25 December 2011
BBC News

A Warwickshire man has managed to bring a stray dog he befriended in Romania back to this country.

John Bagley, 45, had to get a pet passport to bring the dog, called Husky, back to his home in Warwick.

He also had to get the stray released from a pound where he had been put by Romanian dog wardens.

Mr. Bagley said: "I could have gone down to the local dogs trust and picked one, but the dog that I've got has almost picked me."

Mr. Bagley works for a firm that installs paint spraying equipment for car manufacturers.

He first came across Husky when he spent three months working in Romania early in 2010.

"In winter it drops to minus 20 degrees and I was on nights so I was able to let him spend the night in our office—it was nice and warm and I used to feed him," he said.

Mr. Bagley then spent six months back in England before returning to Romania.

"I walked back on site and he came up to me and started fussing like I'd never been away," he said.

Pet Passport

He had already thought about adopting the stray as a family pet when the dog was caught by government dog wardens.

"I found out which pound he was taken to and I took him back to my apartment and kept him there.

"Then I took him to the vets where he had his rabies shot and I got him microchipped and all the other things you have to do to bring a dog back to the UK," he said.

To get a pet passport Husky had to have a blood test and then spend six months in quarantine.

Once the six months had passed Mr. Bagley was able to make the journey back to Romania by plane and car to pick Husky up.

"It's cost me a bit of money do it but once I've said I'm going to do something I go through with it and do it whatever," he said.

29 October 2011
by Charlie Ottley
The Daily Mail

The last thing I expected was for Prince Charles to crack a joke about being descended from Dracula.

But when I spoke to him for my new TV show Wild Carpathia, he told me he can trace his ancestry back, through his great-grandmother Queen Mary, to the half-brother of Vlad the Impaler, the inspiration for Dracula. Prince Charles seemed quite amused by his dark lineage.

A friend took him to visit the monastery, near Bucharest, where Vlad is buried and showed him his grave. ‘So I do have a bit of a stake in the country,’ he joked. Prince Charles has been visiting Transylvania–the home of his infamous ancestor–for more than a decade and feels passionately that it’s the last corner of Europe where there’s still a real balance between mankind and nature.

And it needs to be preserved, not just for its incredible biodiversity but because it nourishes the soul. To visit Transylvania (part of modern-day Romania) and the Carpathian mountains is to enter a time warp. It’s one of the last great wildernesses in Europe, where bears, wolves and lynx roam a medieval land in which farmers and shepherds live as they’ve done for hundreds of years. Prince Charles has fallen in love with this place, and so have I.

When I travelled to Romania earlier this year to make the programme, we stayed in the remote village of Zalanpatak, in a 400-year-old farmhouse and barn that have been restored for HRH by his friend, Count Tibor Kalnoky.

The forest is just yards from the back door, and one teatime we saw two brown bears enjoying the last of the sunlight as they grazed in the meadow in front of the house. It was a magical moment.

Sadly, if we don’t preserve this landscape, there’s a danger it will disappear within the next ten years. ‘Transylvania has so much to teach us,’ Prince Charles told me. ‘It’s the last corner of Europe where we see true sustainability. We must learn from that before it’s too late.

‘People will say, “Oh, you’re trying to preserve things in aspic, you’re trying to prevent progress.” But you’d think by now we might have learned our lesson from all that’s gone wrong with the agroindustrial approach,’ he said, referring to the large-scale, highly mechanised production prevalent in farms today.

That’s why Prince Charles has been working with Count Tibor to restore some of these beautiful houses, not only to preserve local skills, but to promote responsible tourism so people have a means of supplementing their incomes. If you wander through villages like Viscri, now designated by UNESCO as a world heritage site, you see a landscape much like England was in the Middle Ages. Yet it’s a way of life that’s being destroyed.

From the air, you can see great swathes of deforestation. HRH kindly allowed us to film him at Birkhall, his home at Balmoral–because that’s the Carpathian landscape of the future if they continue cutting down trees at the present rate. The Scottish Highlands are undoubtedly beautiful, but they are barren. Yet this was once the ancient Forest of Caledon, with wolves, bears, lynx and European elk.

But bears and other big carnivores need vast tracts of wilderness, linked by corridors that let them migrate and move freely. The wilderness, on the other hand, needs large carnivores because they keep the ecosystem in balance. Without wolves at the top of the food chain, deer and chamois stray down from the mountains, damaging crops and the shoots of trees that support countless species of birds, butterflies and flowers.

In one Carpathian meadow you can find 60 different flowers in one square metre–I counted six different orchids alone. That’s because the land has never been fertilised or sprayed. And in May, when we were there, the high alpine pastures are a stunningly beautiful sea of white daffodils.

However, these days lots of villages have been abandoned and wonderful houses and medieval fortified churches are crumbling into decay. After the fall of Communism, many Transylvanian families moved to the West, leaving everything behind. Those small farmers who remain are custodians of the landscape and their survival ensures the survival of this place. But they’re poor.

Understandably, if they can’t get fair prices for what they produce by traditional methods, they’ll be tempted by intensive farming–with all that means for the environment. Prince Charles believes it’s vital that Transylvanian farmers continue living in harmony with the natural world–and that we in the West also put nature back at the heart of the way we produce our food.

‘The great thing about Transylvania,’ he told me, ‘is that unique relationship between man and his surroundings.’ Because that’s what’s missing from our own society. ‘People yearn for a sense of belonging, identity and meaning,’ he went on. ‘It’s in us but we’ve denied it and discarded it as if it’s irrelevant. It isn’t.’

26 October 2011
by Bruce Weber
New York Times

Liviu Ciulei, who was voted best director at the Cannes Film Festival in 1965 and who led the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis in the 1980s, when it won a Tony Award, died on Tuesday in Munich. He was 88.

The cause was multiple organ failure, his stepson, Thomas, said. Mr. Ciulei had homes in Munich and in Bucharest, Romania.

Mr. Ciulei (whose name was pronounced LEEV-you CHEW-lay) made films in his native Romania, but in the United States he was best known for his provocative interpretations of classic plays. “Contemporary art,” he once said, “is one that brings all the conflicts of the world into the poem, into the theater, into the painting.” And the world’s enduring turmoil often rumbled, at least subliminally, through his presentations.

He made his American debut in 1974 at Arena Stage in Washington with Georg Büchner’s “Leonce and Lena,” a 19th-century German absurdist political satire. The New York Times theater critic Clive Barnes called the production “electric” and “eclectic,” describing it as “a sort of time capsule of world theater right up to the foolish epics of Brecht and the epic follies of Ionesco.” Mr. Ciulei, Mr. Barnes wrote, “is one of the most imaginative directors in the world.”

Among his other notable productions were a “Hamlet” at Arena Stage in 1978, set in Bismarck-era Germany, which Richard Eder in The Times called “not the triumph just of a season but of a decade”; “The Inspector General,” Gogol’s skewering of bureaucracy, which appeared on Broadway at Circle in the Square, also in 1978; and a second “Hamlet,” less well received, at the Public Theater in New York, starring Kevin Kline, in 1986. Among many other productions at Arena, he directed “The Lower Depths,” “Don Juan” and “Six Characters in Search of an Author.”

His first production at the Guthrie, in 1981, was a “Tempest” that depicted Prospero’s kingdom as an island surrounded by a bloody moat with cultural artifacts—the Venus de Milo and the Mona Lisa among them—floating in it. His “Midsummer Night’s Dream” underscored a psychological savagery and sadism in the play’s romantic roundelay, depicting Bottom, the leader of the jesterlike players, as humiliated to the core by the indifference of his royal audience, a comment, some felt, on Mr. Ciulei’s own lack of recognition by American audiences.

“I think there is, in this country, a certain prudence or refusal to be troubled, much encouraged by TV,” he said. “Many people still want the theater to be like cool lemonade when it’s hot.”

Trained as an architect, Mr. Ciulei was a set designer and an actor as well as a director, and his work was characterized by a precise visual sense. He believed that physical form suggested meaning, not just in design but in performance, and rather than having actors create actions to suggest the emotions of a moment, he encouraged them to begin with the actions and seek their psychological underpinnings.

“With Liviu, every moment was born out of a form, a shape,” said Zelda Fichandler, a founder and former artistic director of Arena Stage. “He would say, ‘Now she puts her head down, so her hair falls over her face,’ and he taught actors to find what generated the cause of that action.”

