"Situated at the very center of the ancient spice routes of the Orient, Romania was the golden apple that made everyone's mouth water, and consequently, everyone, the Goths, Visigoths, Huns, Slavs, Austrians, and Soviets, tried to swallow it whole. Amazingly enough, it survived the battering rams of a ceaselessly hostile history for hundreds of years until the regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu began accomplishing in a few years what the combined horrors of numberless invaders were unable to."