The Filter^

Social Change Project Newsletter

The Romania field work has been highlighted in the Summer newsletter of the Social Change Project.

The intention of the Romania field study was to demonstrate the way in which ideas are transmitted effectively and the institutional prerequisites for a campaign to implement diffuse ideas. Gavin and Anthony sought to create a framework within which the diffusion of ideas, throughout a network of individuals, could be analyzed. The objective was to speak to as many people as possible who had encountered market economy operational codes, to discover the conditions within which the codes were attained, and to ascertain whether they ‘stuck.’

You can read the article here-->>

Constanta and Brasov

Our last weekend in Romania has been an opportunity to travel more. On Friday Faith and I rose early and took a train to Constanta – a harbour city looking Eastward over the Black Sea. A short bus ride north led to Mamaia, a grockle-filled resort lacking individuality but providing us with exactly what we needed: several hours to sit and read, occasional dips in the warm sea cooled by waitresses bringing lager. Non-evasive dance music and an international crowd meant this might have been anywhere, but it wasn’t. As a tourist, I expect nothing more.

On Saturday we again rose early, but this time our train went northward into Transylvania. Brasov is renowned as a hidden treasure, and it was indeed pretty. The old town was contained within city walls, and the German influence was blinding. Cafes gathered around two churches in the main Piazza, and were it not for the incessant rain we might have felt more charmed. As it was, I feel it sufficiently ordinary to warrant a public opine: the real secrets of this trip will remain kept.

Some photos have been added to the photo album.

Palace of Parliament, the “House of the People”

Although here on business, it’s impossible to visit a foreign city without sampling some of the star attractions, and although I’d never admit it, sometimes I’m just a tourist. On Monday we were offered a tour of the Palace of Parliament, Romania’s most famous icon and the unmissable leviathan of the Bucharest skyline.

It is a phenomenal construction – the world’s second largest building – with over 3000 rooms covering 12 stories. Only the Pentagon has a larger surface area, and within the marble walls are grand halls, galleries and conference rooms. We stood in a room built to be a theatre, but since there’s no backstage it’s used for meetings. Amongst the million tonnes of marble and crystal chandeliers (all mined in Romania), the neglect of common sense offers a lesson in the folly of socialist calculation.

For the people of Bucharest, the cost of this elephant was immeasurable. About a sixth of the city was bulldozed to make room for the Palace, and when lit it would consume a day’s supply of electricity for Bucharest in just 4 hours. During a time when people starved on the streets (as they still do) and hospitals lacked basic medicine, 700 architects and 20,000 workers laboured non-stop to build nothing more than the egotistical whim of a megalomaniac.

Romania’s dictator - Nicolea Ceausescu – ordered construction to start in 1984 and took control of many details of the design. He made sure that the emblem adorning the marble floor would match the pure silk drapes and would change his orders daily. Indeed he still hadn’t decided on the roof design when his regime was toppled in the 1989 revolution, but construction continued and the building now houses the Chamber of Deputies.

Now, it feels very melancholic to walk through the immaculate, grandiose halls. The entire construction is a testimony to Romanian craftsmanship, and must be treated with awe. And yet this is the world’s biggest statement of what communism really means – a human genocide to finance the lavish political elites. Before advocating a greater concentration of power to central government, and before letting politicians get away with taxing us for their lives of majesty, remember this building.

We stood on the balcony that looks out toward Unirri. The vista is deliberately longer and wider than the Champs Elysees, and the concrete blocks lining the road frame the Palace so that it commands the attention of anyone walking through the main district. Whilst Ceausescu called it “a victory of socialism”, the people called it “a victory of socialism over the city”.

Lest we forget.

For more photos from Bucharest click here

Trampling Through Culture

During our trip to Cluj, we ventured eastward into a more rural region of Transylvania. We drove for about 2 hours to Bistrita, and another hour into the Carpathian Mountains. We took a seated ski lift to get a better view of the mountains, and passed peasant industry underneath. A family were out collected berries, and several men were using axes to fell trees, and then harness them onto horses that dragged them down the mountain side. It was a unique and spiritual voyeurism.

One of our hosts in Cluj comes from a region north of Transylvania, close to the Hungarian and Ukranian border. He spoke of it as being the heartbeat of Romanian culture - a rural, self-sufficient idyll untouched by Collectivism or Westernization. The question - whether to visit?

Our apartment has cable and so I've been watching a lot of BBC World, and a series by Kirsty Wark called "Tales from Europe". She journeys from south to north throughout 8 ascession countries, delivering the sort of establishment pretentiousness one expects from the BBC. As an example, she sits drinking beer in Prague, likening British stag parties to swarms of locusts. Apparantly we in the west think of Eastern Europe as a barren land devoid of culture or romance, and in our masses we visit to trample through the hidden richness in a blaze of cheap beer fuelled revelry.

The hypocrite clearly misses the point - that it is precisely her presence that encourages western Europeans to venture east - and she has no moral claim to bemoan her "less civilised" compatriots. I do not need her to tell me that communism breeds a culture, as much as it abolishes rights. If we were to travel up to the land untouched by the west, then I'd be guilty of the same process of cultural collision that Wark likes to pretend she's above. So if I do go, then I promise to never complain that such regions are being lost to homogeneity. And if I don't, rest assured that there's still pockets of desperate poverty that can make us in the west feel charmed by.

Bucharest Photo Blog

There's currently a train strike in Romania, and it might affect our overnight 8 hour journey to Cluj - a small town in Transylvania. We leave just before midnight, tonight.

In my continued absense, follow this link for a few photos taken thus far, and should I not return from the forests of the Balkans, remember me thusly:

Peaks and Troughs