Liviu Ioan Ciulei was born in Bucharest on July 7, 1923. His father ran a large construction company, and though he preferred that his son become an architect rather than an actor, he gave young Liviu a Bucharest theater, where he made his acting debut as Puck in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in 1946. In the 1950s Mr. Ciulei joined the Bulandra Theater, a leading Bucharest troupe, and became its artistic director in 1963. The American director Alan Schneider saw his work there and recommended him to Ms. Fichandler at Arena as the finest theater director in Europe.

“Liviu was the first, and maybe the only, director I ever hired without seeing his work,” Ms. Fichandler said.

Mr. Ciulei’s first two marriages ended in divorce. In addition to his stepson, he is survived by his wife, the former Helga Reiter, whom he married in 1979. Mr. Ciulei was artistic director of the Guthrie for five seasons in the early 1980s, during which he redesigned the main stage and added challenging productions by himself and directors like Andrei Serban and Peter Sellars to the schedule and was generally credited with bringing increased national attention to the theater. In 1982 the Guthrie won the Tony given annually to an outstanding regional theater. He later taught at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts and at Columbia.

In Romania Mr. Ciulei was also known as a filmmaker. His films included “Padurea Spanzuratilor” (“Forest of the Hanged”), about a soldier who takes part in the execution of a deserter during World War I and is overcome by guilt. Shown at Cannes, the film earned Mr. Ciulei the festival’s best-director award and he considered it, at least in part, to be his finest work.

“The most beautiful scene I have ever directed in my career is the last scene of ‘Padurea Spanzuratilor,’ ” he said. “We see a young peasant woman preparing the last meal for the man she loves who is sentenced to death by hanging—a man, a woman, bread, salt and wine, love, life and death.”

25 October 2011
by Nick Thorpe
BBC News

The former King of Romania won a standing ovation as he addressed the country's parliament for the first time since 1947, to mark his 90th birthday. But the past few months have not been easy, with accusations flying that he betrayed Romania to the Soviet Union and allowed the deportation of the Jews.

Asked to react to recent criticism of him in his own country, King Michael of Romania laughs gruffly.

He is ninety years old and much admired in Romania, and the occasional barbs which come his way bounce off a skin hardened by both the battles of history, and the bitterness of exile.

I spoke to him at his home in Aubonne, a peaceful Swiss hamlet perched above Lake Geneva, just before he travelled to Bucharest for his birthday celebrations.

In a television chat show this summer, President Traian Basescu blamed the king for "betraying the national interest" by delivering Romania into the hands of the Soviets, when he was forced to abdicate in December 1947.

"It's not even worth reacting to a thing like that, because it's so small, you know. And that's the type. The small insults from him, the bigger he thinks he is. I couldn't care less!" the former monarch says.

President Basescu, the prime minister, and several ministers stayed away from the king's address to both houses of parliament in Bucharest on 25 October.

The aged king, his back as straight as a ramrod, sits forward in his chair to recall his abdication.

"It was the end of the year [30 December]. My secretary called up from Bucharest and said, Groza would like to see you as quick as possible... because they wanted to talk about a 'family problem'. We had just come back from Switzerland, and my future wife and I had just got engaged, so I thought they wanted to talk about that," he says.

Petru Groza was the communist prime minister, known as the "red bourgeois" because of his own, upper middle-class background.

"Well the family question was, to put it to me that I have to abdicate. That the times have changed, monarchies don't count any more, and all sorts of nonsense of that sort."

A glance out of the window confirmed that troops had taken up positions around the royal palace. Groza then threatened him, that if he did not sign the paper of abdication lying on the desk, then he would order the execution of about 1,000 pro-monarchy supporters, most of them students, who had been arrested at earlier rallies.

"What are you supposed to do in a situation like that?" he asks, rhetorically. To back up his threat, Groza even grabbed the king's hand, and forced him to touch a pistol in his jacket pocket.

Moment of Glory

He bowed to the inevitable, and signed the paper. There was an impromptu meeting of parliament the same day, and the republic was proclaimed by a handful of deputies, in a session which only lasted 45 minutes. It was the end of a Romanian monarchy which had begun just 66 years earlier, after Romania's emergence as an independent country, and the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the Russo-Turkish War.

Another criticism of the king which occasionally surfaces, as it did in the Swiss newspaper Neue Zuercher Zeitung this summer, is that he did not do enough to stop the deportation of the Jews.

Again, the former king says there is no case to answer.

Marshal Ion Antonescu, Romania's wartime leader, excluded the young monarch (Michael was just 18 at the outbreak of World War II) from all key decisions. Antonescu's rule was marked by anti-Semitic atrocities, including racially discriminatory laws, deportations and pogroms.

The chief rabbi of Romania, Alexandru Shafran, kept the king and above all his mother Queen Helen informed about the next actions planned against the Jews. The queen then sought urgent meetings with Antonescu, and managed to have many anti-Jewish measures and orders rescinded. Her role in saving many thousand Jewish lives was later recognised by the Yad Vashem organisation in Israel.

"It was extraordinary, how much Antonescu respected my mother," King Michael recalls now. "Even though he didn't like what she was telling him, he listened to her."

The king's moment of glory came in August 1944, when he requested a meeting with Marshal Antonescu, and demanded his resignation.

"What—and leave the country in the hands of a child?" Antonescu retorted.

The king uttered a coded phrase, and three soldiers and a captain, listening in the next room, entered and arrested the furious marshal. A provisional government was formed, and an armistice announced—an end to hostilities with Soviet troops who were already pressing towards Romania's borders.

Within hours, German planes bombed the royal palace. Romania joined the Allied side, became a victor in the war, and the country was spared the devastation and loss of life of a Soviet military conquest.

Antonescu was executed by the Communist authorities after the war, and Romanian nationalists today still accuse the king of responsibility for the death of their hero.

'Bad Habits'

King Michael is one of the few men alive who can claim to have had lunch with Hitler—once with his father in Bavaria in 1937, and with his mother in Berlin in 1941.

He cannot remember what they had to eat, but does remember Hitler praising the performance of Romanian troops on the eastern front—at that time, still fighting the Soviet army.

But what was Hitler actually like? He says he doesn't remember much of what was said—on one of the occasions, there was no translator to help him understand the German conversation.

"He would sometimes screw up his face..." says the king, grimacing for my benefit.

The festivities to honour his birthday in Bucharest include a royal gala performance at the opera, a dinner at the National Bank, and a presentation of awards.

In his first speech to parliament for 64 years, he offered a little criticism of his own.

"The time has come... to finally break with the bad habits of the past," Michael told a packed house.

There should be an end, he said, to "demagogy, selfishness and attempts to cling to power".

A Life Less Ordinary

    Attended three royal weddings in London, most recently Prince William's

    Is a great-great-grandson of Queen Victoria on both sides of his family

    One of the last surviving monarchs from WWII

    Shared company with Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin and Churchill

    Has five daughters and lives on Lake Geneva but spends a lot of time in Bucharest

A King's Opinions

    On Churchill: "There was no question that he was a great man. But there was also
    no question in my mind that he was not very interested in Romania."

    On Hitler: "I knew from the moment I met him that I was facing someone mad but
    calculating."

    On Yalta (which brought Romania under Soviet control): "What was really
    abandoned was any pretence of morality and principle."

25 October 2011
BBC News

King Michael's speech was boycotted by the president The former king of Romania has addressed parliament in Bucharest for the first time since he was forced to abdicate in 1947.

Speaking on his 90th birthday, King Michael I called on politicians to strengthen democracy in Romania and restore the country's dignity.

He received a standing ovation from many MPs.

However, some government ministers, and President Traian Basescu, refused to attend the event.

Members of Europe's royal families were joining him for his birthday celebrations, attending a gala concert at the Romanian Opera before a private dinner.

But officials say there are no plans for Romania to revert to a monarchy.

"We want to honour and to celebrate an important person of our history and of contemporary history," Romania's Liberal Party leader Crin Antonescu—whose party invited the former monarch to speak—was quoted as saying by the Associated Press news agency.

"It is a symbolic gesture that has no connection to the idea of changing Romania's status as a republic," Mr Antonescu added.

