Time travel

I’ve been on a bit of a retrospective posting binge lately. For the last month, I’ve been drafting and publishing posts about the three months I spent travelling with a small group through Eastern Europe in 1990. For years, I’ve talked about documenting my travel adventures, which began before this blog started in 2006. My time in Eastern Europe was one such project, followed by the three months I then spent backpacking through Western Europe.

I’m proud to say I’ve finally completed the story of my time in Eastern Europe. To follow this journey, start with this introductory post. Links within each story then take you on a ride through Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania and Bulgaria, before concluding with an idyllic holiday in Northern Greece. There are ten posts in total.

I’ve also started chronicling the backpacking odyssey that followed my time in Eastern Europe. However, it'd be fair to say that this experience isn’t as well-documented. I have little more than a photo album and a pile of souvenir ticket stubs to guide me. As a result, these archival posts require significant amounts of research as I strive to trigger and recall old memories. To follow this journey, start with this introductory post.

To date, I’ve documented my time in Berlin and Norway, including a 700 km excursion north of the Arctic Circle, as well as posts about my first time in Morocco. Enjoy!

In search of paradise

It’s time for a final post about my journey through Eastern Europe in 1990. At the time, I was travelling with a group of 12 as part of a YWAM Christian missionary program. For almost three months, the group made its way progressively through Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania and Bulgaria. Our formal activities finally came to an end in the Bulgarian city of Plovdiv.

On 30 July, we bid farewell to our local hosts and drove towards Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria. Here, our group split and headed in different directions for a final week of rest and relaxation. Six of us (me, Dean, Dave, Sandy, Michele and Christine) took one of our two minivans and drove south to Greece, while the remaining six members returned to Switzerland to explore the Swiss Alps.

My group decided to go in search of a remote Greek beach, set up camp, and enjoy the ultimate postcard vacation. We left Sofia early in the afternoon and headed towards Thessaloniki, 300 km south. We were keen to see the city, given its prominent role in three New Testament books (Acts, as well as 1 and 2 Thessalonians). During the early days of the Christian church, it was the capital of the Roman province of Macedonia. 

We stopped for a night in Thessaloniki and spent the following morning exploring this ancient Greek city. That’s us in the image above at the Arch of Galerius. This is a triumphal arch in the centre of town, built to commemorate a victorious campaign against the Persians by Roman Emperor Galerius in 306 AD. It was originally an eight-pillared gateway that formed a triple arch and connected to the Roman palace. Only two of the arches are still intact today. 

The nearby Rotunda of Galerius, a circular Roman temple, was an equally impressive sight. It’s a massive masonry structure which, much like the Pantheon in Rome, once featured an oculus. These days its dome is fully enclosed. Over time it’s been used as a mausoleum, a Christian basilica, a Muslim mosque, and again a Christian church (and archaeological site). Faded frescoes still adore its ceiling as you can see in the image above, which I’ve sourced from the web.

Exploring Thessaloniki was kind of mind-blowing. As we wandered, a revered biblical location came to life for the very first time. When you live in the antipodes, ancient history feels mythical by nature. They’re not stories of real places where actual people live. In the decades since, I can’t tell you how many times while traveling I’ve stopped and figuratively pinch myself, marvelling at the fact “this place really exists”.

However, while Thessaloniki was fun, our ultimate destination was the Chalkidiki peninsula. This is a three-fingered landmass extending south of Thessaloniki into the Aegean Sea. We decided that its rambling coastline was promising territory in our search for the perfect beach.

We headed south along the coast of the Kassandra Peninsula, Chalkidiki’s westernmost finger, mid-afternoon on 31 July. However, the further south we drove, the more crowded the beaches became. Our dream destination was proving more elusive than anticipated. We eventually stopped for the night on the eastern shores of the peninsula.

The following morning, we continued our quest for the perfect beach. We drove back up the coast and around Toroneos Kolpos towards Chalkidiki’s middle finger. It was here, at the tip of the Sithonia Peninsula, that we finally found the iconic beach we’d been searching for. 

Porto Korfu Beach ticked all the boxes. It was a gently arcing crescent of sand hugging the eastern shoreline of a small, sheltered bay. A narrow channel between two picturesque headlands provided safe access to the sea. Even better, there wasn’t a soul to be seen.  

A few days later, we found a postcard of Porto Korfu in a local store. I've kept it as a souvenir for more than 35 years. Look for the red dot in the image above. That was our small piece of paradise.

We set up camp on a grassy flat towards the southern end of the beach and spent the next three days in paradise. Every day we swam in the warm azure-blue waters of the Aegean Sea. One afternoon, we hiked over the headlands to soak in breathtaking views of the local coastline. We bought watermelons from a nearby village, filled them with a bottle of Ouzo and feasted on their sweet, aniseed flesh that evening. It was truly idyllic. 

We even enjoyed an unexpected taste of local culture. Every morning, a young lad passed through our campsite shepherding a herd of goats. He’d walk them along the beach to graze on the headlands and return home with them late afternoon. You can see the herd making itself at home in the image above.

