Romanian Radio in 2003, told us about a fatal accident in a mine in Jiu Valley.

Petru Gherman: “We had this sloped mining equipment, digging at around 150 meters depth, self supported. It had pillars for self-support. I was operating a combine. At some point, a crevice about 17 meters formed, and buried my combine completely. I managed to get away, but one other miner, a young fellow, did not, and they dug him out three days later. His name was Vasile Muresan and I’ll never forget him. He was a great guy and we got along really well. Even though I was operating the combine that got caught, he was the one who got buried.”

Bokor Miklos became a miner not only because it was traditional in his family, but he also liked it. It would be tempting to believe that miners took on this risky job for the benefits. However, according to their testimonies, a lot of miners actually loved the job. This was the case for Bokor Miklos, who worked in the Aninoasa Mine, a depth mining facility.

In 2003 he told us how he broke his leg at work: “I worked there for 31 years, and there were two accidents underground during that time. One of them was a rock fracture and another was a mine collapse, a ceiling collapsing. We had a high degree slope, measuring 50 or 60 degrees. You can see how fast a boulder would roll on that kind of slope. A boulder fell from about 20 or 30 meters above me. I heard the noise, and I wanted to dodge it, but my leg was caught, and I had three toes broken. You can hear it coming a mile away. If you’re a miner and you have your wits about you, the earth speaks to you, so you know every time something fishy happens. You can hear the mine shedding tears, crying, and the boulder comes as if it were a tear. If it’s quiet, you realize that something is afoot, and you have time to get your people out.”

Mining accidents were major events, prompting investigations and trials. Engineer Iulian Costescu was a technical director at the Livezeni mine. In 1980, two explosions killed 53 workers. The first killed 32, the second 21. A labor protection commission which included officers of the Securitate (the former political police) investigated, and found him guilty.

Iulian Costescu: “That’s how it was back then, the higher ups, such as the mine director and head engineer, did hard time. Political police general Macri came to supervise everything. The minister of mines, Virgil Trofin, put me in charge of rescue. I had a row with Macri, he wanted to investigate right after the explosion. It was within my rights to bar him from doing that, there could have been another explosion, which had happened on other occasions, such as the one in Vulcan, where the accident killed even professors from the school of mining in Petrosani. Even the head of the school of mining security got killed like that. Macri indicted me and I was prosecuted. It lasted for a year, but I was acquitted. That morning, Paul Romanescu was the head of labor protection in that complex. They told him to go to the mine to check ventilation. He was a great guy. He went down in the mine. If I had gone with him, maybe it would not have happened. Maybe the measures I was taking would not have killed this many people. The explosion would have happened anyway, I believe, but maybe we could have gotten the people out. I don’t know what I would have done.”

Mining accidents did not scare people off, even though labor protection cannot guarantee lives will not be lost. One can never tame the depths of the earth, just as one cannot completely tame the depths of the ocean.

Targsorul Vechi is a place that has been inhabited for ages, boasting at least 600 years of documented history. Proof of that is the local archaeology park, where experts from the Vasile Parvan Institute of Bucharest are digging for artifacts. The reservation is even more important by the fact that school children come here to lend a hand to the grownups in the dig.

Targsorul Vechi has been documented as far back as the reign of Mircea the Elder (1386- 1418), considered the founder of the place. Bogdan Ciuperca is the head of the team that digs in Targsorul Vechi, and he introduced us to the earliest known facts about the dwelling.

Bogdan Ciuperca: “600 years ago, in a document found in Mircea the Elder’s chancellery, a commercial treaty between Wallachia and the burg of Brasov, the village of Targsor is mentioned, by its Slavonic name as such, and by its Latin name, which is Novum Forum. The two names are very significant. On the one hand we have the Slavonic name, Targsor, which is a diminutive, it means Small Town Fair, as compared to the name of the capital of the kingdom back then, Targoviste, which means Large Town Fair. The Latin version indicates that it was a new place, most probably established during the reign of Mircea the Elder. This ruler did a lot for Wallachia, and has everything to do with the emergence and development of Targsor.”

The archaeological dig has not yielded much, but it is enough to draw the attention of a history aficionado. The oldest traces of habitation are stone tools from the later Paleolithic. The Neolithic period is a blend of Cris, Boian and Gumelnita cultures, with painted ceramics. The Glina, Monteoru and Tei bronze cultures are followed by two Iron Age cultures, Halstatt and La Tene. The first ruins of buildings date back to the Roman era, a castrum and baths, built in the second century AD. The castrum was part of a fortified line stretching to the north, towards the sub-Carpathian area of Wallachia, built during the Dacian wars of 101-102 and 105-106 AD, with the purpose of controlling access ways to and from the Carpathian arch.

Dating back to the following century are the necropolises and funeral complexes which yielded ceramics, vestment accessories, jewelry and weapons belonging to Sarmatian tribes, of Iranian origin, which passed through in their migration.

Bogdan Ciuperca told us how Targsorul Vechi grew in economic importance during Mircea the Elder’s reign: “Targsorul was a princely fair, built on royal domains, and granted significant commercial privileges. It was also a customs, and in 1413 they were taxing the carts of fish caught in the marshes of Braila, going to Transylvania. Targsor has an important economic history. It was one of the three largest commercial fairs of Wallachia, and the main trading partner of the burg of Brasov. We can say that Targsorul Vechi is Mircea the Elder’s town, because he is the first ruler to document it. Paraphrasing historian Nicolae Iorga, Targsorul is ‘the Ploiesti before Ploiesti’. Before Ploiesti came into existence, there was Targsor, and Ploiesti owes its existence to it. Another connection with the illustrious ruler was Vlad the Impaler, aka Vlad Dracula, Mircea’s grandson, who in 1456 started his reign here after defeating the army of Vlad II, and was anointed ruler of Wallachia.”

The St. Nicholas princely church was erected by Vlad the Impaler in 1461, as Targsorul vechi is considered one of the main secondary residences of Wallachian rulers. Only the old foundation and the scriptorium have been preserved. In 1667, it was rebuilt by prince Antonie, who set up here Turnu Monastery, which was renovated and painted by order of ruler Constantin Brancoveanu around 1700. You can still see a good part of the walls and some of the original painting. In 1570, Alba church was built here, and in late 16th century, and during the rule of Mihnea Turcitul, the Red Church was built. Civil architecture is represented by the mansion of the Moruzi family, on the west north west edge of the reservation. It was erected in the early 20th century, in neo-Romanian style. The Moruzi family was the last owner, and they built there a modern farm on the Western model.