Test Pilot

The king, who sat on a throne-like chair in parliament, said since the collapse of Nicolae Ceausescu's dictatorship in 1989: "The last 20 years have brought democracy, freedom and a beginning of prosperity."

"The time has come after 20 years to... break for good with the bad habits of the past", such as "demagogy, selfishness and attempts to cling to power".

"It is within our power to make this country prosperous and worthy of admiration", he added, prompting a standing ovation.

King Michael I reigned from 1927 to 1930, and again from 1940 to 1947.

In December 1947, Romania's new Communist leaders threatened to carry out mass executions if he refused to abdicate.

In an interview with the BBC's Nick Thorpe (see above article), the former monarch described how the authorities had blackmailed him: "If you don't sign this thing now, we're going to have to shoot or kill 1,000 people that are already in prison."

"What do you do in a case like that?"

The king was then banned from returning to Romania for nearly half a century.

The Romanian royal family settled near Geneva in Switzerland, and the former king had to find work.

He said one of his favourite jobs was as a test pilot on private aeroplanes in Europe and the United States.

He met his future wife, Anne of Bourbon-Parma, at the wedding of the future Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh in London in 1947.

King Michael's Romanian citizenship was restored in 1997.

25 October 2011
by REUTERS
New York Times

BUCHAREST (Reuters) - Romania's aged former King Michael delivered his first speech to parliament Tuesday since Soviet-backed communists forced him to abdicate more than 60 years ago, highlighting deep divisions over the country's past.

While opinion polls show most Romanians do not want the monarchy back, post-communist leaders have tried to limit Michael's influence, fearing he could erode their own power if given a platform.

"We cannot have a future without respecting the past," Michael, 90 and looking sprightly in a suit and striped tie, told a packed parliament on his birthday.

"The royal crown is not a symbol of the past but a unique representation of our independence, sovereignty and unity," said Michael, Europe's oldest former monarch and one of the last surviving World War Two-era heads of state.

Parliamentarians from across the political spectrum gave the king, who was forced to quit the throne in 1947, a standing ovation before and after his speech and some even took pictures on mobile phones.

Michael's speech was proposed by the opposition Liberals but opposed by the ruling Democrat-Liberals (PDL).

President Traian Basescu, who has close links to the PDL, has criticized the former king for leaving the throne, saying he was "Russia's servant," and did not attend the speech in parliament. Many PDL deputies did attend, however.

"This is a gesture of normality," said Mircea Geoana, speaker of Romania's upper house of parliament. "His Majesty's presence 64 years after his last speech in parliament is proof that the communist era is a closed bracket."

Romania is now a member of the European Union.

EXILE AND RETURN

But its record in World War Two and its aftermath still stir heated debate. The country fought alongside Nazi Germany and was occupied by Soviet Union, which engineered the removal of the monarchy, fearing it could be a rallying point for opponents.

Michael played a central role in a 1944 coup to overthrow fascist wartime leader Marshal Ion Antonescu, after which Romania broke with Nazi Germany and switched to the Allied side.

After communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was overthrown and executed in a violent revolution in 1989, Romania blocked the first few visits Michael tried to make after decades of exile in Switzerland, Britain and the United States.

He finally returned to Romania in 1992 and only managed to regain his citizenship in 1997 after reformist President Emil Constantinescu took over from former communist Ion Iliescu.

Michael made several appeals for a restoration of the monarchy in the early 1990s. Iliescu deported him on several occasions and even deployed tanks on one occasion to prevent him from touring the eastern Balkan country.

Born in 1921 in his family's Peles castle in the Carpathian mountains, Michael is a descendant of the German Hohenzollern dynasty and a cousin of Britain's Queen Elizabeth.

The king still has many supporters—thousands wished him happy birthday on his website—and some gathered Tuesday outside parliament, a huge marble palace built in central Bucharest by Ceausescu.

Michael is to attend a concert Tuesday evening at Bucharest's opera with several other European royals and is expected to greet supporters, who will be able to watch on a big screen outside.

(Additional reporting by Sam Cage; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

20 July 2011
by Stephen Castle
New York Times

BRUSSELS—Bulgaria on Wednesday was warned of serious deficiencies in its judicial system, urged to get more convictions from its fight against organized crime and told that its battle against corruption had yet to lead to convincing results.

The warning, in a formal assessment from the European Commission, highlighted continuing worries about law and order in Bulgaria and Romania, four years after they joined the bloc.

Both nations are subject to a European monitoring mechanism intended to ensure that reforms take place and will continue for another year when the five-year period will be assessed; the final findings could have an effect on the level aid sent to the two countries, and could also limit prospects for their citizens’ passport-free travel in the European Union.

This year’s report on Bulgaria was more critical than that of 2010, which appeared to give the benefit of the doubt to government. It is led by Prime Minister Boiko M. Borisov, who was elected in 2009 on a pledge to improve law and order. The European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, said in its report that the number of acquittals in cases involving high-level corruption, fraud and organized crime “have exposed serious deficiencies in judicial practice in Bulgaria.”

Though the commission praised Bulgarian police efforts to tackle crime gangs, it said the results needed significant improvement. “The fight against high-level corruption has not yet led to convincing results,” it said.

Mark Gray, a commission spokesman, said in Brussels: “Both Romania and Bulgaria have made some progress. The laws are largely in place if not totally concrete. We are not yet seeing those laws turned into concrete actions, whether in the case of corruption and organized crime in Bulgaria and whether in prosecution and convictions in Romania.”

Mr. Gray said that in Bulgaria, the issue of “private and public donations to police have raised concerns” but that its government had “shown determination and commitment in driving the reform process.”

Romania received a less critical report, though it was told that “progress in the fight against corruption still needs to be pursued” and that “urgent action is needed to accelerate a number of important high-level corruption trials.”

“The effectiveness of the fight against corruption is hindered by serious weaknesses in recovering the proceeds of crime,” the commission’s report said.

The assessment was released two months before European ministers are expected to debate whether to admit Romania and Bulgaria, the two newest E.U. members, to the Schengen zone, which allows travelers to cross frontiers without showing passports. Though the report is not technically connected to that application, it is unlikely to placate France, Germany, the Netherlands and other countries that have called for a delay over the countries’ admission.

The Romanian president, Traian Basescu, said his government had the “determination and commitment” to continue fighting crime and corruption.

“The report is correct and shows the progress made to achieve the objectives,” Mr. Basescu said in a speech on state television, Bloomberg News reported. It “also pinpoints the perpetual problems of the judiciary which affect the credibility of the system as a whole and Romania’s credibility as well.”

Mr. Borisov, who has himself criticized Bulgaria’s judges, said he welcomed the findings and pledged to act on them, according to novinite.com, a news agency Web site in Sofia.

“Personally, I am glad that this report exists, and that this mechanism is in place,” he said. “It was introduced for a purpose several years ago, because imagine what it would be like if we had to evaluate the work of our own Parliament and our own government. That is why this report is friendly indeed; it is a matter of partnership, and it is extremely important with its conclusions and precise recommendations and an actual work schedule that it provides for us by the next summer.”

A version of this article appeared in print on July 21, 2011, in The International Herald Tribune with the headline: E.U. Warns Bulgaria and Romania on Reforms.

8 July 2011
by Gary J. Bass
New York Times

The Crimean War - A History
by Orlando Figes
Illustrated. 576 pp.
Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company
$35
Excerpt: "The Crimean War"

The Crimean War was the first major war to be covered by professional foreign correspondents, who reported on the disastrous blundering of commanders and the horrors of medical treatment at the battlefront. Today, we remember fragmentary stories: the charge of the Light Brigade, symbolizing the blundering; Florence Nightingale, for the medical treatment. But the real war has faded away, eclipsed by the two vastly worse world wars that were to come.

Still, the Crimean War—in which three-quarters of a million soldiers and untold multitudes of civilians perished—shattered almost four decades of European peace. It inflamed Russia’s rivalry with the Ottoman Empire over the Balkans, providing the tinder for World War I. And by thwarting Russian’s ambitions in Europe, it made possible the fatal rise of Germany.