On the afternoon of 3 August, we reluctantly packed up camp and began making our way north. Our minivan had to be returned to its owners three days later, in Einigen, Switzerland, more than 2,100 km away. We camped for the night on the outskirts of Nea Mouldania, gateway to the bustling Kassandra Peninsula.

The following day, we crossed into Yugoslavia and drove nonstop for an entire day and on through the night, before finally reaching Liechtenstein on Sunday afternoon. I recall one driving shift I took on. We pulled off the motorway late at night to refuel and take a quick bathroom break. As I drove across the motorway overpass, I momentarily forgot we were driving on the right-hand side of the road and turned onto the wrong side of the slip road leading into the service station. The entire van erupted with shouts as we realised my error.

I also remember our stop at the Liechtenstein border. A modest road sign and a small guard hut were the only indications of its existence. A friendly border guard welcomed us to the principality. We handed over our passports, hoping for a souvenir stamp. The guard waved them off. We insisted he stamp them. He eventually relented, disappeared into his little hut and eventually returned with a stamp pad. I suspect he had to search high and low to find it. That’s my stamp in the image above. It would be another twenty years before I’d return to Liechtenstein again. 

We stopped for the night at Camping Mittagspitze, which I’m sure is Liechtenstein’s only campground. The following morning, 6 August, we drove across Switzerland and into Einigen. Here we handed back the minivan and large canvas tent we'd borrowed from the local YWAM base. Two days later, I set off with Dean Keiller, a Victorian sheep farmer, on a new adventure, backpacking our way through Western Europe. Follow this link to learn more about our three-month odyssey through 12 countries.

Tampons and toilet paper

Here’s more about my time in Bulgaria in 1990. If you’ve been following the journey so far, a dozen of us spent three months travelling through Eastern Europe as part of a YWAM Christian missionary program. We entered Bulgaria on 11 July and spent eight days in Varna on the Black Sea coast, before heading south to the provincial port city of Burgas.

This city of more than 200,000 sits on the edge of Burgas Bay, the westernmost point of the Black Sea. According to Wikipedia, Burgas is the centre of Bulgaria's fishing and fish processing industry. Our group spent five days here, hosted by a fractious local church. The congregation was deeply divided between two camps. Our group spent much of its time promoting unity, attempting to reconcile the warring factions.

I don’t recall the cause of the schism. However, it wasn’t all that unexpected. Protestant denominations were subjected to relentless persecution in Bulgaria during the Communist era. For example, when the Communists came to power in 1946, a law curbing foreign currency transactions was introduced in part to control the nation's churches. At the time, many Protestant churches were funded by international donations, and many of their ministers had been trained in the West. As a result, these foreign ties were treated with suspicion, often fostering deep divisions within congregations and subjecting them to relentless harassment.

On 24 July, we headed inland to the city of Plovdiv. In many respects, we’d saved the best for last. The church that hosted us proved to be one of the strongest contacts we made throughout Eastern Europe, second only perhaps to the church we'd met in Debrecen, Hungary. Much like Debrecen, the church in Plovdiv boasted an active and energetic youth group that quickly took us under its wing.

For six days, we delivered daily open-air performances of our dialogue-free street drama to large and engaged crowds. The church also took on a day trip to a nearby village to share the gospel with a fledgling congregation it was sponsoring. Above you can see Dean Keiller and me with Jimmy, a member of our host church. Jimmy was simply enamoured by our group and its activities. He followed us everywhere, and we welcomed him with open arms for dinner and a laugh at our campsite more than once. That’s our campsite in the image that opens this post.

Plovdiv is Bulgaria’s second-largest city. Its greater metropolitan area is home to more than half a million people. It’s also one of its oldest cities. There is evidence of habitation in the area dating back to approximately 6000 BC. In the millennia since, it has been conquered and ruled by the Greeks, the Persians, the Celts, the Romans and the Ottoman Turks.

As a result, Plovdiv is rich in fascinating history. One afternoon, our hosts took us to visit the city’s beautifully restored Roman amphitheatre. The Roman theatre of Philippopolis (Plovdivski antichen teatar) is one of the world's best-preserved ancient theatres, and one of Bulgaria’s most famous monuments. It sits within a natural saddle between two of the city’s historic Three Hills. It is divided into two parts, each with 14 rows, separated by a horizontal aisle, and could accommodate up to 7,000 people. The first image above is mine, while the second was pulled from the web.

One final anecdote from our time in Bulgaria. Shortages of basic goods were a common occurrence wherever we travelled in Eastern Europe. However, each country had its own peculiar supply challenge. For example, in Romania, toilet paper was scarce, while in Bulgaria, women’s sanitary items were hard to come by. As we travelled through Bulgaria, the women in our group were constantly approached by locals asking for a spare tampon or sanitary pad.

During our final days in Bulgaria, the women in our group donated their surplus sanitary supplies to several grateful women. Although, if I recall correctly, in Sofia, the nation’s capital, one particularly well-heeled woman cornered a group member in a toilet. She offered a hefty sum of banknotes for a handful of tampons. We later joked that had we been better prepared, we could’ve funded our trip through Eastern Europe by simply stocking up on toilet paper and tampons.