After 1945, decolonization became the main trend in international relations, as colonial domination started falling out of fashion fast. Decolonization, however, sparked violence and civil wars between factions trying to impose their own model of post-colonial development.

Africa’s break with its colonial past was supported by the USSR and China, communist countries seeking to control spheres of influence against capitalism. In most African colonies war was waged between communist guerrillas armed and financed by the communist bloc, who refused to negotiate with the other political groups. Like other communist states, Romania got involved in decolonizing Africa, trying to find an independent solution and betting on the unaligned movement, of which it was a part. Mircea Nicolaescu was ambassador in a few African and South American countries, and was a member of the Romanian delegation to the UN in the Decolonization Committee. In a 1996 interview with the Center for Oral History of the Romanian Broadcasting Corporation, he spoke of this issue:

“Romania’s relations with the former colonies were intense, even before WWII. They became even more intense after the war, especially as Romania tried to present itself to the world as an independent country, with its own politics, seeking alliances and common interests. One of the points in the agreements struck with those colonies, then countries, was their freedom, their right to choose their own path of development. The problem of the domestic system was always a part of our foreign relations documents.”

In case of civil conflicts, the solution chosen by Romanian diplomacy was of equal distance, of not taking sides.

“I Cairo there were few embassies visited by representatives of African freedom movements. All the liberation movements, irrespective of their political color, had a residence in Cairo in 1961-64. Both sides, the communist and the rightists, visited only a few embassies equally, that of Romania and those of two or three other countries. The Soviets had their clientele who supported the socialist regime. The Chinese also had their clientele, not to mention the Americans. The British and the French were compromised, and had less. Romania was the only country to make friends on both sides in civil wars such as in the Congo, Angola, Mozambique, Kenya, Zimbabwe. We always provided an open channel, but told them that it was their own business to sort things out.”

The African independence supported by Romania was not to the Soviets’ liking. It was also not realistic, and proof of that is its reduced impact, as Mircea Nicolaescu told us.

“When Angola proclaimed its independence, the Soviets called a meeting of all socialist embassies to agree on sending greetings to the new president elect. Romania’s representative, ambassador Gheorghe Stoian, was the only one to disagree, and went ahead of everyone to express his support for Angola’s independence. As long as the turmoil in that country lasted, we kept in touch with both movements when called upon, and always advised them to reach an agreement. The Soviets supported one side, the Americans the others, the Chinese sided with the Americans, and that caused a war. That was not the case of Tanzania, where domestic forces were mature enough to keep their distance from either side.”

Mircea Nicolaescu also referred to Africa’s peculiarities, which led to failures such as that in Algeria.

“In terms of the vision regarding the decolonization process, there is a rift between Arab Africa and Black Africa. You cannot say that Africa is strictly black or Arab anywhere. The Saharan area is an area of mutual influence. It is hard to make a historical separation as well. One of the states that proclaimed its independence was Algeria. There are few colonial areas of the world which were included in a country’s national area, such as Algeria, which was removed as an entity, and broken into three departments of France. One of the resounding failures of the communist system was Algeria, because it did not understand that it was about the independence of a people, not of three French departments.”

Romania’s involvement in the decolonization of Africa also meant choosing a direction without a future in diplomacy. In the 1980’s, isolated from the Western political world, and kept at arm’s length by the Socialist countries, the diplomacy of the Ceausescu regime relied a lot on relations with Africa.

Prehistory may look like a time of adventure and adrenaline rush. In reality, prehistory is one of the most difficult exercises of reconstruction of the oldest period in the history of humankind.

There are no written documents from that period, also dubbed “the childhood of humankind”, which is usually studied in close relation to anthropology. It’s a field analyzed by geologists, archeo-zoologists, as well as specialists in micro-fauna and date setting.

Items from the Romanian Palaeolithic have been discovered in the Arges River Basin, in the Sibiu Depression and the southern sub-Carpathian area. Archaeologist Adrian Dobos with the Vasile Parvan Archaeology Institute of the Romanian Academy introduced us to Palaeolithic, an era when stone was the expression of human civilisation.

“Etymologically speaking, Palaeolithic means the stone age. Back then, people would exclusively use carved stone. Later, in the Neolithic, people used both carved and grinded stone. Contrary to the general opinion, what we do is rather precise. Sometimes they say it’s speculation, because we analyse carved stone objects and sometimes human fossils, which is rather rare and something that we are eager to find. And then there is fauna. When you study a Palaeolithic site, it’s important and useful to have fauna to study. Besides identifying species, we can learn about the climate in which that site or the various levels of the site appeared.”

In Cuciulat, Salaj County, north-western Romania, archaeologists found cave paintings going back to the Palaeolithic: a horse and another animal that specialists say could be a feline, maybe a panther. Adrian Dobos was part of a team of archaeologists who in 2009 discovered the oldest Palaeolithic site in Romania in Dealul Guran, Dobrogea.

“Guran Hill is a site that we discovered in 2009 during a project run by the Archaeology Institute together with the Max Planck Institute of Leipzig and the Romanian-German Museum in Mainz. There were six weeks of periegesis and we also dug in 2010 and 2011. That is a silex exploitation area and we managed to go down to a level dated 390 thousand years ago. It is still the oldest site in Romania. There have been other findings from the early Palaeolithic, but most of them in river basins. If the site is not intact, it’s difficult to establish precisely that it goes back to the early Palaeolithic.This is quite impressive for Romania, as the number of Palaeolithic sites in Europe is rather small, around 15-20. “

What did the Palaeolithic man look like? How similar was he to us? Who inhabited the territories of today’s Romania in Palaeolithic times? Adrian Dobos:

“The term ‘hominin’ applied to he who made tools, hence the description ‘homo habilis’, that is the skilful man, the man who carved. The size of the skull is another criterion. Individuals whose skulls exceed 600 cubic cm are considered to form part of our family tree. Locomotion has recently become another criterion and in this respect, even the oldest australopithecines capable of bipedal movement are classified as hominids. Locomotion is a necessary feature of man’s ancestors. The oldest fossil found in Romania similar to modern man in anatomic terms originates from the Bone Cave and is dated 36,000 years ago, which makes it the oldest fossil in Europe. This cave is not, however, an archaeological site, but was discovered by a few cave explorers. The archaeologists found nothing here. No fossils have been found on Romania’s territory of the Neanderthal man. He must have lived in these parts, but we have been unable to find any trace of him so far. The oldest hominid discovered here is Heidelbergensis, a generic term for homo erectus, the upright man. Homo Heidelbergensis was shorter in height and had strong ape-like appearance. His brow ridges were more prominent and also displayed the traces of the sagittal crest in the middle of the skull. We do not know precisely whether this individual was weaker or stronger than his descendents because there aren’t enough fossils available for comparison.”

The site in Bugiulesti is representative for the Romanian Palaeolithic, because scientists long believed that this is where the oldest hominids used to live. Adrian Dobos: ”This is a very important site, in paleontological terms. Around ten points of interest have been noted in this village. Dating back 1.8 to 2 million years, they were discovered in the late 1950s, and mainly consist of stacks of large animal bones. At some point some fragments were found, which were said to be tools made by hominins, therefore by australopithecines. It was definitely an area where the excitement of archaeologists converged with the authorities’ tendency to idealise the history of the country.”

The Romanian Communist Party’s Congress of November 20-24th, 1989 was eagerly awaited by Romanians and all those interested in the political future the then leader Nicolae Ceausescu had in store for Romania. Never before had a Congress of the single party been expected with such a considerable amount of interest and fear. Usually, the Party’s Congresses and conferences used to be something ordinary folk would just ignore. People paid heed to such events only because the party and the repressive apparatus forced them to. But that particular congress was one of restlessness, as communist regimes kept crumbling one after the other. As Ceausescu’s regime looked like it would endure forever, Romanians lost all hope for a peaceful change, while the most pessimistic saw no change in store for the country as a whole.

At that time, Romanian society was under the grip of its own frustrations, of the political class’s lack of vision and inability to find a successor for the dictator who had been ruling Romania since 1965.

With the year 1974, the regime’s excessive personalization policy gained its momentum in the 1980s when everything had become unbearable. Against the backdrop of the communist regime’s chronic crisis, an ambition began to burn in Nicolae Ceausescu to see Romania pay its foreign debts. And that lead to harsh austerity measures targeting basic needs such as food and heating.

Engineer Pamfil Iliescu was employed by one of Romania’s largest enterprises at the time called “August 23”. Pamfil Iliescu was also a union leader and all the time he was in contact with people and their needs. Radio Romania’s Centre for Oral History has a recording of Pamfil Iliescu dated 2002.

“In the last five, six or seven years the pointless work we had been doing began to make its presence felt. This became even more obvious in “August 23” plants. As long as there was work, nobody complained. Problems started to surface with the advent of massive investments. In the last years, especially in the last five years, in the mid-1980s, everyone could see that actually everything we placed our investments in was money thrown down the drain. I for one can say that in our department we made investments worth half a billion lei during that period. It was no small amount at the time. Right now it is tantamount to hundreds, if not thousands of billions. And, with no exaggeration, from an investment accounting for more than half a billion we could use nothing!”

The Romanian industry, where a tremendous amount of money had been invested, most of which were loans, was supposed to provide prosperity. On the contrary, it turned out to be a stumbling block for the economy. The cause was the much-too-bureaucratized logic of the communist regime.

“We generally faced many drawbacks, but the biggest one was the lack of money. We had to receive many pieces of equipment or we were given money only to build various pieces of equipment, but that was not enough, because the equipment had to be integrated into a system. And so we received many expensive pieces of hardware that could not be integrated and used, and in the meantime we were required to produce the same amount as before.”

Trade relations with other socialist countries were becoming even more difficult and Romania was running the risk of turning into a closed economic system. Many factories produced more than they exported, therefore the management of many factories was forced to accept products and equipment that had nothing to do with the factory’s specificity. The events of 1989 were also caused by the fact that Nicolae Ceausescu, a rather narrow-minded person, would not give up power at the 14th Congress of the Communist Party. In December 1989 those who took to the streets were the very workers from Romania’s big industrial platforms.

“Roumors had started to go around. It was common knowledge that people said one thing in the meeting hall and something different outside the hall. There was this huge gap between words and actions and people had grown tired of it. They no longer had their weekends free, but what was curios was the fact that they worked more efficiently at the weekend than during the week, because there was no pressure put on them. On Sundays, during breaks, they would even vent their discontent with the system. Without any exaggeration many people expected a change to happen at the 14th Congress and disillusionment was great when they saw that nothing had changed after the Congress. The atmosphere had got very tense and revolt was in the air. I guess many people felt the uprising coming and were not at all surprised when it broke out”.

What followed only one month after the 14th Congress of the Romanian Communist Party was a people’s regaining freedom by paying a blood price. “The last ball in November” is the title of a film by Dan Pita, which shows the final party before the storm, which any authoritarian regime throws before ending up in the trash bin of history.

Body painting is a practice with magical overtones found in all cultures. Nowadays, in the form of tattooing, it is more of an art form, a matter of fashion, expressing one’s personality and originality. It is also an intimate gesture, sometimes used to remember something very important for the person getting the tattoo. The sky is the limit when it comes to the patterns: exotic animals, calligraphy, esoteric symbols, flower patterns, landscapes, portraits, and many more. Art tattoos are a relatively new practice, much different from what it used to be no more than a century ago.

The history of tattoos is a history of mankind and its many facets. Historian Adrian Majuru helps us navigate the rich significance of tattoos, as it was studied in the early 20th century.