In “The Crimean War: A History,” Orlando Figes restores the conflict—which predated the American Civil War by eight years—as “a major turning point” in European and Middle Eastern history. He argues forcefully that it was “the earliest example of a truly modern war—fought with new industrial technologies, modern rifles, steamships and railways, novel forms of logistics and communication like the telegraph, important innovations in military medicine and war reporters and photographers directly on the scene.” The ferocious yearlong siege of Sevastopol “was a precursor of the industrialized trench warfare” of World War I.

The war itself was initiated when religious squabbles over holy places in the Ottoman towns of Jerusalem and Bethlehem prompted Russia to march troops into present-day Romania, threatening the partition of Ottoman lands. In response, the Ottoman Empire declared war, and Britain and France rallied to its defense. The devastating combat around the Black Sea proved unbearable for Russia: two-thirds of the soldiers killed in the war were Russian. After losing Sevastopol, Russia accepted a humiliating peace.

Figes, a renowned professor of history at the University of London, might be thought the loneliest of creatures, the Crimean War buff. But his history is a huge success. His harrowing recounting of Sevastopol presents an inferno of military absurdities and gruesome deaths, with people hit by rocks, gored with lances, hacked by swords, decapitated by shells and disemboweled. Figes artfully uses painstaking archival work—disturbing dust in London, Paris, Istanbul, Moscow and St. Petersburg—to expose the secret machinations of statesmen, but he never overlooks the awful human costs, like the nonchalant willingness of aristocratic Russian officers to sacrifice their peasant soldiers. And the book traces the roots of many modern crises: Britain, trying to create buffer zones against Russia, occupies Afghanistan and considers seizing Baghdad, where a British diplomat blithely proclaims that Sunnis and Shiites “could always be played off against each other.”

This is history with an argument. Figes maintains that the conflict was essentially a religious war, and he is frustrated that most writers have neglected that theme: “If the Balkan wars of the 1990s and the rise of militant Islam have taught us anything, it is surely that religion plays a vital role in fueling wars.” Figes writes of Russians and Turks clashing over “religious battlegrounds, the fault line between Orthodoxy and Islam,” and explains that “every nation, none more so than Russia, went to war in the belief that God was on its side.” The Crimean War “opened up the Muslim world of the Ottoman Empire to Western armies,” and “sparked an Islamic reaction against the West which continues to this day.” The title of the British edition of the book is “Crimea: The Last Crusade.”

Figes presents czarist Russia as a deeply religious state, on a “divine mission” to recapture Constantinople and deliver millions of Orthodox Christians from Ottoman rule. More than anyone, he blames the war on Czar Nicholas I: a militaristic reactionary, a pioneer in the use of secret police and censorship, who Figes also suggests was mentally ill. In the decisive hours of 1854, as Britain and France threatened war against him, Nicholas failed to make “any calculation” about his military strength or give “any careful thought” to British and French military superiority; he chose war in a “purely emotional reaction,” based “perhaps above all on his deeply held belief that he was engaged in a religious war to complete Russia’s providential mission in the world.”

Figes makes a powerful, if not entirely convincing, case. Russia could be a fickle friend to the Orthodox peoples. It blew hot and cold in its support for an earlier Greek revolt against Ottoman rule. And it had some pragmatic reasons to try to dominate the Ottoman Empire. As Figes notes, Russia needed Black Sea ports for its trade and to project naval power.

As Figes himself emphasizes, ideologues, whether Islamist or Christianist, who seek historical evidence of a permanent war between Islam and Christianity will have to look elsewhere. Britain and France fought for the Ottoman Empire. And Western and Eastern Christians despised each other, sometimes more than they loathed Muslims. Nicholas, declaring himself the champion of Slavs throughout the Balkans, hoped that Britain would not dare “continue to ally with the Turks and fight with them against Christians.” He was dead wrong. If Britain was on a crusade, it was against Russia, not the Ottoman Empire. Britain spent most of the 19th century trying to thwart Russian expansion, with some Britons feverishly dreading Russia as the only land power that might be able to threaten India; Disraeli once claimed, “Constantinople is the key of India.” Figes depicts Britain as obsessed with the Russian menace to liberty and civilization—an obsession, he adds, that partly shaped cold war attitudes about the Soviet threat.

To resist Russia, Figes observes, Britain had spent decades trying to revitalize the Ottoman Empire. Many Britons developed a soft spot for the Ottoman Empire, hoping that it could successfully reform itself under British tutelage. Some Anglicans admired Islam, and some influential Britons praised Ottoman religious toleration. These pro-Turkish Britons held “a romantic sympathy for Islam as a basically benign and progressive force,” which was “preferable to the deeply superstitious and only ‘semi-Christian’ Orthodoxy of the Russians.” Figes wryly quotes a British speaker: “The Turk was not infidel. He was Unitarian.”

The war was also a clash between political systems: British liberalism against Russian absolutism. The freedom-minded British (as well as many French people, despite Napoleon III’s stifling rule) were horrified by Russia’s despotism, and by its bloody military suppression of liberal revolutionaries in Poland and Hungary. When the Crimean War came, Figes writes, the British public saw it as a defense of “British principles” like “liberty, civilization and free trade.”

Figes, like other scholars, chillingly shows how British freedoms and open institutions helped drive the country into catastrophe: “This was a war—the first war in history—to be brought about by the pressure of the press and by public opinion.” Lord Palmerston, a wartime prime minister whom Figes calls “the first really modern politician,” had stoked the xenophobic indignation of the British people, while the rabble-rousing press smeared those who questioned the wisdom of the war. Palmerston once said he wanted Britain to be “the champion of justice and right” while “not becoming the Quixote of the world.” In this, as in much else, the Crimean War remains alarmingly relevant.

Gary J. Bass is a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton and the author, most recently, of “Freedom’s Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention.”

6 July 2011
by The Associated Press
National Public Radio

30 June 2011
by Jessa Crispin
Natioanl Public Radio

On The Road To Babadag: Travels In The Other Europe
by Andrzej Stasiuk, Translated by Michael Kandel
Hardcover, 272 pages
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
List Price: $23
Read An Excerpt

In 1846, when Jacub Szela first ascended as a Polish leader, he guided a ragtag mob of peasants and serfs in a fight against their landowners and gentry. Szela had been anointed "king of the peasants" for 24 hours by the ruling Austrian empire, and in that time he raised an army, running into taverns with the cry, "Get to work, boys, and hurry, for time passes." Those men would slaughter almost 1,000 noblemen in their quest for economic freedom. Szela and his followers came to a bad end (as uprisings of these sort tend to do). More than a century and a half later, writer Andrzej Stasiuk now sits in a dusty co-op on Szela's old stomping grounds in Vicsani—which are once again filled with the poor and powerless drinking their vodka and pear brandy—imagining the second-coming of the rebel leader. The land here may still be full of the poor and oppressed, but missing now are the oppressors to direct their fury against. Stasiuk, a Pole himself, addresses this frustration to his dead countryman: "There's no one for you to go after... The most you could do is go to Suceava and like a postindustrial Luddite smash a sky-blue ATM."

With On the Road to Babadag: Travels in the Other Europe, Stasiuk has ostensibly written a travel book, but calling it that would be a diminishment. Sure, there are the requisite passages about lush landscapes, anecdotes about unusual people met along the way, accounts of the generosity of strangers and miscommunications on trains and buses. Yet the book stretches far beyond the confines of its genre. Its scope is massive, covering philosophy and history, literature and politics. It's more along the lines of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Rebecca West's epic travelogue of the post-WWI Balkans, than anything you'd want to file next to Bill Bryson.

The "other Europe" of the subtitle is the region beyond the more postcard-ready sights of Paris, Stonehenge or the beaches of Spain. Stasiuk ruminates on the forgotten corners and cubbyholes of Europe, from small villages in Hungary and Romania to parcels of land off Moldova newly impacted by the first stirrings of sovereignty, where he can't even get his passport stamped because no other nation would recognize as legitimate the seal. He comes across a map of Europe, its Western countries clearly demarcated, its capitals noted with stars. "But to the east and south of Prague and Budapest lay a terra incognita: countries without capitals," he writes. "Some countries [aren't] even there. No Slovakia. Moldova, Ukraine and Belarus all evaporated in the dried-up sea of old empire." Likewise, the people of these nations have been largely forgotten. Many of the farmers and the habitues of bars express nostalgia for communist and long-dead tyrants, as democracy and capitalism have done nothing to improve their lives.

