Living in Ceaușescu's shadow

Time for another retrospective post. This time, we’ll complete the story of my journey through Romania in 1990. At the time, I was travelling with a group of 12 as part of a YWAM Christian missionary program, just six months after the totalitarian regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu had collapsed in a violent revolution. Local church families, as we travelled through the country. For many of our hosts, we were the first foreigners they’d ever met. For decades, engaging with a foreigner inevitably led to an unscheduled visit from the Securitate, Romania’s much-feared secret police agency.

In an earlier post, I wrote about our time in Drobeta-Turnu Severin on the banks of the Danube River. On 4 July, we farewelled our riverside hosts and headed 40 km north to the impoverished mining town of Motru. The town was established in 1960 to house workers for a series of new open-pit coal mines established nearby. At their peak, they were the largest coal mines in the country.

We stopped for the night in Motru after performing our street drama in another striking open-air setting. We delivered our three-part production in a park opposite the Catedrala Sfânta Treime și Cuvioasa Parascheva, a classic white Russian Orthodox church in the centre of town. Our local host later claimed it was probably the first time the gospel had ever been preached publicly in the town.

He made this claim in part because the town had been established during the communist era. A time when proselytism was illegal and religious activities were restricted to government-sanctioned denominations such as the Russian Orthodox church. Furthermore, the Orthodox church was filled with patriarchs sympathetic to the Communists. However, even then, it suffered persecution. According to historians, more than 1,700 Orthodox priests of the 9,000 Orthodox priests in Romania were arrested between 1945 and 1964.

On 5 July, we drove 35 km north to the provincial city of Târgu Jiu. Here we were hosted by another highly organised church. It kept us busy visiting local villages, where we peached the gossip in open fields, and an afternoon at a youth summer camp. You can see us performing in the images that opens this post. The guy in the grey track pants is me playing the role of Satan. I honestly don’t recall much from our time in Târgu Jiu. However, I do remember an uncomfortable conversation I had with a young man, either here or possibly a few days earlier in Drobeta-Turnu Severin.

This young man shared how he’d successfully escaped Romania by swimming across the Danube. You can see how narrow sections of the river are in the image above that I've sourced from the web. He then evaded capture by the Yugoslavian authorities and made his way to Italy. It was here that his luck ran out. The Italian authorities arrested him and eventually deported him back to Romania. Upon his return, he was held in solitary confinement by the Securitate for almost a month.

As he mentioned his solitary confinement, he suddenly froze, his demeanour changed, and he promptly terminated the conversation. Whatever memories came next, they were clearly too painful to share. I can only speculate that he was beaten, tortured or subjected to psychological abuse. Sadly, the scars of Ceaușescu were never far below the surface wherever we ventured in Romania.

On a lighter note, I vividly recall the local head of a small village inviting us to his house to drink tea. Inside, proudly displayed on the mantlepiece, was an empty Coke bottle. This quirky artefact spoke volumes regarding his power and prestige. You couldn't buy Coca-Cola in Romania for love or money. Therefore, if you had this bottle in your home, you were clearly well-connected, highly influential and potentially very wealthy. It was amusing to see an object that you or I would discard without a second thought given such reverence.

On 10 July, we made our way back to Pitești. It was fitting that our final night in Romania was in the very place we’d begun our month-long circuit of the country’s southern towns and cities. We stayed again with the families who’d hosted us in June, reporting back on all we’d seen and done. The following day, we crossed the Danube and made our way to Varna on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast.

Our route east took us through the capital, Bucharest, for the first time. Driving there was a rather unique experience. A dual carriageway motorway, the Autostrada A1, linked Pitești with the capital. It was the nation’s first motorway, and for 15 years after its opening in 1972, the only one in the entire country. 

However, it wasn’t like any motorway I’d ever seen. Weeds grew in the cracks across the carriageway; waist-high grass filled the median strip and lined its shoulders, and a single, solitary, hand-painted, fading billboard (the only one we saw in all of Romania) promoted the nation's homemade Dacia motor car. It looked more like a set from a post-apocalyptic movie than a modern highway. It was just another sad example of the impact of Ceaușescu’s harsh austerity programs on infrastructure maintenance.

 
The image above shows the motorway as it appears today. The road surface and line markings are in much better condition. However, the dense corridor of trees and long grass on either side is exactly how I remember it. At times, it really felt like the highway was slicing arrow-straight through dense green forest.

Likewise, along the entire highway’s length, shredded black rubber littered the verge. Extreme austerity and growing poverty meant people used their tyres until they literally disintegrated. Then, once their remnants were dumped on the roadside, the waste was never collected. I’ve never seen anything quite like it anywhere else in the world.

It's also worth noting the unusual presence of a Dacia billboard. Promotional advertising was notable for its complete absence in Romania. We never saw billboards or posters anywhere, including shop windows, bus shelters and the like. Furthermore, under Ceaușescu’s regime, the automotive industry was never promoted through advertising. Dacia vehicles were in high demand and sold on a waiting list, with customers often waiting for several years to purchase one, so there was no need to promote them!

Our time in Bucharest was all too brief. We stopped long enough to collect a few supplies and walked briefly through a section of town. I was fascinated by the scars of battle visible on the surrounding buildings. Bullet holes from street fighting that raged for days after Ceaușescu’s fall were visible everywhere. You can see a typical example above. It was surreal walking the streets where gun battles had been fought just months earlier.

However, the city’s biggest highlight – for me at least – came as we drove out of town. Our route took us along Bulevardul Ion C. Brătianu and then briefly across Bulevardul Victoria Socialismului (Victory of Socialism Boulevard, a dramatic arrow-straight throughfare that extends for more than three kilometres through the city’s centre. It’s since been renamed Bulevardul Unirii (Union Boulevard).

Bulevardul Victoria Socialismului was constructed by Ceaușescu as a showpiece processional avenue leading to his grand Presidential Palace. This monumental building was still under construction when his regime fell in December 1989. I was keen to see it up close. However, I had to satisfy myself with a passing glimpse in the distance as we crossed over Bulevardul Victoria Socialismului. Still, it was an astonishing sight. The intersection we crossed was a kilometre from the building, yet it still dominated the landscape.

The image above was pulled from the web. It captures the scene we briefly witnessed, including the forest of construction cranes we saw. It would be another two decades before I’d return and see it up close.