“If we talk about historical studies, we should begin with physician Nicolae Minovici. He published the first monograph of its kind, The Fashion of Tattoos in Romania. First and foremost he dealt with everything he could find in the field. He ran the anthropometrics department of the Medical Forensics Institute, where they made all sorts of measurements. He was interested in tattoos, and he photographed everyone that had a tattoo. Many of these ended up in his book, drawn by himself at a 1:1 scale, and classified scientifically by theme. This book was published at the same time in Paris and Bucharest in 1905. This is an older story, because Nicolae Minovici treated these tattoos anthropologically, but he did not look to the past. In the history of Romania, going back to the Middle Ages, we had people with tattoos reflecting their social status, such as membership to a guild or a professional cast. Our sources do not mention this often, but since medieval legislation did not ban this, people were not scandalized by the presence of tattoos in Romanian medieval society.”

Tattoos were also environment specific, such as when going into the army:

“Generally, tattoos were done in the army, because there was a three year conscription in place. That does not mean that all conscripts were getting tattoos, it was voluntary. However, many people coming out of the army to rejoin society had tattoos. There is a very interesting example, a tailor from Bucharest, who went for a few years into the French Foreign Legion after WWI, and was stationed in North Africa. He was studied by physician Francisc Rainer, and we have the photos he took. This young man, who hadn’t turned 30, had three tattoos done in Maghreb, in the Atlas mountains, by a Czech man from the Foreign Legion. One of them was the portrait of a woman with an elaborate hairdo, tattooed on his chest. He also had two stars tattooed on his shoulders. This is the only case so far in the collection of tattoos where the person is actually known, and the circumstance of how he got the tattoos are known.”

People on the fringe of society often had very emotionally charged tattoos. We are talking about prison inmates or prostitutes. Here is Adrian Majuru once again:

“Some prostitutes had tattoos that were beauty enhancers, such as a beauty mark or a small flower. Sometimes, more seldom, some prostitutes had tattoos that were very personal on an emotional level, such as the name of a man that they had cared for very much. This sometimes was detrimental to their livelihood, since many men would turn them down once they saw the name of another man tattooed on their skin. Other prostitutes had erotic scenes tattooed. In Nicolae Minovici’s book we see a prison tattoo of a death row inmate smoking his last cigarette, while he was being taken to the gallows. Generally, in these environments tattoos represented things that had an emotional impact on those people, pleasant or tough moments which they did not want to forget.”

Overall, what all tattoos have in common is emotion. Here is Adrian Majuru once again:

“Many men had tattoos with the names of their lovers, wives, sometimes children. At the Medical Forensics Institute they have an interesting tattoo from 1873, the oldest in their collection. It is a tattoo of a lady in a crinoline called Gherghina, holding a child, Ionut, by his hand. Between them the year 1873 is tattooed. This was probably an attempt to remember loved ones when going away, one took their loved ones with them in this way. These were gestures of love or beauty enhancement, not showing off. In western countries, in elevated circles, there were even relief tattoos. They were ornamental tattoos resembling bracelets on the forearms, or rings on fingers, vividly colored. Minovici describes them in his book as being found in high European urban society in the early 20th century.”

The Cucuteni-Trypillian culture is one of Romania’s most impressive Neolithic archaeological cultures. It stretched across a surface area of 35 thousand square kilometers including northeastern Romania, the Republic of Moldova and southwestern Romania. It took its name from Cucuteni, the village where in 1884 the first archaeological vestiges had been discovered. The Cucuteni culture is famous for its superbly painted ceramics and has been dated around 4,800 BC. People back then were known as “Cucutenieni”. Hunting, fishing and farming were ingrained in their lifestyle.

Apart from that they specialized in household crafting and salt mining and trading. The village of Poduri in eastern Romania’s Bacau County is one of the most notable settlements where traces of the Cucuteni culture first emerged. A rich archaeological site was unearthed here in 1979, with lodgings, tools, supply storage areas, painted ceramics, statuettes and even a mill among the most important finds. The Cucuteni people’s tale is buried underneath the Ghidaru hill. It is that tale we’ll be trying to tell today, with the help of Radio Romania’s Oral History Center, which made a documentary about the archaeological site in Poduri. Dan Monah is the archaeologist supervising excavation works on the premises.

“The fist inhabitants settled in Poduri around 4800 BC. They built their first village which at a certain point in time was destroyed by a fire. The people returned on the premises and rebuilt the village. And that is how the phenomenon repeated no less than 15 times. The surface area we managed to research is, unfortunately, limited. We’re getting close to doing research for a surface area of 1,000 square meters or thereabouts, while the hillock’s surface area

exceeds 12 thousand square meters, and the settlement’s overall surface area accounts for 60 to 80 thousand square meters. Sedentary farmers used to inhabit the settlements in Poduri. They were also fishing, hunting and collecting fruits. But the salt springs nearby were something those farmers heavily relied on. There they extracted salt which they subsequently traded with the populations from areas with no salt deposits.”

Historian Dan Monah also spoke about the most relevant items and constructions that were unearthed in Poduri.

“We dug up large granaries, and I also mention a lodging where no less than 16 cereal storage rooms were unearthed. We excavated box-shaped with the surface area of one square meter and with 45-centimeter- high walls, so they had a capacity of half a cubic meter. But the most spectacular discovery in the region is the so-called mill. It is a construction with 4 panhead-shaped granaries about one point ten meters tall, with a lid and a vent hole. When they were dug up, they were filled with charred cereals for up to three thirds of their capacity. It’s interesting that each granary was meant for storing a specific type of cereal, since two of them had barley for their most part, while the other two stored wheat. Close to the two granaries there is a square-shaped construction where 5 hand-mills were placed, 3 bigger and 2 smaller ones. They were fastened in white-painted clay plinths. The construction had one groove through which the corn and grain milling was evacuated. It is one of the oldest grinding mills in South-eastern Europe.”

The inhabitants of Cucuteni worked hard, but they also prayed. We have a comprehensive inventory of worship items Dan Monah and his team unearthed in the Poduri archaeological site.