Not that it's all gloom. On the Road to Babadag has great humor and a wonderful loopiness. Stasiuk shows what life is like when the stakes are so low the rest of the world regularly overlooks you. And as for that thoroughly trodden area west of here? He has little interest in exploring what everyone else has already seen. "Observation," Stasiuk notes, "irons out objects and landscapes. Destruction and decline follow. The world gets used up, like an old abraded map, from being seen too much." He prefers the previously overlooked world, and he witnesses it with wise eyes and an immense curiosity.

30 June 2011
by The Associated Press
National Public Radio

Basescu said in an interview last week that Romania's war against the Soviet Union was justified because it wanted to regain a territory—Moldova—taken by the Soviets in 1940. He said: "I probably would have done the same."

The order to attack Soviet troops was given by the pro-fascist dictator Marshal Ion Antonescu and led to the slaughter of thousands.

Russia's Foreign Ministry said in a statement it is "outraged" at Basescu's comments.

"Such shameless bravado, justifying the fascist aggression and desecrating the memory of millions of Nazi victims, is unacceptable and should get an appropriate appraisal from civilized Europe," the statement said.

Basescu was talking in an interview with B1 television on the 70th anniversary of Antonescu's order that the Romanian army cross the River Prut into Moldova.

"We had an ally and we had to retake a territory," he said, referring to the German army. "If I had the conditions of that time, I probably would have done it."

Romanian officials took exception to Russia's condemnation, and accused Moscow of "inappropriate" language in a responding Foreign Ministry statement. The ministry lamented that Basescu's comments on "tragic events, both for the Romanian people and the Russian people," were being used politically.

"We consider the expression of such public reactions to be regrettable and groundless, with unacceptable violence in the language used." The statement said Romania was disappointed there was no diplomatic correspondence before Russia went public, but said it hoped the episode would not affect relations.

Antonescu was Romania's prime minister from 1940 to 1944 and is considered responsible for the death of about 280,000 Jews and 11,000 Gypsies.

Critics accused Basescu of trying to soften the image of Antonescu as a war criminal in statements made last week, but in Wednesday's interview Basescu firmly accused Antonescu of having a hand in the Holocaust.

He added that if Antonescu had stopped at the Dniester — the river that was Moldova's border with the Soviet Union before the war — "it would have been perfect." Instead, Romania joined the Germans in attacking the Soviet Union beyond Moldova.

———

Alina Wolfe Murray contributed from Bucharest, Romania

28 June 2011
by Manohla Dargis
New York Times

When the central character in “Aurora” begins eyeballing another person—turning his shiver-inducing gaze on a complaining co-worker, on a salesgirl who anxiously laughs out of turn and even on a child who innocently returns his look—he seems like a man possessed. His eyes lock and the whites catch the light, shining without revelation. You may think you’re in Charles Manson-ville. (It’s only Romania.)

For the most part, Viorel, the character played by the film’s director, Cristi Puiu, doesn’t explain or, for that matter, bother to do much talking. Mr. Puiu also directed the 2005 festival favorite “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu,” by turns a deadly serious comedy and comically deadpan drama about a broken-down man in a broken-down society dying alone among a veritable crowd of people. That film felt like a relative talk-a-thon compared with “Aurora,” a quiet, steady burn filled with stretches of unsettlingly reverberant silence cleaved in half by a midpoint eruption of violence. Here there is before, and then there is after.

The movie opens on a man whose name, like so much else in the story, is held back from you for a relatively long time even as he and his world come progressively into focus. For the next hour or so the camera closely tracks the man, Viorel, and brings to mind the nominally objective style of those fly-on-the-wall documentaries in which the camera hovers near subjects without conspicuous commentary, seemingly following rather than predicating (or predicting) the action: Viorel idles in one apartment and then another, smokes, drives a car, smokes some more, buys groceries and steadily, imperceptibly unnerves you. As in such documentaries, Mr. Puiu’s fingerprints are all over “Aurora,” evident in both style and sensibility.

Money counts here for starters, and it’s notable that shortly after the movie begins a woman who appears to be Viorel’s lover discusses the price of a dress with him (a satiny chartreuse number bought by a different man, suggesting that there’s another lover or sugar daddy in the background). A short while afterward, Viorel (a metallurgical engineer) visits a factory where he lurks about, ducks out of the view of one worker and retrieves money from another. After passing the cash over, this man carpingly implies that Viorel doesn’t believe his excuses, an outwardly innocuous comment that leads to a near-comic, uneasy conversation with a shudder of violence. Not long after, Viorel buys a shotgun and a little later fires it.

Like Viorel, a thickly set man who at times moves as if through a heavy fog, the film unwinds deliberately if not slowly, its rhythms those of someone going about the business of an apparently unremarkable life. In some mainstream movies, the rhythms can be so obvious you can keep the beat with your tapping toe as you play along with the three-act structure (calm, crisis, resolution). In “Aurora,” Mr. Puiu thwarts various narrative (and rhythmic) expectations, reversing or avoiding many familiar rules, including psychological explanation for what happens. When some clarification finally arrives, it’s about as illuminating as the shrink’s yammering about why Norman Bates done it in “Psycho,” which is the point.

This is the second film in Mr. Puiu’s projected cycle, “Six Stories From the Outskirts of Bucharest,” a series about love, morality and human relations. (The cycle’s title refers to Eric Rohmer and his “Six Moral Tales.”) He has said he sees “Aurora” as something of a counterpoint to “Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans,” the 1927 F. W. Murnau lyrical classic.

“Murnau’s film is about his hopes concerning the relationship between a man and a woman, what that should be,” Mr. Puiu explained in one interview. “This film is about what I think is the relationship between human beings.” He added that he doesn’t “know what real life is like outside Romania, but in Bucharest, where I live, relationships are pretty brutal.”

That may make “Aurora” sound like a dirge rather than a song, when it’s not. Clocking in at an engrossing, immersive three hours, the movie is a mystery about the human soul. It’s brutal in its particulars, with dreary streets, bleak houses, stray and (maddeningly) barking dogs and the grim, hard faces of men and women wearing masks bequeathed to them by Ceausescu. Yet the film is also marked with oddly funny, touching exchanges that waver between the ridiculous and the tragic (a mother chastising her child so harshly that she becomes absurd) and that are more generous about people than Mr. Puiu’s tough talk may suggest. His stare may seem at times pitiless, but there’s compassion in his insistence on looking.

AURORA

Opens on Wednesday in Manhattan.

Written and directed by Cristi Puiu; director of photography, Viorel Sergovici; edited by Ioachim Stroe; produced by Anca Puiu and Bobby Paunescu; released by the Cinema Guild. At the IFC Center, 323 Avenue of the Americas at Third Street, Greenwich Village. In Romanian, with English subtitles. Running time: 3 hours 1 minute. This film is not rated.

WITH: Cristi Puiu (Viorel), Clara Voda (Gina), Valeria Seciu (Pusa), Luminita Gheorghiu (Mioara), Catrinel Dumitrescu (Mrs. Livinski), Gelu Colceag (Mr. Livinski) and Valentin Popescu (Stoian).

23 June 2011
by The Associated Press
National Public Radio

Romania's president has launched a stinging attack on the country's former ruler, King Michael, accusing him of being responsible for the Holocaust in Romania, and calling him "a Russian lackey."

In an interview on the B1 television channel late Wednesday, Traian Basescu said as Michael was head of state during the pro-fascist regime of dictator Marshal Ion Antonescu—prime minister from 1940 to 1944, during World War II — he should also be considered responsible for the death of some 280,000 Jews and 11,000 Gypsies.

In 1944, when Romania was allied with Hitler's fascists, Michael staged a coup against Antonescu, and Romania switched sides to the Allies.

Basescu called Michael "a Russian lackey" in the interview, adding that his abdication—forced by Soviet-backed Communists in Dec. 1947 — was "an act of treason."

In Nov. 1947, with the communists gaining a hold over Romania and the region—which led to the monarchs of eastern Europe moving to Western Europe—Michael surprised the government by returning to Bucharest after attending the royal wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip in Britain.

A month later the Soviet-backed communist government told him if he did not sign his abdication, 1,000 Romanians would be executed. He abdicated on Dec. 31, 1947 and began a life of exile in Britain and Switzerland. His Romanian citizenship was restored in 1997.

