Romania

"I am standing by my guns, Mr. Schwartzer. There is no such place as Budapest. Perhaps you are thinking of Bucharest, and there is no such place as Bucharest, either."

"The escalating pace of the change that seemed graspable was indicated by a slogan of the Velvet Revolution: ‘Poland – ten years, Hungary – ten months, German Democratic Republic – ten weeks, Czechoslovakia – ten days’. The public nature of the pressure for change was important as it could be captured by a domestic media no longer under state control, as well as by the international media. Scenes of East Germans travelling West were followed by those of the demolition of the Berlin Wall. In December 1989, in turn, they were succeeded by demonstrators in the capital Bucharest booing Nicolae Ceauşescu, the Romanian dictator, when he spoke in public. Abetted by the vicious Secret Police, he sought to resist reform by the use of force against demonstrators. However, Ceauşescu was overthrown after mass demonstrations. The army, which played a key role, providing force sufficient to overawe the Secret Police, was responsible for his execution on Christmas Day."

"From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow."

"Little Paris," as Bucharest was once called, became "Ceaușwitz."

"I went out onto the streets, expecting to see a nervous city that had recently been at war. But something didn't add up. Bucharest was no Beirut. If anything, it was narcotically peaceful, in a deep green midsummer way. People strolled lazily in the warm evening."

"In days too long ago now to remember, Romania was a breadbasket and among the largest corn producers in the world, and Bucharest was lush with fruits, vegetables and every delicacy. But the bankrupt economy of the Ceaucescu had stripped the city of private markets and virtually everything green, for that matter. It's all been replaced by by a sea of concrete tenements webbed over with television antennas."

"The city frequently is compared with Paris, gay and lighthearted, whereas Russia is strong and earnest. The beauty of Leningrad and Moscow is that of New England, that of Bucharest is of North Carolina."

"Bucharest is like cilantro, a Romanian resident once told me: You either love it or hate it. But there's much to love about a city that provides a less-expensive taste of Europe (Romania is in the European Union but not in the eurozone). Still grappling with allegations of government corruption and working to rebound from layers of grim history, the present-day capital remains a bit rough around the edges, but offers a rich ethnic culture, a resurgent arts and crafts scene, beautiful parks and a booming night life."

"Rome is famous for its stray cats, New York for its rats. But in Bucharest, the streets have gone to the dogs."

"Bucharest is a faded old gal in a raggedy coat. Once called the "Little Paris of the East," she has long lost her finery. A few parks and buildings dream of past grandeur, but the picture is spoiled by concrete and steel mementoes of Communism on every side."

"Bukarest sieht man auch all die historischen Umbrüche an, all die Verletzungen, weswegen es Liebeserklärungen umso dringender nötig hat. Um in angemessene Stimmung zu kommen, geht man am besten zu Fuß. Andere Städte sind ja ohnehin schon zu Tode flaniert. Berlin, London, Barcelona. Allein deshalb, entgegen möglicher Empfehlungen von Einheimischen: Bukarest, Flaneurshauptstadt Europas."

"Two thousand thirteen, Bucharest is glittering. It's a mish-mash. It's got a lot of bad new architecture. Some good new architecture. Beautiful new Plexiglas, Vancouver-like buildings right next to vacant lots because, you know, this is part of the corruption, the property regime, who owns what after Communism has still not been resolved in many places, so you have vacant lots because nobody can legally determine who the owner is, so it hasn't been built upon. It's a mish-mash."

"I came to Bucharest with a troupe of conquering heroes and I leave here with a troupe of gigolos and racketeers."

"One sixth of Bucharest was demolished to make way for a Pyongyang-in-Romania that the Conducător envisaged. The resulting masterpiece/disaster (*delete according to your achitectural preferences) covers 5 hectares and is roughly 1km wide and 5km long. All the damage caused by the bombing of World War II and the 1977 earthquake only equates to 18% of the destruction rained on Bucharest by Ceaușescu's wrecking balls and bulldozers which levelled countless historic buildings, (250 hectares of the new city lies on what were considered to be historical districts), including churches, monasteries and synagogues and even a statue attributed to Gustave Eiffel. After the end product — well, not quite the end product since 1989 Revolution intervened before it could be properly finished — has been christened 'Ceaușima', a contraction of 'Ceaușescu's Hiroshima' by the locals."