“A construction was discovered, with two hearths. Near the first hearth there was a statuettes complex, made of six feminine items, a burnt clay throne and a small ceramic jar. We called the complex the Sacred Family, as it looked like it reflected the feminine part of a family. So we had a matron and six other feminine shapes which, judging by their dimensions and certain somatic features, appeared to have been younger than their matron. But the most interesting discovery is the one we made in the same construction, where near the second hearth a pot was found, with 21 feminine statuettes, 13 thrones and two objects which at that time we called unidentified historical objects. The pot with the sacred objects was protected by another pot placed with its bottom up. All items were broken because the walls of the construction had crumbled, and because of subsequent sediments. The complex, which we called The Gods’ Synod is a portrayal of the pre-Cucuteni inhabitants’ pantheon, and not only for those from Poduri. 28 years later, in Isaia village, Iasi County, a vase was dug up in a pre-Cucuteni settlement, containing 21 miniature statues, 13 thrones, 42 perforated spheres, 21 cones, 21 partially perforated spheres. Thus we discovered a link between the two worship sites, underscoring the religious unity of pre-Cucuteni tribes”.

Romanian physician Romeo Dumitrescu is a Cucuteni pottery collector and one of the sponsors of the excavation operations.

“The most valuable items are those found in the Bohotin treasury, made up of 21 deities, of which 13 are seated on a clay chair. Adding to that is an extremely rare item for that period, which is also part of a set of 21 clay figurines, which has a beautiful image of a couple engraved on the side of a chair. Every object is beautiful in itself. Each has its peculiarity. They make up a pattern that is specific to no other culture and sticks to the mind”.

The Cucuteni culture is a palpable manifestation of the Neolithic man, whose creativity is no less powerful than today’s artists. Its history rolling back to the present Today’s archaeological finds never cease to marvel the mind and delight the eye.

The repressive apparatus of the communist regime in Romania, the Securitate, terrorised Romanians for decades, whether they were within the country or outside it. A number of famous Romanians abroad were targeted by the intelligence and repressive machine of the Securitate. Important resources were used, even disproportionately, to annihilate or use various people. Recently, Dinu Zamfirescu published a book called “Securitate Informers” about Romanian exiles who collaborated with the political police.

At the event, the historian Liviu Tofan talked about how important the Romanian political refugees were for the Securitate:

“The Romanian exiles were a prime target for the Securitate, and one of its few achievements was undermining them. They aimed for the top, and were successful in several cases, managing to turn on the side of the regime in Bucharest a number of personalities living in exile. How did they manage it and what means did they use? What weaknesses did they exploit in order to turn major figures among the exiles? We have three textbook cases. One is Virgil Veniamin, an old high-ranking member of the National Peasant Party living in Paris, then there was Eftimie Gherman, a former Socialist leader, and Pamfil Seicaru, a great journalist. In addition to these three cases, the list goes on. Among the most influential people who were Securitate informers was writer Virgil Gheorghiu, the author of a book called ‘The 25th Hour’, which was also made into a Hollywood film. Ion V. Emilian, who published a journal called Stindardul in Munich, also worked for the foreign branch of the Securitate. Other such examples included the Social Democrat Duiliu Vinogradovschi Gustav Porde, the first European MP of Romanian origin, and the industrialist Iosif Constantin Dragan.”

The historian and political scientist Stelian Tanase also talked about the methods employed by the Securitate to recruit such prominent figures:

“Most often it was about money, because a lot of these people were in financial difficulty, especially in the final part of their life. Some were also blackmailed over secrets that could be used against them, either by exposing them in the press or within the community. Others yet were offered certain favours which could benefit their relatives still living in Romania, facilities such as getting a passport, or having solved issues with their properties or pensions. All these seemingly very simple methods were used in various combinations to convince someone to collaborate with the Securitate, which, for most people who had fled the country, was the worst thing imaginable.”

The Securitate started being successful among Romanian exiles in the mid-1960s. Stelian Tanase explained the change that occurred in communist Romania in 1964, leading to a change in the relationship between the authorities in Bucharest and the exiles:

“Something else happened on top of everything. If we look at the archive documents we see that the collaborators caved in in the 1960s. What was the new element emerging during that time? It was the same mechanism that makes perfectly honourable people become informers in their final year of political prison. Romania had changed its foreign policy and was indicating a break from Moscow. There was a fresh patriotic and nationalist drive and many dropped their guard. The West started considering support for the regime in Bucharest, which was seen as protecting it from Moscow. I have to say that a lot of people made out of their Securitate contributions their life’s work. Many have left veritable works of art into those files. The archives are incredible, people really put their soul into those reports.”

The historian and political scientist Daniel Barbu believes that the archives of the Securitate say a lot about human nature:

“We find out a lot about who we are as people, about our nature, about our weaknesses and vulnerabilities, about the wavering ethics that inspire us, about the pretexts that we find for ourselves to give an ethical content to things that are in the end trivial. Is there a technique that is typical of the Securitate or typical of the intelligence services in the Soviet space at large? Is there a motivating ideology behind the Securitate, or is it simply bureaucratic work, done better or worse, but typical of any such organisation? Maybe at first the Securitate was motivated by a proletarian impulse. However, in only a few years, the only preoccupation of the Securitate was to control as many levers as possible, and more and more citizens.”

Even though they lived in the free world, Romanian exiles were not spared the savagery of the communist regime, caving in and becoming collaborators of its secret police.

The Holocaust is the utmost expression of hatred that human beings have ever been capable of. From contempt and the racial inferiority rhetoric, the professionals of hatred took the next step, to deportation and methodical mass assassination, which was perpetrated indiscriminately. The victims, for the most part, were Jews and Rroma. Romania has its own share of responsibility in perpetrating such crimes, and took responsibility for that in the 2003 Wiesel Report, where the date was set for the commemoration of the National Holocaust Day on October 9. The Archives of Radio Romania’s Oral History Center have valuable testimonies from people who lived in the inter-war period and during World War 2. In an interview dated 1999, medical doctor Radu Damian recalled a series of anti-Semitic acts at the Medical School in Cluj:

Radu Damian: “As freshmen we had a dissection exam, we studied the muscle and the bone systems. We were supposed to start sectioning, so that we could see the internal organs. And at our dissection table there were also two Jews, Davidson was the name of one of them. One of us asked, “Why, I’ve never seen a single Jew corpse.” And the Jew snapped back, “We never desecrate our people’s corpses!” That was the final straw, something terrible followed. All of a sudden, the room flared up and went berserk, all the bones, all those long femurs from the trays we had there were flung at them. They were cornered, shaking. It took a while before everybody calmed down. “How can you say something like that?! So we’re desecrating our corpses, is that so?!” Then we held a meeting in the courtyard, to decide what we were going to do: whether we should go on strike or take other measures. And finally things calmed down, I just don’t know how, and we all agreed to pay no heed to all that, on condition that they should never speak like that any more.”