Basescu's comments stunned Romanians, who respect the former monarch, and praise his role in their history. Basescu's stance echoed that of the communist era when Michael was belittled by the regime, and his role was downplayed.

Relations between Basescu and Michael became strained after the former king's son-in-law announced he would run for president against Basescu in 2009 elections.

The president is embattled after his plans to reorganize Romanian territory were refused by opposition parties and an ethnic Hungarian party whose support the government needs to survive.

Michael, who will be 90-years old this year, is one of the few surviving World War II leaders and had good relations with the Jewish community when he was king.

20 June2011
Radio Romania International

In June 1940, the USSR presented Romania with an ultimatum for conceding Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina. The takeover did not only translate into a loss of territory, but leaving the population in the grip of the most oppressive regime in history: communism.

According to Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, communism was “the embodiment of devil in history”. This will become more transparent in Soviet-occupied states. One of the unmistakable signatures of this regime was to be mass-deportations.

Apparently grounded on political criteria, which were equally disgraceful, while in fact the result of random causes, deportations spelled as tragedy for those who experienced them: separated families, people forced into labour until they dropped dead, cruel living conditions in labour camps and death, a great of it.

Anyone who has experienced the Soviet labour camps will be haunted by memories until the day they will cease to exist altogether. The Romanians in Bessarabia were among the first to experience the hard way the horrors of communism, which were at a very far remove from the communist humanism pervading the writings of Marx, Engels and Lenin.

On June 22nd 1941, a year following the Soviet occupation of Bessarabia, Romania entered the war alongside Germany to liberate Soviet-occupied territories. Nevertheless, 10 days before Soviet troops were driven out of Bessarabia and Bukovina, on the night of June 13th 1941, the first wave of deportations started in Bessarabia, heading for Siberia and Central Asia where thousands of Romanians were to be resettled.

The same practice was commonplace in the case of the Baltic States, Poland, Ukraine and other countries on the USSR’s western borders. The deportation of civilians prior to Germany’s entry into the war alongside its allies is clear evidence against the lie the Soviets repeated years on end, claiming that the USSR had been allegedly taken aback by the Axis attack.

Between 2003 and 2008, historian Vasile Soare identified 20,054 people in Kazakhstan who descend from people who were deported during several waves of resettlements, of whom 594 Romanians and 19,460 Moldovans. He was extremely surprised to find out that the Soviets had learned from Romanian textbooks that Romanians in Bessarabia and Bukovina were considered gypsies.

“When talking freely to people, I discovered a theory that is still very much circulated in the 21st century, namely that Moldovans are gypsies. I was simply outraged. I started doing some research about the reasons behind this. One librarian told me that Pushkin’s poem “The Gypsy” became a compulsory reading in the course on Soviet literature at the time. I looked into Pushkin’s biography, and found that in 1821, during his exile in Southern Bessarabia, he traveled to modern-day Bessarabia, to a location 40 km away from Chisinau, and, fascinated with a throng of gypsies inhabiting the margins of a village and infatuated with a little gypsy girl there, he wrote this beautiful poem. But why was Pushkin’s literature used during the Soviet campaign of denationalization? This was largely because this theory was circulated with a specific purpose, to create a cloud of confusion regarding this territory that was separated from Romania in 1940. Pushkin’s poetry made the entire Soviet Union believe that throngs of gypsies were roaming Bessarabia”.

Vasile Soare consulted literary works in archives and libraries and made oral history interviews in order to retrace the exodus of Romanians to Kazakhstan. He pieced together the events the night when the ordeal began for thousands of miserable Romanians:

“The way in which the operation unfolded was typical. On May 31st 1941, the commissary of the Soviet Union in Bessarabia sent Stalin a request that read: “several parties and middle-class organizations have been operating in Bessarabia, and their leaders took refuge in Romania after Bessarabia was annexed to the USSR. The remaining members of these parties and organizations are actively supported by the Romanian secret police and have intensified their anti-Soviet activities”. Within the category of anti-Soviet elements, the Soviets included landowners, merchants, policemen and state police officers, White Guard mayors, refugees who had fled the USSR and other foreign social elements. He demanded all these anti-Soviet elements be removed and relocated in the Northern and Eastern regions of the USSR. He also indicated a round figure, some 5,000 people who were to be identified”.

Tens of thousands of people were taken during the first wave. Vasile Soare explained the Soviet deportation procedure, which the Nazis copied in the case of Jews. As it was typical under the totalitarian regime, people were taken from their homes, taken to the railway station and put on trains.

“On the night between June 12th and June 13th, 29,839 people were taken from Bessarabia and Bukovina, of which 5,479 were arrested. These were the heads of family. They were put in train cars, which were later lined up on parallel lines after crossing the Dniestr. Men were put in train cars, while the ones carrying women, children and the elderly were lined up in parallel. This is where the real drama began and lives were torn apart. Some were sent to forced labor, to work on deforestation in the taiga, road and bridge construction or rock mining, while the women and children were sent to work in agriculture. 1,655 train cars were used to transport all those people.”

The people who were abducted left behind homes, relatives and customs that many of them never came back to. Despite such personal tragedies, some modern historians of communism like Jean Jacques Marie found economic justification for the Soviet genocide policies through forced labor and subhuman living conditions.

Nevertheless, a regime’s economic achievements, which were fairly modest in the case of the Soviet Union, do not justify mass murders. Romanians from Bessarabia and Bukovina, along with other peoples that suffered under Soviet oppression, can confirm this.

30 May 2011
Radio Romania International

Twenty years ago, Romanian culture lost one of the most brilliant people of the 20th century. On 21 May 1991, historian of religions, fiction writer and essayist Ioan Petru Culianu was shot in the back of the head with a handgun. The incident happened in the lavatory of the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. The FBI arrested two suspects, one of whom was immediately released. The second was sentenced later, but only because there existed prior warrants. At 41 years of age, Culianu left behind a vast corpus of writing in several areas, revealing great creativity, an uncommon analytical spirit and a desire to explore the edges of knowledge.

Ioan Petru Culianu was born in the NE city of Iasi, on January 5th 1950, in a family of noble extraction. His paternal great-grandfather was one of the founders of Junimea, a cultural movement with a huge influence on Conservative groups. He was a brilliant student at the School of Letters of the University of Bucharest, with a graduation paper on Italian humanist philosopher Marsilio Ficino. Since high school, Culianu was fascinated by a great personality of Romanian culture of the 20th century, Mircea Eliade, whom he tried to copy to the letter. Upon his 1972 graduation, Culianu left Romania and settled in Italy where, alongside Ugo Bianchi of the Catholic University of Milan, he specialized in Gnosticism, early Christianity and the Renaissance. In 1976 he moved to the University of Groningen, in the Netherlands, and, in 1990, to the US, where he obtained a teaching job at the Divinity School, where Mircea Eliade had taught.

The special relationship between Eliade and Culianu was a topic for study for Romanian philosopher Horia Roman Patapievici, who has written various essays on Culianu. It was a meeting of minds, a means of inner transformation: “What fascinated Culianu when dealing with Eliade was just what had fascinated Eliade when dealing with Giovanni Papini. That is, a means of utilizing culture. This is illustrated in an article that Mircea Eliade published in the Royal Foundation Review, in 1937. The title was ‘Folklore as an Instrument of Knowledge’. In essence, what it said was: all cultural fact, including the facts that became cultural relics, such as folklore, store within them a cognitive set of tools that can be used not only for knowing, but for inner transformation. In this way, one attains a cognitive set of tools allowing them access cultural or ontological areas inaccessible before that. What fascinated a young Culianu about a young Eliade was this cognitive utopia".

Culianu’s biography is that of a restless individual, in a quest for boundaries to cross. While in Italy, Culianu made acquaintances in radical circles, his Italian girlfriend being a peer of the terrorist group the Red Brigades. For a short period of time he worked as a librarian for the Iosif Constantin Dragan Foundation, named after a well-known business man, close to the Nicolae Ceausescu regime. While in a refugee camp in Italy, he had one suicide attempt. He left for the Netherlands and this was the beginning of a calmer period in his life. He wrote most of his works at the Groningen University.