On 30 July, we packed up our outreach camp for the last time and made our way to Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria. Here, our group split, with half returning to Switzerland and the rest travelling south to Greece. You can learn more about our time in Greece here. My only enduring recollection of Sofia was its hillside suburbs. The ridge line was dominated by a string of drab, monolithic high-rise apartment blocks. It was classic socialist architecture in all its soul-destroying glory.

The Black Sea

In 1990, I spent three weeks travelling through Bulgaria, just seven months after the nation’s Communist Government had voluntarily ceded power. At the time, I was part of a YWAM Christian missionary program, travelling in Eastern Europe for the first time following the fall of the Berlin Wall.  On 11 July, our group of 12 crossed the border from Romania, exactly one month after Bulgaria had held its first free elections in almost fifty years.

We drove from Pitesti, via Bucharest, before crossing the Danube into the Bulgarian city of Ruse. It was a poignant moment, driving across the Bridge of Friendship. After spending several weeks visiting towns and cities along the Danube, this was to be our final view of the King of European Rivers. After passing through the border checkpoint, the group exchanged its remaining Romanian banknotes with black market touts loitering nearby and headed east to Varna on the Black Sea coast. 

As we ventured through the countryside, we unwittingly experienced our first taste of post-Communist corruption. In the middle of nowhere, as our minivan rounded a downhill curve, a police officer suddenly appeared from the trees holding a sign instructing us to stop. We pulled over. In broken English, he demanded payment of a fine. David, our Canadian colleague who’d been driving the van, quietly slipped a handful of banknotes into his open hand. We were then free to go.

We encountered this entrepreneurial spirit everywhere we went in Eastern Europe. For example, almost every town had someone offering Western pornography, a once-rare item, at a bargain price. This included trestle tables set up in city parks loaded with explicit magazines. We were also frequently approached by freelance money changers offering an exchange rate two or three times more favourable than the official rate.

The use of unofficial money changers caused quite a stir within our group. Some of us, including me, felt we were normalising lawlessness in these fledgling and potentially fragile democracies. Tim, our group leader, eventually agreed that our collective expenses would be funded using official currency exchange outlets. Individual team members were left free to complete black-market exchanges for their own discretionary expenses.

Varna was a typical seaside resort destination (see the internet-sourced images above). It’s home to more than 300,000 people, making it Bulgaria’s third-largest city. It’s often referred to as Bulgaria’s maritime capital and is home to the headquarters of the Bulgarian Navy and merchant marine. We were invited to visit Varna by a local church member who’d seen us performing our street drama elsewhere in Eastern Europe. However, unlike Romania, we set up camp in each location rather than being taken in by local families. It was also the height of Summer, so the campground was alive with holidaying families and international visitors.

As I’ve posted previously, public infrastructure throughout Romania was in disarray thanks to the oppressive austerity measures imposed by the Ceaușescu regime. We camped for a night in Timisoara when we entered the country. The campground was in a serious state of disrepair, with broken toilet bowls and cubicles filled with human excrement, and basic foodstuffs impossible to procure without the right connections. We couldn’t have travelled for a month in Romania if local families hadn’t taken us under their wing.

By comparison, camping in Bulgaria proved a rather civilised affair. In Varna, we stayed at Resort Complex Kamchia, a beachside complex about 25km south of the central city. Its facilities were well-maintained, and hot water was generally available, although sometimes only for a set period each day. I recall an encounter I had with an old lady cleaning the campground shower block in Varna. I was enjoying a leisurely shower when she suddenly appeared in the doorway. She immediately took umbrage when she saw me blade-shaving in the shower. She decided this was a colossal waste of precious hot water and began scolding me in Bulgarian. I dismissed her protestations and continued shaving.

A few minutes later, she reappeared. However, this time she took a more aggressive approach. She decided that the only way to stop me wasting water was to embarrass me. She began cleaning the shower block while I was still standing there. I decided that being naked in front of an elderly Bulgarian woman was a humiliation worth enduring for the sake of a leisurely hot shower. To this date, I’m sure she thought I’d rinse off and make a quick exit.

We spent eight days in Varna, hosted by a large and active evangelical church. I believe the image above, taken from the web, is of the church that hosted us. This is First Evangelical Baptist Church located in the Izgrev neighbourhood of Varna. Although thanks to the passage of time, I can’t be sure. Its bold and public proclamations of the gospel meant that it had suffered extensive persecution under Communist rule. We heard many stories of individuals who’d been harnessed by local officials, denied access to social services, and subjected to other injustices. 

For example, we learned that the church’s pastor was relatively new to the congregation. Apparently, his predecessor had been arrested, imprisoned and never heard from again. It was confronting to hear firsthand about people disappearing at the hands of the Government. I recently watched a documentary that claimed upwards of 30,000 dissidents were murdered in Bulgaria during the Communist era.

Most days, we performed our open-air gospel-inspired street drama in the central city. We regularly drew large crowds, often hundreds of people at a time. In fact, some of the largest crowds we attracted during our entire time in Eastern Europe were in Bulgaria. You can see one such crowd in the photo above. This was taken in Varna. The central city is dissected by broad pedestrian boulevards filled with plazas, parks and garden beds. These offered plenty of space for us to perform without impeding pedestrians, while providing a ready-made audience. 