Art historian Radu Bogdan joined the communist movement early in his youth. He was not a hardliner, although he had survived a labor camp. In an interview in 1995, Radu Bogdan remembers the camp commander, a true savior, one of those who managed to preserve their dignity in spite of absurd orders.

Radu Bogdan: “True saviors are just like that camp commander of mine, whom I loved and respected a lot, and with whom I stayed on friendly terms. He was an extraordinary man. His name was Petre N. Ionescu, but few people know his name. He was a Councilor at the Bucharest Court of Appeals, and came from a very respected family of magistrates from Iasi. I met him when we reached the Osmancea encampment area, and when we first saw him we didn’t think much of him. His nickname was Mickey Mouse, because he was short, and no one could suspect the tremendous moral resources that man had, his perfect moral integrity. I remember one day when Colonel Corbu came on an unannounced inspection, and found our man with his collar button undone. It was summer, it was hot, and he took us by surprise. He started yelling at him because his collar was undone and was walking about with no tie. But much to our surprise, Ionescu replied, ‘With all due respect, Colonel, Sir, but I’m not going to allow you to speak to me the way you’re speaking right now, let alone raise your voice at me. Please bear in mind that as a civilian I am a high magistrate, a councilor with the Court of Appeals, and I deserve to be treated with respect!’ That man never took bribes. Whenever people needed to find out what had become of the households they had left back home, since they had been forcibly displaced, he allowed them to go and see for themselves, he allowed them to bring gas cylinders back to the camp to be able to cook. Not a hair was touched from those people! There wasn’t a single case of abuse. I admired that man’s courage and moral dignity.”

During those war years, Sonia Palty ended up in a concentration camp and witnessed a heart-rending episode while crossing River Bug. The recording was made in 2001.

Sonia Palty: “One morning, deputy prefect Aristide Padure came to the camp, holding his infamous riding rod, and said: ‘I want all Jews queued up on the Bug River bank! We’ll get you on the other side, to the Germans!’ We all knew that meant death. My father had three arsenic capsules with him, just like the Brauch family did. Mr Brauch gave one of the capsules to my friend Fritz, who was only 20, while I was 15. He told us: ‘Kids, we take the capsules while on the raft. It’s pointless to end up in the Germans’ hands.’ Fritz and I took the arsenic capsules in our palms but we secretly agreed not to swallow them because we wanted to stay alive. So we set down on the bank of River Bug and when we looked up — as most of the time we were looking down — saw some 40 or 50 kilometers away a lot of Gypsies who were drawing their covered carts themselves, as their horses had been taken away. Women with many children got off the carts and the crossing of River Bug began. It was a nightmare. While crossing the river, the Gypsy women on the raft lifted up their children and threw them into the water. Then they jumped in as well. The other Gypsies on the bank started screaming and pulling out their hair at this horrific scene. We had no doubt we would soon be in the same situation.”

The Holocaust was the expression of hatred and obsessions, of general blindness. Its lessons were tough, but the message was clear. Nevertheless, mankind is not yet safe from the temptation of radicalism.

The Romanian medieval state was established in the second half of the 14th century, long after other European states had emerged. Historians say the delay was caused by an unstable political, economic and social context that was highly influenced by migrations.

The Romanian settlements, just like those of the Northern Slavs were constantly exposed to the destabilizing incursions made by barbarian invaders from Asia.The beginnings of the principality of Wallachia, stretching between the Southern Carpathians and the Danube, which will be the nucleus of the Romanian state founded in the second half of the 19th century, are still unclear and quite controversial, because of the lack of information.

The big number of more or less credible theories that circulate simultaneously make it difficult to understand this long and complicated process. The latest theory regarding this issue, supported by Romanian historian Neagu Djuvara, is the one according to which the Cumans, a Turkic nomadic tribe, contributed to the establishment of Wallachia.

Historian Matei Cazacu, a researcher of the Middle Ages with the “Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique” in France and a lecturer with the Paris-based “Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales” has told us more about the archaeological finds that are relevant to the birth of Wallachia.

Matei Cazacu: “Archaeological diggings in Curtea de Arges and Campulung have brought to light houses belonging to the princely family and the nobility as well as a 13th century church. These discoveries helped us learn more about the rulers of that time. They had been living in oral societies, that had not developed literacy until the 13th century. It was only in 1204, when crusaders occupied Constantinople and these territories were included into a huge papal strategy of integrating the pagan and the schismatic inhabitants living North and South of the Danube that we learned about the existence of Wallachian rulers. They were Romanians, Orthodox believers and lived in houses made of wood and stone. The Cumans and the other nomadic tribes lived on the banks of the Danube and of its small tributaries, where they left traces of their existence. A total of 13 graves were found across Wallachia, most of them being grouped in the eastern part of the territory. This is one more proof in support of the theory that the center of the Cuman power was somewhere in the East, in today’s Dobruja and southern Bessarabia. If the Cumans had founded Wallachia, Curtea de Arges, located in the Carpathians, wouldn’t have been its capital city. In another move, the Romanians call this principality ‘Muntenia’, deriving from the word ‘munte’, which is ‘mountain’ in Romanian. Literally, ‘Muntenia’ means ‘the country of the mountain people’. In the same line of thought, it’s very likely that the Cumans would have picked Lehliu or Caracal as their capital city, as these two places were located in the area where the Cumans are supposed to have lived.”

The theory, most historians seem to have agreed on, is that there were two historical states in Wallachia (in the southern part of today’s Romania): the Northern Subcarpathians were controlled by the Romanian elites, whereas the Southern Danubian region was controlled by the Cumans. The maps mention the name “Cumania” for eastern and southern Wallachia.