After 1989, the fall of communism fully opened the Romanians’ horizons. People who had lived the bitter life of exile were now free to step in and help the reconstruction of Romania. This is how Culianu also became better known. Writer Gabriela Adamesteanu interviewed Ioan Petru Culianu in Chicago, in December 1990. This was to be his last interview.

Gabriela Adamesteanu, who at the time was touring US, told us how she flew in to Chicago from Los Angeles to talk to Culianu: ‘’It’s very hard to explain why I got back to Chicago. I met Culianu who looked unbelievably young. He was forty, but he looked as if he were in his late 20’s. I compared him to other people I’d met in exile. He seemed perfectly adapted to the world he was living in and he really looked like a personality, somebody who was carried on his shoulders an opportunity for Romanian culture. I took the interview in the restaurant where he used to go with Mircea Eliade. I still remember the music, the movements, and the light that evening.”

Ioan Petru Culianu’s death has fueled lots of rumors and scenarios. American journalist Ted Anton wrote a book about Culianu and his death, actually describing five potential scenarios: a revenge of exiled Romanian far-right activists, considering that Culianu has written texts against the Iron Guard ideology, an act masterminded by the communist political police who wanted to punish Culianu for his disclosures regarding the 1989 revolution, a student’s revenge, a drug dealers’ settling of accounts and even a scenario in which his girlfriend killed him to get insurance money. Despite all these hypotheses, more or less convincing, his death remains shrouded in mystery, 20 years on.

see Eros, Magic, and the Murder of Professor Culianu

30 May 2011
by Arthur Max
Associated Press
The Washington Times

TULCEA, Romania—Alas, poor Harald. Wired up to a satellite transmitter, he had much to teach science about the life of the great sturgeons of the Danube River and Black Sea.

His probable demise is a cautionary tale of the multiplying threats to the great sturgeons, sought since Roman times for the wealth they yield in meat and caviar.

Consider: A living creature from the age of the dinosaurs, a fish that can grow as long as a minibus, lives longer than most men, sniffs its way to its birthplace to spawn and can yield a fortune in caviar.

When in 2009 a team of Romanian and Norwegian researchers attached a satellite transmitter to Harald's 2.9 meter (9 1/2-foot) body, they hoped the data beamed back would show them ways of halting the rapid drop in the sturgeons' numbers. But now the Beluga sturgeon is missing, presumed to be a victim of poachers.

Sturgeon have thrived in the Danube for 200 million years, migrating from feeding grounds in the Black Sea to Germany 2,000 km (1,200 miles) upstream. Archaeologists have found wooden sturgeon traps in the ruins of Roman fortresses behind the willow trees on the Danube's banks, along with sturgeon bones dated to the 3rd century.

In the 1970s and '80s Romania built giant dams across the Iron Gates gorge, cutting off half the sturgeons' spawning grounds.

Fishermen, unrestrained after the collapse of order in eastern Europe in 1989, caught them in huge numbers as they began their migration, trapping them before they could reproduce. Pollution from agricultural run-off and expanding cities put them under further pressure, although the construction of water treatment plants in the last decade has lessened the flow of filth.

Now environmentalists are trying to head off the latest threat: a European Union plan to deepen shipping channels in the Danube that they fear could eliminate the last shallows where the sturgeon deposit their eggs, which would doom the fish to vanish in its last stronghold in Europe.

"Right now it's teetering on the edge of extinction," said Andreas Beckmann, director of the Danube-Carpathian program of the Worldwide Fund for Nature, or WWF. "That one project, depending on how it's done, could push it over the edge."

Under the plan, engineers would block partially several side channels of the Danube and divert water to the main fairway, enabling year-round shipping through what are now low-water bottlenecks. Concrete would reinforce the banks of some islands.

European and Romanian officials insist the proposed action would not further endanger the fish in the wild, free-flowing waters of the Lower Danube.

"There will be enough water to ensure migration," said Serban Cucu, a senior Transport Ministry official and Romanian negotiator. Still, construction has been delayed for a year to allow more monitoring of the channels.

"If the data collected shows there is some influence, we will decide together whether to stop the project," said Cucu, interviewed in his Bucharest office.

Sturgeon, which can live a century or more in both salt and fresh water, are genetically wired to reproduce only where they themselves were born. Equipped with four nostrils, each fish sniffs its way to its birthplace, says researcher Radu Suciu.

After the Iron Gates went up, fish west of the two dams effectively were rendered infertile. The reproduction rate was reduced by half, said Suciu, of the Danube Delta National Institute in Tulcea, at the mouth of the Danube Delta.

Even now, 40 years later, older fish congregate at the foot of the dam in spawning season.

This month, conservationists, governments and the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization agreed to explore building a fish ladder for the sturgeon to crawl around the Iron Gates dams. But unlike salmon, sturgeon cannot jump and would have to use powerful underside muscles to climb nearly 40 meters (130 feet) through a chain of pools.

In a separate attempt to revive sturgeon stocks, experiments have begun to breed sturgeon in fish farms, safe from poachers who kill them for their roe, which is processed into expensive caviar.

In 1999, Stelic Gerghi, an unemployed aquaculture engineer from the Tulcea area, famously caught a 450 kilogram (990-pound) fish and extracted 82 kilograms (180 pounds) of roe. It earned him enough to finish building his home and buy a new car. He is now serving his third term as mayor of the Vacareni district.

International trade in sturgeon was banned in 2001, and in 2006 Romania outlawed sturgeon fishing, followed by Serbia, Ukraine, Moldova and lately Bulgaria.

"We stopped the clock," says Suciu.

But as Harald's story illustrates, the threats have not disappeared.

Harald, named for the king of Norway because that country sponsors sturgeon research, was 12 years old and weighed 80 kilograms (175 pounds) when he was caught and taken to an experimental farm. There his sperm was harvested to artificially fertilize the eggs of females.

After a month he was tagged with a transmitter and released back into the Danube in May 2009, carrying the hopes of scientists to learn how sturgeons travel and behave.

"He was in very good health, a strong fish," said Suciu.

He made his way downstream to the Danube Delta and into the Black Sea. Abhorring light, he stayed in murky depths of 10 to 50 meters (30-150 feet).

Scientists pieced together his movements from 11,000 messages transmitted over five days after the tag reached the surface six months later.

Harald had foraged for herring, sprats, mackerel and other small fish for several weeks. Then in October he swam north.

Suddenly, on Nov. 2, he stopped moving. For three days he stayed on the bottom of the sea, 65 meters (215 feet) down, immobile.

During the night of Nov. 6, sometime after 2 a.m., Harald rose swiftly to the surface and went in a straight line 11 kilometers (7 miles) to Ukraine's Crimean coast. He remained offshore for two days and on land for another two. The transmitter's final messages, plotted with the help of Google Earth, indicated movement along a railway line.

Much of Harald's data was lost during transmission to the satellite, but the scientists had enough information to surmise his fate: he had been snared by a hook or net, then hauled up in the dead of night and taken ashore by rowboat.

"This was really sad. It was a young fish. He came into the Danube to spawn for the first time," said Suciu.

But the scientist was consoled that Harald left offspring that were released into the river. "The sons and daughters of Harald are safe in the Black Sea. He didn't die for nothing," he said.

20 May 2011
Radio Romania International

Prince Charles, the heir apparent to the British throne, is once again visiting Romania, where he is contributing to the preservation of Medieval German Saxon villages set up around the 13th and 14th centuries.

Prince Charles, the heir apparent to the British throne, believes that Transylvania is Romania’s best export. These past few days he was on a personal visit to the region. He seems to be quite fond of it, since a few years ago he purchased property there, including a few buildings over 100 years old in a tiny hamlet with only 150 inhabitants. Far from the maddening crowd, this village seems stuck in time in the Middle Ages.

The Prince of Wales got involved in restoring several Transylvanian villages settled by the Saxon colonists of the 12th century, some of them included by UNESCO in their world heritage list. In an interview with the public television, he said there was a lot to do in Romania and Transylvania in terms of preserving the multiethnic heritage in order to prevent these cultural treasures being lost.

He said that if these places were lost, it would be a tragedy for the people in the region and for humanity as a whole. As part of his visit, the Prince of Wales went to a fortified church in Delniţa, in Harghita county, a monument dating back to 1333, mentioned in Vatican documents. The vault of the church was built in late Gothic style, but also preserving Roman elements, which, according to experts, is the oldest and most beautiful of its kind in Transylvania.