After trolling Google Street View, I've confirmed the photo above was taken on the edge of Independence Square (Ploshtad Nezavisimost). It’s a well-known focal point where several pedestrian boulevards converge, including Preslav, the main pedestrian throughfare. Preslav starts in front of the city’s iconic Dormition of the Theotokos Cathedral and ends at Knyaz Boris I, the city’s premier shopping street. A web-sourced image of the cathedral opens this post.

Above is a screenshot of Independence Square as it appears on Google Street View more than three decades later. The red building on the right in my image has been repainted. However, its distinctive balconies and those on the left-hand building visible in both images remain unchanged. It's eerie to see these streets online and think that I once walked them during a time of dramatic geopolitical change.

When we weren't ministering in the streets, we spent time at the beach, enjoying the warm waters of the Black Sea. I still marvel at the fact that I once swam in this renowned body of water - one that's currently a battleground in the war between Ukraine and Russia. 

On 19 July, we packed up camp and drove south along the Black Sea coast to Burgas, Bulgaria’s fourth largest city, before turning inland towards the ancient city of Plovdiv. You can learn more about our time in these Bulgarian cities here.

Bullet holes in Bucharest

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. 

After spending a week in Romania's impoverished mining region, we made our way back to Pitești on 10 July. 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.  The image that opens this post was taken in 2010 when Garry and I revisited the capital.

At one point, we drove past the headquarters of the National Salvation Front, Romania’s new, democratically elected governing party. Its security perimeter was simply out of this world. The free-standing collonaded building was surrounded by an impenetrable ring of armed soldiers standing an arm’s length apart. Outside the main entrance, tanks, artillery and another line of soldiers were stationed on a ceremonial lawn. 

A block away, we stumbled upon a side street filled with more tanks and soldiers milling around. I’ve never seen so many soldiers on duty, or tanks for that matter, and certainly never in the heart of a modern city. The firepower on display was extraordinary and rather intimidating. I’ve since learned that the National Salvation Front’s headquarters was previously home to the Romanian Communist Party’s Central Committee.

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 surrounding the incomplete building. It would be another two decades before I’d return and see it up close.

Follow this link to continue our journey through Eastern Europe. Varna, on the Bulgarian Black Sea, was our next destination. 

Living in Ceaușescu's shadow

Time for another retrospective post. This time, we're travelling into Romania's interior in 1990.  At the time, I was travelling with a group of 12 as part of a YWAM Christian missionary program. For more than a month, local church families hosted us 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 in Motru for the night 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 preached the gossip in open fields, and an afternoon at a youth summer camp. You can see us performing in the image above. 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, which 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 mayor of a small village we visited 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.

Follow this link to continue our journey through Eastern Europe. Our final stop in Romania was a brief return to the city of Pitesti, followed by an eye-opening day in Bucharest, the nation's capital. 

Life on the Danube

Drobeta-Turnu Severin lies on the northern bank of the Danube River. This historical city is home to more than 100,000 people. Drobeta is the name of the ancient Dacian and Roman towns that once resided here. The modern city of Turnu Severin received the additional name of Drobeta during Nicolae Ceaușescu's communist dictatorship as part of his national myth-making efforts.

Nine hundred years ago, one of the Roman Empire’s most famous bridges crossed the river nearby. Trajan's Bridge, as it was colloquially known, was the first bridge to be built over the lower Danube. It’s 20 masonry arches spanned 1,135 metres (the Danube is now 800 m wide in that area), was 15 metres wide, and sat 19 metres above the waterline.

Although it was functional for only 165 years, it is often considered to have been the longest arch bridge in both total span and length for more than 1,000 years. These days, all that remains of this impressive structure are its two ruined entrance pillars located on either side of the river.

I spent eight days in Drobeta-Turnu Severin in late June 1990. At the time, I was travelling with a group of 12 as part of a YWAM Christian missionary program. We arrived in town on Tuesday, 26 June, before departing again on 3 July. As had been the case elsewhere, our group was warmly greeted and hosted by families from a local church.

Our time here was a highlight of our month in Romania. We were welcomed by an enthusiastic and well-organised Baptist church, which scheduled a hectic itinerary for us. For the next eight days, we visited five regional churches and conducted daily street performances that drew large crowds. Romanian television and newspapers even reported on our presence in the area.

However, it was the scenery that I remember most vividly. The Danube was at its most dramatic here, and the villages we visited in the surrounding hills were easily the most scenic we encountered in all Eastern Europe. A few kilometres upstream from Drobeta-Turnu Severin are the Iron Gates. This is the name for a series of narrow and dramatic river gorges winding their way east for more than 50 kilometres. It forms the border between Serbia to the south and Romania to the north.

The Great Kazan (kazan meaning "cauldron" or "reservoir") is the most famous and the narrowest gorge along the route. Here, the river narrows to less than 150 metres. Elsewhere, steep rocky cliffs soar to 500 metres and are almost impossible to reach by land. In other words, the scenery is truly spectacular.  The images above, pulled from the web, barely do it justice.

One afternoon, we drove along the Danube to a small village called Dubova, about an hour west of Drobeta-Turnu Severin. At times, you felt as though you could reach out and touch the Serbian shoreline. The middle image above includes Dubova in the background. However, it wasn’t the scenery that created the most memorable experience.

