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 outreach teams for many 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, overnight stops were rarely planned ahead of time. Instead, we’d drive into a local campground on a whim, hoping they’d have room for us. Likewise, we were unable to enter Czechoslovakia simply because Tim hadn’t researched our visa requirements before reaching the border.

Readers who know me will testify to my meticulous travel planning. While I always leave room for a new experience, I have a good sense of what’s on offer before reaching a new destination. As a result, I found Tim’s constant 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 morphed into 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. 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, just 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 violent anti-government protests had rocked Bucharest the previous day. This were the first such protests since the fall of Ceausescu. Historians claim up to one hundred were killed in what’s now known as the June 1990 Mineriad. I doubt we’d have continued towards the capital had we translated 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 while passing through the smallest of them.

This lack of respect for the law drove a Swiss couple travelling with us 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.

Three days in Bucharest

For more than 21 years communist president, Nicolae Ceausescu, ruled Romania with an iron fist. He ruthlessly suppressed all opposition with the help of a secret police service known as the Securitate, while simultaneously promoting a sycophantic personality cult among the general population. At its peak the Securitate operated the largest network of spies and informants in Eastern Europe.

On 22 December 1989, Ceausescu was overthrown in a violent revolution. This was the last of popular uprisings against communist rule that had swept across eastern Europe that year. He subsequently fled the capital, Bucharest, only to be captured a few hours later. Three days later he and his wife Elena were summarily tried and executed by firing squad on Christmas Day.


Ceausescu’s end came remarkably swiftly. It began ten days earlier in the western city of Timisoara with demonstrations against the harassment of a dissident ethnic-Hungarian priest, Laszlo Tokes. The protests grew rapidly in size. Within hours chanted slogans like "We want bread" turned into bolder cries such as "Down with Ceausescu".

Ceausescu was enraged; even more so when army and Securitate generals ignored orders to shoot protestors. He personally ordered troops to fire on the Timisoara demonstrators. More than a hundred were killed. News of the tragedy spread and soon mass protests were erupting in other Romanian cities. In an attmept to restore order, on 21 December, Ceausescu stage-managed a show of support for his government in Bucharest's main square. As he’d done many times before, he bused people into town to hear him speak and chant their adoration.

However, things went disastrously wrong. The crowd interrupted his speech soon after it began with increasingly bold jeers and chants. The incident was broadcast on national television before transmission was interupted by the censors. However the damage was done and the following morning Ceausescu fled by helicopter as fighting broke out between rival factions.


According to Wikipedia, 1,104 people died over a ten-day period. At least 162 were killed in protests that led to the overthrow of Ceauşescu (December 16–22, 1989) and 942 in the fighting that occurred after the seizure of power by the National Salvation Fornt (FSN). In May 1990, less than six months after the revolution, I was lucky enough to spend three weeks travelling in Romania. I saw for myself hastily erected memorials to the dead in Timosoara, building riddled with bullet holes in Bucharest and thousands of troops and tanks guarding the headquarters of the National Salvation Front. However, it’s the abject poverty I witnessed that’s stuck with me most in the years since.

This poverty was the result of a draconian austerity program Ceausescu had launched in 1980, designed pay off Romania’s national debt within ten years. Vast chunks of economic production destined for domestic consumption were diverted for export, plunging the population into painful shortages and increasing hardship. The Romanian TV channels were reduced to one 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.

It’s somewhat ironic that Romania paid of the last of its external debts of US$11 billion in early 1989. However, the austerity measures didn’t come to end. Instead, funds were being diverted to pay for megalomanic projects, such as the construction of the grandiose House of the Republic (today the Palace of the Parliament), the biggest palace in the world, and the future Communism and Ceausescu's Museum, known today the Casa Radio.


Having witnessed these hardships for myself I was keen to return and see what impact two decades of progress had made on Bucharest. Sadly, the scars of Ceausescu’s brutal economic policies are still very evident. Much of the city remains in a state of decay and disrepair. It’s a sad sight as Bucharest contains many grand neo-classical buildings and hundreds of acres of parkland. However, economic revival is slowly reclaiming parts of the city. I’m sure it will be almost unrecognisable in another decade.

Garry and I spend almost three days exploring Bucharest from our base at the Marriott Hotel. From here we ventured out to see the Palace of the Parliament, the Lipscani district or old town and explore the city’s many parks. Without doubt the most enduring highlight of our weekend excursion was the Palace of the Parliament. This enormous building dominates the city. It sits on a low hill and is the largest building in Europe and the world’s second largest administrative building, second only to the Pentagon. Ceausescu conceived it to house all of the organs of his communist government under one roof, thus concentrating his power and improving coordination between departments.


In 1989, when Ceausescu fell, the building was only partially complete leaving the post-communist government in a quandary. With the nation improvised and seeking economic advancement, the incomplete building was a serious drain on the nation’s coffers. Officials explored the option of demolishing the hated complex. However, the cost of demolishing proved greater than the cost of simply completing the building and so its construction continued, albeit at a much slower pace. Parliament eventually relocated to the building in 2006, but more than half of the building still remains idle.


Garry and I joined a tour of the building on our second day in town. It’s an opulent venue. We saw room after room of gilded ceilings, carved marble and colonnaded hallways. When you see such decadence it’s not hard to understand why the Romanian people hate Ceausescu so passionately. This vain edifice was being built at a time when the average citizen couldn’t find fresh milk and eggs in their local store. Perhaps the only redeeming feature of the building is the stunning view across Bucharest from its rooftop.


Garry and I also ventured into town to see the site of Ceausescu’s final ill-fated broadcast. Piaţa Palatului, now known as Revolution Square, contains several memorials to the 1989 revolution. A white marble triangle, with the inscription Glorie martirilor nostri (Glory to our martyrs), sits in front of the former Central Committee building pointing to the low balcony from which Ceausescu spoke. Nearby a soaring obelisk immortalises the dead. It’s not a particularly large square and so it’s hard to image the area filled with angry protesters.


Our final morning in town was spent wandering through Parcul Carol, or Carol Park. During the communist era it was called Liberty Park and housed the tombs of Romania’s most prominent communist leaders. Today the mausoleum is empty, but its site is still marked by a dramatic 49-metre monument called the “Monument of the Heroes for the Freedom of the People and of the Motherland, for Socialism.”

In 1991 the mausoleum and the monument were transformed into a memorial for the Unknown Soldier. Remains from an unidentified World War I solider were subsequently entombed by an eternal flame that once burned in memory of workers killed fighting for socialism. The monument sits on a low hill, reached by an impressive series of broad stairs. From its summit the view is dominated by the nearby Palace of the Parliament. While Ceausescu may have been dead for twenty years, the legacy of his regime endures.