Bear Grylls, the Discovery Channel survival expert, has been dropped (literally) in the Transylvanian forest, a place “crawling with brown bears”. There you go, Bear.
If you want to have a first-hand look at the wild Carpathian mountains, check out the movies below. Carpathians are considered ideal for hiking, being not as high as the highest Alps, thus more accessible on foot, but high enough to be challenging (Bear can testify). As opposed to the Alps, you find wide uninhabited territories (or, at least, not by humans), great wildlife (read: “big”) and outstandingly diverse landscapes.
“Faţa galbenă care râde” (“the yellow smiley face”, or rather in a word for word translation “the yellow face which is laughing”) received awards at film festivals in Locarno, Trieste, Belgrade, Warsaw. The movie is about… but I think it’s best to watch it instead of reading about it. Are you away from your parents? Got them into using computers to stay in touch? Got 15 minutes? Enjoy:
Every nation is proud of its Nobel Prize winners. Romanians too, albeit with a concern casting a shadow on this feeling: all 3 Romanian-born Nobel laureats received the prize only after they emigrated to other countries. George Emil Palade in the USA, Elie Wiesel in Sweden and Herta Müller in Germany. Very few of us had heard about a 4th Romanian Nobel-man, who lived and died in Romania.
Ioan Moraru was the head of the main medical research institute in Romania. Together with Bernhard Lown and Yewgenij Chazow he founded in 1980 the international organization called “International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War” (IPPNW). The group used research, education and advocacy to help prevent nuclear war and encourage the abolition of all nuclear weapons. By the mid-1980s IPPNW had around 145,000 members and by the early 1990s around 200,000 members from over sixty countries. (source: Wikipedia).
In 1985, IPPNW got a collective Nobel Peace Prize. Dr. Moraru was supposed to attend the ceremony, yet the Communist authorities didn’t give him the visa. President Ceauşescu was dreaming to get the prize himself, for his pacifist propaganda (he was indeed talking about “world peace” in all his mumbled speeches, whether it was to the subject or not). The news that another Romanian got it, even in a collective, didn’t sit well with him – must have figured the odds of him getting it thereafter had probably decreased significantly. So authorities not only denied the visa, but Read the rest of this entry »
Mihai Eminescu is the all-time star of Romanian poetry. After a short and intense life (died aged 38), he who is known as “the last Romantic” as per the statue in Vevey, Switzerland, has revolutionized Romanian poetry in the 19th century pushing musicality of the language to new limits. He was born on January 15th, so on this day Romanians sort of celebrate him. I used to find it pathetic as I disliked him as a matter of principle when I was in school – there was just too much Eminescu in the program. However, later on I had to admit that he makes my native language sound more harmonious and enchanting than any other managed to do before or after him.
Unfortunately, translations are quite difficult, it’s tough to match words, rhythm, rime and feel altogether in another language, especially an anglo-saxon one. Still, it’s worth a shot – below is a translation of one of my favorite poems. The year was 188something, and he’s Read the rest of this entry »
“A dozen or so years ago, William Blacker ran off to live with the gipsies of northern Romania. That may not have been his original intention, but that is how it ended up. Wandering over the Carpathians into northern Transylvania he entered an enchanted world. Most travel was on horseback or by cart and sled, or feet clad in traditional laced boots, unchanged in design for centuries.
This chronicle of life in northern Romania, a place mercifully free of cars and television until very recently, is a jewel. It is a portrait of a complete world, with its glorious landscapes, its squabbling villagers – and above all the gipsies, whose main activities seem to be singing, fighting and procreation, and not necessarily in that order.”
For Romanians, Christmas carols are not only a custom, but a real institution, an entire process with very precise rules maintained for centuries. Of course, modern life did to these customs what it does best to all traditions – nearly wipe them out. Still, in some villages spread across the country, you can still find “old school” Christmas caroling, and it’s worth a closer look.
From Christmas Eve till New Year’s Eve, carol singers are passing from house to house announcing the Birth of Jesus and spreading wishes of good health and prosperity.
Traditionally, singers are usually young men as well as grown up men in groups of up to 30 or 40. In some regions, each member of the group has another task, besides singing – for example, initiating local youth in dancing and other folk traditions.
Amidst a tense climate following protests in Timisoara which had started on Dec. 15th, on December 21st, 1989, Nicolae Ceaușescu holds a speech in front of an as-huge-as-usual crowd of supposedly machine-like applauding people. Yet this time something goes wrong. Inconceivably wrong.
After 20 years, these images seem almost like from a movie. Yet they depict a reality I can still remember. A memory I want to never stop holding on to, to never forget that freedom doesn’t come for granted, and when it does, it should be duly appreciated.
“Videograms of a Revolution” is a German-Romanian documentary showing key footage from those days. I recommend the full movie to all who would like to know, or remember.
Some sequences below:
As mentioned before, Wikipedia has a comprehensive story about the Romanian Revolution:
On December 18th, 1989, Romania was frozen. Not necessarily because of the weather – it was a much milder winter than in other years – but because of several other factors.
First, there was no house heating. Winter was mild, but it was still… winter, yet Communist authorities decided to save energy (what a “green” initiative!) not by tackling the enormous consumption at inefficient and outdated factories, but by stopping warm water delivery (both running water and for heaters) to people’s apartments. “People don’t spend much time in their appartments anyway”, they must have thought, “they’re outside most of the time, lined up in endless queues in front of empty stores in the attempt to buy sophisticated food items such as bread and milk. Who needs heat.”
Second, the atmosphere was frozen. On December 16th, a group of insanely brave people had gathered in front of the house of a Hungarian pastor in Timişoara, Laszlo Tökes, who was about to be removed abusively from office, and protested. “Protested” was such a strange-sounding word. Nobody would have thought of ever having to use it in a lifetime. There was no such thing as “protesting” in the official Romanian vocabulary of that time.