 
At one point, we stopped to inspect an abandoned watch tower overlooking the gorge. With us were several youths from our host church. They’d joined us for the ride in part because they’d never travelled this stretch of road despite living nearby. During the Ceaușescu era, this section of the Danube was off-limits to all but a few local villagers who required a special permit to reside here. The narrow gorge was considered far too tempting for illegal border crossings, mainly Romanians trying to escape the oppressive regime and its increasingly harsh austerity programs.

As a result, the road was heavily guarded by a chain of watchtowers monitoring it and the river day and night. Alison Mutler, a freelance journalist in Romania, published this harrowing story of one man's experience swimming across the Danube in the dead of night. She also took the image above near Orsova, a town we passed through on our way to Dubova.

As one youth told me, he’d seen photos of the river valley but never the real thing. It was hard to imagine living just a few kilometres from such scenic beauty and never seeing it with your own eyes.  This fear of the past came alive during one scenic stop. We pulled over to take a closer look at one of the abandoned watchtowers. A couple of us, including me, climbed the guard tower ladder for a better view. Our hosts were visibly uncomfortable with our excursion. Such an act, just six months earlier, would have been a death sentence.

The threat of death was brought home again by the family that hosted three of us. The couple had two children. However, the wife was considerably older than her husband. He seemed too young to be the father of their children. We later learned that he was her second husband. The first had been shot and killed trying to escape across the Danube in search of a better life for him and his family.

One day, we ventured into the surrounding hills to visit Băile Herculane, one of the region’s famous spa resort towns. In the photo above, you can see us performing in Parcul Central (Central Park), which doubles as the local town square. It’s a beautiful spot filled with mature trees, two iconic fountains and a large wrought-iron bandstand, surrounded by the region's spectacular granite mountains. 

Opposite the park is the town's most iconic complex, the ornate Neptune Imperial Thermal Baths, accessed by a graceful arch bridge spanning the local river. Sadly, this spa complex has fallen into disrepair in recent years. The image of the complex above was sourced from the web. I’ve also included a more recent image of the park from Google Maps. Not much has changed in thirty years. 

However, we weren’t here for the town’s geothermal waters; instead, we trekked up into the foothills to visit a small gypsy village. The locals greeted us warmly, cooking a meal on an outdoor wood oven (a gypsy BBQ, so to speak), before gathering to watch us perform our missionary outreach street drama in the middle of a field.

The entire experience was extraordinary. We were immersed in a completely untarnished view of gypsy life exactly as it had gone on for centuries. Equally, despite their poverty, they were among the happiest people we encountered in Eastern Europe.

We finished our day in the mountains with a quick dip in a local thermal pool. It was a popular venue. Hundreds of adults and children were soaking in the main pool. However, its hygiene standards were rather dubious. The water was rather murky, and at one point, a distinctly firm and clearly identifiable human turf floated past us. Then, shortly after we exited the pool, the complex started draining it.

We later learned that the facility lacked any form of filtration or sterilisation plant. Instead, the pool was drained, scrubbed clean and refilled once a week. It was just our luck to arrive in the final hours before a week of human scum, urine and turds were flushed away. However, we enjoyed a more sanitary swim in Drobeta-Turnu Severin. One of our host families boasted a backyard pool – a genuine rarity in Romania. We spent several relaxing afternoons here, swimming and lounging in the Romanian sunshine.

From Drobeta-Turnu Severin, we travelled inland to the mining town of Motru and the regional mining city of Târgu Jiu. Follow this link to learn more.

On stage in Craiova

I spent four days in Craiova, a regional city in Romania, in June 1990. At the time, I was travelling with a group of 12 as part of a YWAM Christian missionary program. We arrived in Craiova on Friday, June 22, after a successful week of engagements in Pitesti.

Our time here was mildly controversial. I don’t recall all the details, but we were hosted by a local church that proved relatively conservative. Its congregation openly questioned our Pentecostal style of community outreach. No doubt some of them considered us blasphemous.

Our local sponsors were Lydia and George, a husband and wife who’d seen us perform on the streets elsewhere. She was a trained opera singer, and he was a former musician. They had one young daughter called Dimetrias. We later learned that Craiova was considered the cradle of classic operetta music in Romania. Its local operetta company was considered one of the nation’s best for much of the 20th Century.

Lydia and George hosted three of us in their home. You can see all of us in the image that opens this post: me, Dave Craddock, a Canadian (on the left) and Dean Keiller, a Victorian sheep farmer (on the right).  I recall Lydia asking us if there was anything we didn't enjoy eating. Our response was simply "ficat", which translates to liver. At the time, Romania was experiencing widespread shortages of everyday necessities, including basic foodstuffs like meat and bread. As a result, we were often fed dishes that featured liver as the primary protein, or offal, particularly intestines.

Much to our horror, Lydia disappeared into the backyard and returned a short time later with a freshly killed chicken from the family’s coop. She then expertly dipped it into boiling water, plucked it and butchered it. We ate like kings for the next few nights. I felt terrible that the family had sacrificed one of its prize-winning, egg-laying birds for us fussy foreigners - at least that's how I imagined it.  Lydia also made pasta from scratch, something I'd never seen before. Until then, pasta was always something sold ready-made in a bag at the supermarket.