Historian Serban Papacostea has told us more about this exonym: “The entire area stretching from the Olt River towards the east is named Cumania, in West European geographical documents, written in Latin. It is from the area made up of today’s Arges County and the region of Oltenia that the expansion of the Romanian state, founded by Basarab I, started. We are not talking about its origin, but about the key role it played in the history of the Romanian state. The expansion of the Romanian state started in the 13th century, towards the east, towards an area defined by the Western geography as Cumania. Using the traditional Turkic assignment of colours to the cardinal points, White Cumania was the area located in the west and Black Cumania was the North-Pontic area in the east. The process started in 1211 when the Teutonic Order conquered large territories in the Carpathians. It was continued in the 14th century by the anti-Tartar alliance between the Kingdom of Hungary and the Kingdom of Poland, jointly with the son of ruler Basarab. This alliance pushed the Mongolian Empire from the Russian steppe towards the east. The Wallachian regions east of the Olt river and Moldova were known as Black Cumania.”

The emergence of the medieval state of Wallachia during the last quarter of the 13th century and the 14th century is the result of the influence of the local people and of the barbarian invasions during the migration period.

George Enescu is the greatest Romanian composer of all time. His impressive work has never ceased to be eulogized, while his world-renowned name is commonplace in the 19th and the 20th century history of music. Yet Enescu’s life paled in comparison to his artistic prowess. To this day, Enescu has benefited from a kind of personality cult inherited from the cultural policy of the communist regime. Historians wanted to have a closer look at Enescu’s life. Searching the archives, they found out that Enescu the artist and the intellectual was much more inferior to Enescu the man. Sadly, Enescu collaborated with the communist regime that was instated in Romania in 1945 with the support of the Soviet army.

The fact that Enescu was quick to show friendship to the occupation forces and their puppet regime did not prevent the then Romanian intelligence services to trace Enescu and monitor him as closely as they could. Explaining the conundrum is historian Adrian Cioroianu, a professor with the University of Bucharest’s History Department.

Adrian Cioroianu: “Enescu was a target, since most, if not all intellectuals, were a target in the early 1950s. He was a target despite the fact that he left Romania in an unusual way for the Romanian exile, yet quite common for an intellectual in the late 1940s. His departure was negotiated. Before leaving Romania, Enescu, who knew nothing about politics, allowed the communist regime to manipulate him in a very aggressive manner, initially through a tour he took in the USSR in 1945, then through the advice he got from his wife, who dictated Enescu what to do in his relation with Petru Groza. Enescu was used in a wicked and ruthless manner. He was a deputy of the Communist Party-led Bloc of Democratic Parties, in the first parliament elected in the wake of the tremendous electoral fraud of 1946, in the famous 19 November elections. And then he left, or was allowed to leave on a tour to the US, wherefrom he never returned. This is why he was put under surveillance. Everyone was being surveilled, and he would have certainly been under surveillance even if he had stayed in Romania. What was different in his case was that he was under surveillance although he had left with the regime’s permission, and despite his correspondence with Petru Groza.”

Cultivating ambiguity, both towards friends and enemies, was one of the essential features of Stalinism. Adrian Cioroianu believes George Enescu’s political gullibility is evidence of the treatment an intellectual can be subject to, when close to a criminal regime:

Adrian Cioroianu: “In 1945 George Enescu was invited and encouraged by the regime in Bucharest to go on a tour of the Soviet Union. He was amazed with how he was received. Concert halls were packed, people appreciated him, he played with David Oistrah. Once he came back to Romania, he was used in an almost criminal manner. He was taken to speak to workers, to attend meetings of the Romanian Association for Relations with the Soviet Union, and he would tell everybody about the success of culture in the Soviet Union, in the autumn of 1945. That’s why we can say he was gullible. It’s not what Sadoveanu did. Sadoveanu negotiated his every move. He took advantage of his symbiotic relation with the regime. We cannot suspect him of gullibility, because he sold his talent for money and other advantages, which Enescu didn’t. I think Groza was happy to see Enescu leave the country, because Enescu had no sense of politics, his wife literally told him who to talk to and what to do. Other than that, he was living in his own world, one of music. The regime wanted him out, as long as he didn’t vilified communism. Had he stayed in the country, chances are he would have died in prison. He was truly a monarchist, a democrat, and a supporter of the West, but he was naïve enough to think that people loved art in the Soviet Union. He didn’t see that there was nothing to love there: you either loved Stalin and bowed before him, or you took refuge in the world of arts and try to make your stand through culture.”

However, Adrian Cioroianu believes that Enescu’s idealism did little to prevent him from being regarded with disapproval by his posterity.

Adrian Cioroianu: ”What should an intellectual do? What role should an intellectual play when the country is going through difficult moments? What moral message should he convey? Can you just say, let’s leave for Paris, when you see your country conquered? What if King Ferdinand and Queen Marie had left for Paris during WWI? The real question is: is there really a moral message behind people being encouraged to leave the country? I won’t refrain from saying that the regime needed Egizio Massini, a conductor who did everything Petru Groza had asked him to do. It also needed Matei Socor, who was at the helm of the Public Radio Station and who was an incredible useful tool in the then authorities’ effort to turn Romania into a communist country, although he was born into a well-off family. The communists needed such people. That’s why George Enescu was praised, but, at the same time, he should have known his place.”

The privileged relationship between Enescu and the communist regime translated as mutual benefits, and is nothing but one more example of how gullibility, in spite of all good intentions, can be unexpectedly conducive to terror.

Politically correct language has turned the terms for stray dogs in Romanian into ‘dogs without an owner’ and ‘community’ dogs. Irrespective of the name, they are a still a problem for Romania, starting from the inability of the authorities to properly regulate the issue and the lack of will to enforce them.

Stray dogs are associated with poor living conditions, disease and unsafe streets. The issue was not dealt with even when they killed people. They stayed on the streets, with no one taking responsibility for them. Historian Contanta Vintila-Ghitulescu from the Nicolae Iorga Institute of History in Bucharest told us about stray dogs in the 19th century:

Contanta Vintila-Ghitulescu: “Stray dogs have been an issue for Romania forever, and in the 19th century there was talk for the first time of eliminating them. Until then, the problem was partly due to the fact that households did not have clear limits, such as fences, and so household dogs became everybody’s dogs. Bucharest and Iasi back then did not have clearly delimited households, like now, and that was true of Europe in general. The first document I found dates back to 1810, when the Russians, who occupied the Romanian Principalities after the 1806-1812 war with the Turks, saw the dogs all over the streets and hired people to round them up and kill them. Then they issued announcements to tell people to keep their own dogs chained in their courtyards, lest they be hunted down. After the Russians left in 1812, the measure fell. However, when cities started being reorganized by the French model in 1850, it came back. In the countryside, however, dogs are everywhere people are.”