Romania will earn the next Nobel Peace Prize. How come? Well, we had Presidential elections today, and the different exit poll studies show a very tight balance between the two candidates, results well within the standard error margin of 3%, as follows:
Therefore, we don’t know yet who’s going to be the next president, the matter is going to be decided by some votes counting in a county at the seaside, most probably Constanta. But more importantly, what we do know for sure is that the “loser” will go about getting involved in various charity and climate change work and get the Nobel prize for peace in the near future.
Don’t we.
OK, at least that’s what should happen.
.
———————
Update: The future winner of the Nobel Peace Prize is Mr. Mircea Geoana – 49.66%.
James May, the Top Gear top gear, jumps out of his Lamborghini to talk about the Romanian car Dacia Sandero. And, guess what, in good terms:
“The Sandero – sadly only available on the Continent – is the essence of a car, devoid of any of the sociological fug that turns it into a fashion statement, a status symbol, an indulgence, a brand experience or a lifestyle accessory.
[...]
There are two ways of looking at it. One is that it is a cheap car for poor people, a calculated exercise by an opportunist manufacturer and not really good enough for the rest of us.
But it doesn’t feel like that. It feels refreshing, elemental and pleasingly anti-fashion, which in turn makes it seem rather cool.
It is, when all’s said and done, just a car. And it’s here to remind us what that really means.”
For those passionate about photography, Romania offers a wide variety of shooting opportunities. Some have been explored by Mitchell Karnashkevich, an Australian (judging from the phone number) travel photographer, who shares some of his impressions on his blog:
“I would have liked my trip to Maramures to have felt like a trip into a different world, into the past. It wasn’t quite like that, but as I drove my car through the mountains to the Hungarian border, passing old cattle herders in traditional hats, women collecting hay in their unique attires, all while being surrounded by some of the more dramatic scenery one is likely to encounter, I realized – Maramures is still special. It’s not what I wanted it to be, but that doesn’t make it any less special in relation to the rest of the world.”
You can read the full entry about Maramures here. Might want to check out his previous two articles too, the one on Holbav, a forgotten Transylvanian village, here, and some introductory impressions here.
“Before the glory that was Greece and Rome, even before the first cities of Mesopotamia or temples along the Nile, there lived in the Lower Danube Valley and the Balkan foothills people who were ahead of their time in art, technology and long-distance trade.
For 1,500 years, starting earlier than 5000 B.C., they farmed and built sizable towns, a few with as many as 2,000 dwellings. They mastered large-scale copper smelting, the new technology of the age. Their graves held an impressive array of exquisite headdresses and necklaces and, in one cemetery, the earliest major assemblage of gold artifacts to be found anywhere in the world. [...] Writing had yet to be invented, and so no one knows what the people called themselves. To some scholars, the people and the region are simply ‘Old Europe’.
[...] The little-known culture is being rescued from obscurity in an exhibition, “The Lost World of Old Europe: the Danube Valley, 5000-3500 B.C.,” which opened last month at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University. More than 250 artifacts from museums in Bulgaria, Moldova and Romania are on display for the first time in the United States. The show will run through April 25.”
There you go. Ye who happen to be in New York from now to April, if you are interested in seeing what proto-vampires in ancient Romania (and Bulgaria) left behind, check out the exhibition about the “Lost World of Old Europe” (a cool preview here) for a fascinating journey back thousands of years.
To read the full article from the NY Times quoted above, click here.
December 1st is the Romanian National Day. At midnight, all vampires get together, celebrate, hold speeches and do crazy voodoo dances. We mean politicians, of course. Ok, maybe not at midnight, but at midday, and ok, voodoo dances are admittedly rare nowadays, they do however get together, celebrate and hold speeches. Boring demagogic speeches you find with most politicians around the world. Especially around election time, when things get heated and partially insane.
So that is NOT how WE are going to celebrate it here. We choose a rather different companionship, 3 funny Brits in 3 awesome cars, in Romania. What a cocktail. A Lamborghini, a Ferrari and of course an Aston Martin. These Gears guys were given the task to do a Top Gear show in Romania. As we expected, they declared that what they found was not what they expected. Mostly in a good way.
Enjoy their candid impressions in the first part of the show below:
The Romanian super middleweight vampire Lucian “Booty” Bute (read: Loo-chee-ahn Boo-tay, just HBO commentators read “booty”:)) defended his IBF world champion belt last night in Montreal by knocking out the tough Mexican fighter Librado Andrade. The event has some history, it was a re-match of a fight a year ago, when after dominating 10 rounds, Bute was put in great difficulty in the last two, being knocked down and controversially saved by the bell in the last round, winning the match on points. Andrade’s party contested the result, saying the referee delayed counting on purpose to give him an extra few seconds to recover and thus the match sentence.
I just saw this movie at Cabral’s and realized I’d seen it before but forgotten to post it here. It’s what we’re talking about, and if a picture says a 1000 words, a movie shows a 1000 pictures.
Here’s about how the world would have looked like without Romania. Ok, a promo in disguise, but at least it has its learning value:
In the bus, a man asked us where we are from. 'Germany', said my friend. "Germany? Aaa... eyn, tzway, dry, oufeederseyn!", said the man proudly. "And you?" "Romania." "Romania. Hm. Hmm..." and then suddenly smiling: "are you a vampire?"
The maVerick's visits to Romania made for a juicy travelog. Read it here.
"...As I am still rubbing my eyes, searching for a name, the train starts to crawl. A clock at the station says it is 1.30am. Bacău! This is where I was supposed to get down. Should I „pull the chain to stop the train” and get down? Neaah…"
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