Lydia arranged for us to perform in the local opera house, a neo-Gothic stone building featuring an ornate internal central rotunda framed by imposing Corinthian pillars.  The images above, sourced from the web, provide a good sense of this impressive building (thanks, Google Street View). Tim, our group leader, hated the experience. He complained that “this isn’t who we are”. We weren’t a professional theatre group, and thus, he felt that we didn’t fit into this kind of venue. Personally, I was comfortable being on stage, having performed in musicals and stage plays throughout high school.

To drum up interest in our performance, our hosts arranged for us to stroll through the local park, up and down forested hillside paths, playing a guitar and singing Christian songs. As we walked, our hosts handed out flyers inviting everyone to our evening show. At times, the whole experience felt like something out of The Sound of Music. Once dinner was done, we made our way to the opera house. I gave the group some last-minute tips on how to perform on an indoor stage before its massive red velvet curtain parted.

The performance wasn’t exactly Tony Award-winning material. Our group didn’t really understand how to make full use of the stage despite my last-minute coaching. As a result, everyone gravitated towards the back of the stage (a definite no-no in the world of live theatre) and huddled in a tight circle that failed to utilise the available space. To this day, I’m frustrated by the fact that Tim wouldn’t let me spend time with everyone adapting our production for a theatrical setting.

Our next stop in Romania proved more successful. On Tuesday, 26 June, we drove 110 km west towards the Danube, stopping for nine days in the riverside city of Drobeta-Turnu Severin. Follow this link to learn more.

Pitesti

Let’s continue the story of my journey through Eastern Europe in 1990 as part of a YWAM outreach program. Today’s post covers our first week in Romania, where we lived with a family in Pitesti, a satellite city located about 100 km west of Bucharest. At the time, it was a highly industrialised city of approximately 175,000, making it the 12th largest city in Romania.

We were invited to Pitesti by an enthusiastic young woman who’d witnessed us performing a street drama in Hungary. Sadly, I can’t find any record of her name. However, she was a dynamo, an eternal optimist who simply made things happen. She’s the dark-haired woman in the front row, left in the image above. Her parents are on the far left. She became our local host and event coordinator. She arranged for families from her local Baptist church to billet members of our group, organised our daily outings and translated for us wherever we went.

We drove into town late afternoon on 14 June 1990. We’d spent a full day driving through the picturesque Romanian countryside from Timisoara. Our host was shocked to see us. For two days, deadly riots had been unfolding in Bucharest, the worst violence the country had witnessed since dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu's downfall six months earlier. She’d naturally assumed we’d abandon our journey.

Until that moment, we’d had no knowledge of these riots or their violence. Fortunately, the situation calmed down over the next few days. I vaguely recall conversations about ensuring a safe passage out of Romania if things escalated. Pitesti was about 187 km from the nearest border crossing. I also recall a measure of discomfort among the local families that hosted us. They were understandably nervous about being responsible for the lives of international guests during a national crisis.

We spent eight days in Pitesti. It was an extraordinary, eye-opening experience. None more so than the abject poverty we witnessed everywhere we went. The nation’s collective impoverishment was the result of a draconian austerity program Ceaușescu had launched in 1980, designed to pay off Romania’s national debt within ten years. Vast chunks of economic production originally destined for domestic consumption were diverted for export, plunging the population into painful shortages and increasing hardship.

The Romanian TV channels were reduced to a single channel, which transmitted only 2 hours per day. Electricity was interrupted for hours, mostly at night. Repairs of basic infrastructure ground to a halt as spare parts disappeared. There were long lines at the grocery stores for the most basic goods, including meat, eggs, milk, bread and more. The queue in the image above was typical of those we encountered everywhere we went. 

Likewise, streetscape and structures were in disrepair wherever we went. For example, whenever a footpath was dug up or a road repaired, the residual soil, broken concrete and other debris were left piled in place. Painted surfaces were always worn and flaking. Nothing had a new coat of paint. Weeds grew everywhere. I distinctly recall that the apartment building we stayed in had hot water for just a few hours each day, and one of its external walls had a large crack running down its façade, starting at the roofline and extending for several stories.

Without a doubt, the most striking visual difference between Romania and other nations was simply the lack of advertising and promotional signage. Billboards and posters didn't exist, except for the occasional socialist propaganda poster. Neither did neon signs nor promotional signage outside stores and cafes. 

The result was a remarkably clutter-free urban environment that gave the city an old pre-war newsreel look and feel. It often felt as if I’d stepped into the world of grandparents, as if it were when they were my age. The image above came from the web. It's dated 1986. Romania looked no different four years later.

In fact, the only advertisement I recall was a faded, weather-beaten billboard promotion for the nation’s popular Dacia motorcar. It had been painted directly onto the concrete beam of a flyover bridge that spanned the motorway between Pitesti and Bucharest. The Dacia probably deserves its own blog post.