The British heir enjoyed for a few day the simpler life, far from the etiquette of the palace. He took strolls and went riding horse drawn carts, went on picnics and even went reaping grass. He is also a supporter of organic farming in Romania. His foundation, Transylvania Authentica, wants to encourage local farmers to preserve their traditions. In Mures county he visited a dairy modernized to European standards with funds from the Norwegian government, and met local farmers.

When he visits Romania, the prince also takes the time to visit the mansion of Count Kalnoky Tibor in Miclosoara, a 16th century Renaissance style building. The Kalnoky family was, next to former King Mihai I, among the few guests from Romania who attended the royal wedding in London between Prince William and Kate Middleton.

18 May 2011
Radio Free Europe

A look back on the 60th anniversary of RFE's first Romanian broadcasts.

Earlier this week, Moldovan Foreign Minister Iurie Leanca stopped by RFE headquarters, where he discussed Moldovan democratization, the conflict with Transdniester, and the potential for further integration with Europe. His visit was both informative and topically appropriate, as this year marks the 60th anniversary not only of the Czechoslovak Service, but also of its Romanian counterpart, Radio Europa Libera.

Now succeeded by the Moldovan Service, official broadcasts from Radio Europa Libera into Romania were halted in 2008. In its 57 year existence, however, Europa Libera’s Romanian iteration made a lasting impact on the society into which it broadcasted, and on a number of its most prominent citizens.

During his visit, Minister Leanca spoke of his personal relationship that RFE growing up. Said Leanca, “I still remember when I was a child in the 70’s and [my father] was listening to your radio. And it was a really a source of inspiration, of unbiased information, and a source of hope. And by the way, today, we now all live in completely different conditions, but Radio Free Europe is playing a very important role.”

Also impacted was Vladimir Tismaneanu, a noted Romanian/American political scientist, professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, and President of the Scientific Council of The Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes and the Memory of the Romanian Exile (IICCMER). Tismaneanu recently drafted a statement in honor of the anniversary, speaking of the catalyzing effect that RFE’s Romanian broadcasts had on him growing up.

Wrote Tismaneanu: “In a Bucharest pervaded by official lies, with newspapers dominated by sycophantic poems and hagiographic articles celebrating the ‘victories of socialism’ and the ‘triumphant march of Marxism-Leninism,’ not to speak of the infinite genius of the general secretary (first Gheoghiu-Dej, then Ceausescu), Radio Free Europe was indeed the source of our refusal to despair.”

Tismaneanu specifically praised broadcasts by former director Noel Bernard, calling his editorials “superbly informed and remarkably balanced.” In the statement, he also looks back on the particularly virulent brand of opposition that Radio Europa Libera faced in Romania at the hands of the totalitarian government.

“For totalitarianism, truth is subversive. The regime reacted accordingly, unleashing sordid, slanderous campaigns against RFE’s most active editors. An attempt against Monica Lovinescu’s life was hatched. Directors Noel Bernard and Vlad Georgescu most likely lost their lives as a result of Securitate-planned criminal plots.”

Nevertheless, despite the regime’s efforts, Radio Europa Libera endured, even after the fall of communism. Today, the Moldovan Service carries on the legacy, serving as the largest international radio broadcaster in the country.

To read the full text of Prof. Tismaneanu’s statement, click here. Visit RFE’s Moldovan Service web page here.

14 May 2011
Radio Romania International

On 8 April 2011, Romanians celebrated the 100th anniversary of Emil Cioran’s birth. Aside from the usual public events, on this occasion a large number of manuscripts written in the Romanian language were recovered by the Romanian state. The importance of this event is increased by the fact that Cioran stopped writing in Romanian altogether in 1945, writing only in French.

After a bid by telephone, held in the French capital by a famous auction company, all the manuscripts were bought by a Romanian American, George Brailoiu, through his company, KDF Energy, for a total of 575,500 Euro. Right after the transaction, the Romanian businessman said that he planned to donate the manuscripts and objects to the Romanian state, namely to the Romanian Academy Library.

For this, the Romanian Academy granted him their highest distinction, the Academic Merit decoration. The motivation for this symbolic gesture, in a world that sorely needs symbols, was explained simply and directly in his acceptance speech, in the Grand Hall of the Romanian Academy in Bucharest.

Here is what George Brailoiu said: “Surely, there are inner drives within all of us. These drives are as simple as they are real. Some haunt us since childhood, other accompany us obsessively without a clear explanation. Maybe it is because, as Cioran put it in his “Tears and Saints”, there is only one failure in all of us: that of stopping being a child. Perhaps that is why we feel so strongly attached to thoughts that have been with us since childhood. I grew up in Targu Jiu, a small time city, where some of Brancusi’s works are, and I grew to understand that, nowadays more than ever, man needs symbols. Like everyone else, I have weaknesses, and one of them is to not miss opportunities that may never occur again. The fact that Cioran’s manuscripts and possessions went on the market 100 years from his birth is, in my opinion, one of those opportunities not to be missed. In fact, what will matter the most over the years will not be my obsession with not missing Cioran’s things from across continents, but the fact that they returned whence they came”.

Two Romanian public institutions forming a partnership also participated in the auction, namely the public television and the Central University Library in Bucharest. The two found out at the last moment that the Cioran collection was being put up for auction. Despite acting swiftly, the competition was too strong for their limited financial resources.

Alexandru Lăzescu, the director general of the Romanian Television, recalls: “We believed that together with the Central University Library we would be able to raise 150,000, which seemed it would be enough. It turned out it wasn’t enough. We hoped we would be able to buy the entire collection with that money. When the manuscripts were auctioned, we saw the bids were 5-6 times higher than in the catalogues. We were forced to make a decision. It was impossible for us to bid for the whole collection. We realised the bids could go up a lot, so we decided to concentrate on some elements of the collection. We had two important goals: the manuscripts of the books in the collection and a set of postcards sent by Cioran, mainly those sent from Berlin and Paris. They had never been published and contained interesting information, especially about the Nazi period. It was interesting to see how Cioran perceived this unfortunate period in the history of the European continent. But we also ended up bidding for other items, such as Cioran’s baccalaureate diploma.”

Shortly after the auction and after George Brailoiu donated the collection to the Academy Library, there was some controversy about the source of the collection. Gradually, things became clear. The person who sold the collection at the Paris auction house was Laurence Tacou, the director of L’Herne publishing house, who confirmed in a press release that she bought the documents last summer from Cioran’s sister-in-law, Eleonora Cioran, the wife of Aurel Cioran, the writer’s brother who died some years ago.

The Prosecutor’s Office of the High Court of Cassation and Justice was called on by the filmmaker Sorin Iliesu and the philosopher Gabriel Liiceanu to look at accusations that the Emil Cioran collection was removed from the Romanian cultural heritage. Sorin Iliesu, the director of a documentary film made together with Gabriel Liiceanu and called “The Apocalypse according to Cioran,” says it was Emil Cioran’s wish that this personal archive dating back from the years spent in Romania should be donated to the Astra Library in Sibiu.

The Cioran collection donated by George Brailoiu will add to the collection of 14 million Romanian documents of the Academy Library. The manuscripts included in this fund are obviously not the only such documents that belonged to Emil Cioran and that are now part of Romanian public archives.

Philosopher and researcher Marin Diaconu enlarges on their content and the places where they are now archived:‘’Manuscripts of Cioran can be found in important institutions such as the Astra Library in Sibiu, the Romanian Academy Library, Romania’s National Library, The Romanian Literature National Museum, Romania’s Historical Archives, the Central University Library in Bucharest, and the archive of the Foreign Ministry. The Astra Library hosts 540 letters and documents, submitted by Mrs Eleonora Cioran. She also donated 520 books of the family’s library, last autumn. Some books bear Emil Cioran’s signature as a school student, as well as books autographed by French authors for Cioran. The Academy Library holds 49 letters to Arsavir Acterian, sent between 1968 and 1981 and 4 more sent to another person. There are also manuscripts on the black market. I hope the documents will be donated to the Academy Library. Most of them have been published in books and magazines.’’

The collection of letter is quite rich, and is shared by various public and private archives. A complete works edition that will be published under the aegis of the Romanian Academy will rely on these sources.