For foreigners, the sight of stray dogs everywhere was shocking. Constanta Vintila-Ghitulescu says that packs of dogs ruled the cities after nightfall:

Contanta Vintila-Ghitulescu: ‘The consuls of Great Britain and France, present in Bucharest and Iasi until 1859, talk about being unable to walk the streets at night because of the dogs that were everywhere. There is an 1850 testimonial talking about the dogs on the Dambovita. Why there? Because it was the place where there were a lot of slaughterhouses and tanneries. These small businesses threw every piece of refuse in the river, and a lot of dogs ate what they threw away. Taking a walk there was bordering on suicide. In 1852, cities started issuing ordinances against stray dogs. The first shelter was built because the sight of killing them was gruesome. The first humanitarian arguments also emerged against the public killing of dogs.”

Stray dogs have actually killed people in recent history, and the problem was exacerbated by the issue of rabies and the aggressiveness it causes.

Contanta Vintila-Ghitulescu: “You can find in an old newspaper testimonies about rabid dogs, who attack anyone they meet, in cities or villages. You can see how serious the problem was from the many recipes against rabies. The problem was compounded by wolves. In the countryside, especially in the mountains, wolves were a constant presence, especially in winter, in addition to rabid dogs. Dogs are especially aggressive during epidemics, when food is scarce. The spectacle is atrocious, because in times when the plague hit, people were buried even before they were dead. People were so scared that they wanted to get rid of the sick people even before they died of the disease. As I said, the spectacle was horrible: dogs were pulling out corpses out of the ground and dragged them all over the streets.”

In all subsequent historical periods, Romania failed to deal with the problem of stray dogs. During communism, the population of stray dogs exploded as the authorities razed whole neighborhoods to erect blocks of flats, and this issue continues.

After almost two and a half decades of bitterness, between 1945-1947 and half through the 1960s, the two military alliances and rival political — economic systems run by the US and the USSR started trying to cohabitate. Each party would try to make some diplomatic gestures and even take steps of rapprochement across the “barbwire” separating them. Ceausescu’s Romania tried to thaw relations with the USA, and the visits paid by the two US Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford in 1969 and 1975 respectively were major signals in that regard.

Mircea Carp was chief of Voice of America’s Romanian Service and accompanied the two presidents to Bucharest. Carp had been forced to flee the country after the communists came to power, helped by Soviets. He was not just an eye witness to Richard Nixon’s visit to Romania in August 1969, but saw first hand the impression that visit had on Romanian citizens, as he confessed in an interview to the Oral History Centre of the Romanian Radio Broadcasting Corporation in 1997:

Mircea Carp: “Nixon’s visit in early August 1969 was the first visit by a US President to Romania. It marked a moment of openness in the Romanian — American relations. At the same time, though, it triggered hopes among Romanians that the meeting would help solve some of the problems the country was facing. Some may have even thought of a liberation of Romania from the communist occupation. I know that two of the reviews to the book I wrote stated that the US let Romanians believe that Nixon’s visit meant something, even a significant improvement of the situation in the country. However, I can say in all certainty and regret, for that matter, that neither Nixon, the State Department nor the US Embassy to Bucharest had ever implied, in any way, that Nixon’s visit would do that. It only marked a change in the relations between the Governments in Bucharest and Washington. “

Richard Nixon was received with extreme enthusiasm in the Romanian capital. It was a mere triumph, which dictator Nicolae Ceausescu read as a sign of people’s sympathy towards himself. Mircea Carp has an explanation for Nixon’s liking Ceausescu:

Mircea Carp: “Against that background of false hope, Nixon was welcomed to Romania with huge enthusiasm. I found out later from the Romanian Foreign Ministry that some 1 million people had taken to the streets to welcome him. As for Nixon’s formal visit, the enthusiasm was extraordinary as well. The talks between him and Ceausescu, based on Nixon’s kind of liking the Romanian president, were mainly a political attempt of trying to use Romania as a springboard for improving the relations with Moscow. With all due respect, I think that the US President was naïve to imagine that Ceausescu could play that big a role in Moscow. Anyway, I know for sure that was one of the reasons of his visit. Why did Nixon like Ceausescu? After failing to become president in the race against John F. Kennedy, he had become more or less a nobody, politically speaking. When he started trying to rebuild his political profile, he paid three visits to Eastern Europe: to Warsaw, Moscow and Bucharest. In Warsaw he was received with indifference, in Moscow he was given the cold shoulder. In Bucharest, on the other hand, probably sensing something, Ceausecu unrolled the red carpet for him. And that was something that Nixon never forgot. His reception in Bucharest was probably one of the most glorious moments of publicity, not political, but publicity anyway, in his relations with the foreign world.”

Six years later Nixon’s successor Gerald Ford also visited Romania in what was seen as another success, although of a lesser magnitude of that of 1969. Here is Mircea Carp again.

Mircea Carp: “Gerald Ford returned from Warsaw where he had taken part in the summit for Security and Cooperation in Europe. He received a warm welcome in the Polish capital and so was the situation in Bucharest, though the Romanians were not so enthusiastic as in the case of his predecessor, six years before. We learnt at that time that it was Ceausescu and the then communist authorities that didn’t want so many people to take to the streets to welcome an American president, and so they kept the crowds at bay. So it appeared to be only 350 — 400 thousand people to welcome Ford, which from the communist point of view was a major achievement, but nothing extraordinary in the end. The Romanians were not very enthusiastic at that time, because in the six years that passed between the two visits, the USA proved they were not ready to get involved in the region beyond what their political agenda allowed.”

The two visits to Romania paid by Nixon and Ford in 1969 and 1974 were moves of rapprochement between the two states with diametrical opposed political-military systems. That rapprochement failed to yield the desired results as the two political regimes were completely at odds with each other.