S.C. Automobile Dacia S.A., commonly known as Dacia, is a Romanian car manufacturer. It was established in 1966. For years, almost every car driven in Romania was one of a handful of Dacia models manufactured in a large facility about 15km from Pitesti. They looked like a classic small car from the 1960s. Their design remained largely unchanged for decades. We saw them everywhere we went. Often the same colour, the same dated style and in the same slightly drab condition. It was another visual prompt that left me feeling as if we’d stepped back in time.

For many of the families that hosted us, we were the first foreign nationals they’d ever engaged with. For decades, fraternising with a foreigner simply raised suspicions and invited trouble. Nicolae Ceaușescu had ruled Romania with an iron fist, ruthlessly suppressing all opposition with the help of a secret police service known as the Securitate. At its peak, the Securitate operated the largest network of spies and informants in Eastern Europe.

Neighbours, and even family members, were encouraged to spy on one another and report the most minor of civil infractions, or seditious chatter, no matter how banal. As a result, foreigners were avoided like the plague. It was fascinating to watch our hosts alternate between intense curiosity about the West and instinctive discomfort whenever they were in our presence.

I recall a conversation one evening with an older woman. I commented on the sound of children playing and laughing in the apartment grounds outside. She froze, explaining that the sound terrified her. Under Ceaușescu, parents discouraged their children from playing in groups for fear they’d inadvertently reveal a civil disobedience indiscretion happening in the home, be it a passing conversation, a black market transaction or otherwise.

I also recall our host receiving a phone call and then disappearing for hours. The calls were usually friends or neighbours advising that the local store had received a shipment of bread, eggs or some other commodity in short supply. Shopping bags would immediately be gathered, and off she’d go to stand in a queue for hours. Out of curiosity, we visited several supermarkets. Their shelves were always filled with aisles of tinned tomatoes, bottles of beer and little else.

However, despite these hardships, families in Pitesti welcomed us with open arms. I stayed in an apartment owned by the family of our energetic host and interpreter. She and her family lived in another apartment a few floors down. Our host's father was particularly proud to have us stay. As you can see in the image above, he’d break into song or play his flute to entertain us. Given the language barrier between us, music was the only way he could express his joy at our presence.

One night, an elderly man came for dinner. It may have been our host's grandfather. He was introduced as the first Christian in his village. It was fascinating to hear, through our youthful interpreter, snippets of his life story. He and his extended family were truly inspirational role models. It was the first time I came to learn that wealth doesn't necessarily bring happiness. Yes, it makes the necessities of life easier to obtain.  However, real joy comes from the people you connect with along the way.

At times, austerity created some amusing moments. One day, our enthusiastic young host invited us to visit the town centre. She took pride in showing us Pitesti’s premier department store. In particular, she wanted us to see its internal escalators. It was one of the only buildings in town that had them. Let’s just say these moving stairways were arcane in both their style, with worn wooden foot treads, and their less-than-smooth rumbling motion. Likewise, the garments on sale resembled eclectic op-shop fashion statements, and many of the goods, like everything in Romania, looked dated and lacked the functionality we take for granted.
 
On one of the store’s upper floors, we came across some Smurf blue long pants. While not at all on trend, we decided they’d make superb costumes for group members playing the roles of God and Christ in our street play. However, our interest in these pants quickly drew a crowd. Within minutes, everyone wanted the same outfit as the well-dressed foreigners. I still chuckle that, for a moment, we created a hot new fashion trend in the city of Pitesti.

Our new costumes worked a treat. We spent a week conducting outreaches (street performances) in local churches and on the streets of Pitesti. We frequently drew crowds of several hundred people at a time. We generally conducted just one outdoor performance each day, but occasionally performed for a local church before or after these public events.

After a week of street performances and engagement with the local Christian community, we packed our bags and headed for the city of Craiova. You can follow this link to learn more about our time in this regional city, home to more than 300,000 people.

The road to Romania

Time for another retrospective post. This is the story of my brief journey through Yugoslavia in June 1990. At the time, I was travelling with a group of 12 from Youth With A Mission (YWAM). We’d just spent three weeks in Hungary and were now on our way to Romania. We travelled in two minivans on loan to us and camped overnight in tents along the way.

We departed the border city of Szombathely, Hungary, on 11 June and headed towards Graz, Austria. Our route took us via Vienna, the city where our European odyssey had begun weeks earlier. This included a brief pitstop in Baden, where we debriefed the local YWAM base on our time in Hungary.

We continued south before finally crossing into Yugoslavia late afternoon. We stopped for the night at a local campground on the outskirts of Maribor, about 20 km south of the border. These days, Maribor is part of Slovenia, a nation-state that broke away from Yugoslavia in June 1991. In other words, we visited during its final year in this now-defunct nation.

Crossing the border proved to be an anticlimax. A handful of relatively disinterested border personnel gave our passports a cursory review, then stamped them with a seven-day transit visa and sent us on our way. You can see the stamp in my passport above. I still marvel at the fact that this feat would have been far more fraught with challenges a few months earlier.

The following day, June 12, we continued south to Beograd, better known in the west as Belgrade. Our route took us through Zagreb, Croatia's capital. Although again, at the time, it was still part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Croatia broke away a year later, on 25 June 1991. 

The images below were pulled from the web. They show two of Zagreb’s most iconic sights. The first one shows the ornate roof of St. Mark's Church, a historic parish church located in St. Mark's Square. The second shows Zagreb Cathedral. We were lucky enough to see the cathedral without scaffolding. In late 1990, just a few months after our whirlwind drive-by, the local diocese embarked on a major restoration. Since then, for more than 35 years, its spires and facade have been progressively shrouded by scaffolding.

We spent the morning in Zagreb buying supplies in anticipation of our crossing into Romania the following day. Tim, our group leader, recommended that we purchase flour, eggs, bottled water and other essential ingredients to feed ourselves for several days while on the road. He’d previously led groups who’d survived on pancakes for breakfast for days at a time. Hence, he thought flour should be at the top of our shopping list. Ironically, these large bags of flour sat unopened in our van for the next two months. We ultimately gave them away to local families in Bulgaria.

It would be fair to say that Tim was more of a “fly by the seat of your pants” kind of guy. Don’t get me wrong, he was an experienced leader who’d successfully led many groups over the years. However, he wasn’t inclined to plan a great deal in advance. As a result, decisions often seemed to be made on the fly.

For example, our overnight stops were rarely planned in advance. Instead, we drove into a local campground on a whim, hoping they’d have space available. Likewise, we were unable to enter Czechoslovakia simply because Tim hadn’t researched the group’s visa requirements before reaching the border.

Readers who know me well will testify to my passion for meticulous travel planning. While I always leave room for new experience, I also have a good sense of what’s on offer before arriving at a new destination. As a result, I found Tim’s lack of preparation and planning frustrating, to say the least. 

From Zagreb, we spent the afternoon driving towards Belgrade, a distance of more than 400km. Our final night in Yugoslavia was spent in the nation’s capital at another last minute campground. The following morning, 13 June, we finally crossed the border into Romania. The transition could not have been starker. We instantly transitioned from a relatively modern and advanced economy to one suffering acute shortages, where investment in basic infrastructure was visibly lacking.

We spent our first night in Romania camping on the outskirts of Timisoara. I couldn’t believe where we were. Six months earlier, the city had witnessed mass street protests that evolved into what subsequently became the Romanian Revolution. The revolution began on 16 December 1989, when the Hungarian minority in Timisoara held a public protest in response to Government attempts to evict László Tőkés, a local church pastor. László Tőkés had been a persistent critic of Ceaușescu’s totalitarian regime.

The protests began outside the pastor’s home but quickly spread into the central city. For three days, rioting crowds gathered in central Timisoara demanding an end to Communist rule. At one point, the rioters broke into the nearby district committee building and threw party documents, propaganda brochures, Ceaușescu's writings, and other symbols of Communist power out of windows. The military was sent into the city to control the riots, and bloodshed ensued.

The uprising soon spread to other Romanian cities, including the capital Bucharest. Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife eventually fled the capital on 22 December. The dictator was subsequently executed on Christmas Day following a brief military tribunal trial. Street fighting continued around the country for several days before a new interim Government finally restored peace. I arrived six months later, a few weeks after Romania’s first free elections since the end of World War II.

Our group spent our first morning in Romania visiting central Timisoara. This included a walk around the city’s infamous central plaza, colloquially known as Revolution Square. That’s the square above. The first photo shows the National Theatre & Opera House. It’s located at the square’s northern end, while the Orthodox Cathedral stands about 300 metres south at the end of a broad pedestrian boulevard.

Standing in Revolution Square, now known as Victory Square, was an extraordinary experience. The scars of protest were still visible, including makeshift memorials for those who’d died in the revolution. The image that opens this post is a memorial for Jean-Louis Calderon, a French journalist, killed in Bucharest six months earlier. He was crushed by an armoured personnel carrier while reporting on the protests on 22 December. As for the handwritten sign next to this memorial, it reads, "We ask you nicely. No! Don't shoot at us!!! We are with you, soldiers."

I recall watching queues form around the square as people waited to buy a newspaper. We assumed this reflected a hunger for independent news reporting after decades of Communist propaganda. We later learned there had been violent anti-government protests in Bucharest the previous day. The first such protests since the fall of Casuseau. Historians claim up to one hundred were killed in what’s now known as the June 1990 Mineriad. I doubt our group would’ve continued towards the capital had we been able to read the headlines. 

Instead, oblivious to the unfolding riots, we headed south to Pitesti, a city less than 100 km from Bucharest. Weeks earlier, we'd been invited to visit by an enthusiastic young woman we'd met in Hungary. I recall vividly a debate that raged in our minivan along the way. There were no motorways in the region, hence our route took us through village after village. The posted speed limit was always 50 kph, regardless of the village's size or composition. However, Dave Craddock, a friendly Canadian in our group familiar with driving on the right-hand side, didn’t always slow down when passing through the smallest of them.

This lack of respect for the law drove a Swiss couple travelling with us from Zurich completely insane. They simply couldn’t fathom how anyone could disregard road signs so blatantly. It was my first taste of immutable Germanic adherence to rules and regulations. It was one of many fascinating cultural encounters that lay ahead. Follow this post to learn more about our time in Pitesti.