"Bucharest (or Bucuresci, pron. Bukureshti), the capital of Wallachia and of the whole of Rumania, already numbers amongst the great cities of Europe. Next to Constantinopole and Buda-Pest, it is the most populous town of South-eastern Europe, and its inhabitants fondly speak of it as the "Paris of the Orient." The town not very long since was hardly more than a collection of villages, very picturesque from a distance on account of numerous towers and glittering domes rising above the surrounding verdure, but very unpleasant within. Bucharest has been transformed rapidly with the increasing wealth of its inhabitants. It may boast now of wide and clean streets, bounded by fine houses, of public squares full of animation, and of well-kept parks, and fully deserves now its sobriquet of the "joyful city.""

"To my mind, imperialism is something very simple and clear and it exists as a fact when one country, a large country, seizes a certain strip of territory and subjects to its laws a certain number of men and women against their will. Soviet policy after the beginning of the second world war was precisely this. There is no difficulty in pointing this out, but the difficulty lies in the fact that when one quotes from memory one will forget one or other argument. Because the Russians, thanks to the second world war, have quite simply annexed the three Baltic States, taken a piece of Finland, a piece of Rumania, a piece of Poland, a piece of Germany and, thanks to a well thought-out policy composed of internal subversion and external pressure, have established Governments justifiably styled as Satellites, in Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, Sofia, Bucharest, Tirana and East Berlin - I except Belgrade where the regime is unique thanks to the energy and courage of Marshal Tito. If all this does not constitute manifestations of imperialism, if all this is not the result of a policy consciously willed and consciously pursued, an imperialist aim, then indeed we shall have to start to go back to a new discussion and a new definition of words."

"At the confluence of East and West, Bucharest rose above its communist past into a city whose historical influences are reflected in the contrasting architectural fusion, a traditional-meets-modern outlook, and a stream of social happenings."

"To this and other disasters, Romanians reacted (and still react) with glum jokes: Bucharest became Ceaushwitz, Ceaushima, Paranopolis; the dynasty that ruled them represented socialism in one family. But gallows themselves were less evident than gallows humor."

"Because of its lack of geographical unity, Romania is a place full of contrasts."

"Every time I come to Romania, I'm impressed again at just how much progress you've made. In a single generation your country has risen from tyranny to join the ranks of the world's free nations, the European Union, and the most powerful alliance in human history, the NATO alliance."

"Romania has made a remarkable journey from tyranny to freedom, from captive nation to NATO ally -- and it happened, it's happened in the space of a single generation."

"There is no timeless Romania, however. It is my view that the country's distinctive characteristics are to be explained by history and by the current social situation. Today's Romania does not much resemble yesterday's. Nor will the Romania of tomorrow be much like that of today."

"The Romanian constitution of 1866 was simply an imitation of the Belgian one of 1833. This was a remarkable performance: Romania was an agrarian country of rural-patriarchal type, while Belgium was one of the most industrialized and bourgeois countries on the continent. Given all the constitutions available to choose from, the Romanians opted for the most advanced and liberal of them all!"

"We must make cleverness our national trait... Stop showing a sullen, frowning face and clenched fist to the West. Start making it feel compassion for us, and you'll see how fast Western boycotts change into magnanimity. Let's present Romania as a Latin island in the Slavic sea... Our millenia-old traditions of independence are now up against Moscow's political centrism... A pawn between two superpowers."

"Who was your geography teacher? Romania lies in Europe, in France..."

"America knows that Romania's destiny lies in an undivided, democratic, peaceful Europe, where every nation is free, and every free nation is the partner of the United States. To all the people of Romania who love freedom so dearly: I come to Romania because of all you have already done. I come because I know what you still can do. I come because of all that we must do together to achieve your destiny in the family of freedom."

"The values that govern Romania today -- liberty, openness, tolerance, free markets -- these are values shared by the community of democracies Romania is joining."

"After I had told them about my country for so long, stories both true and imagined, my family and friends wanted to hear for themselves what the new story was. One day, I told everyone, we will all go to Romania to eat plums from apple trees, pears from poplars, honey from streams. Romania was more fairy tale than real place to them; but now a miracle had taken place, and the fairy tale had sprung to life."

"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."

"There is an untranslatable Romanian word that expresses with great precision the kind of unbearable longing and nostalgia that grips one's heart when thinking of home. That word is dor. I have felt it many times. Nostalgia for the medieval squares of Sibiu steeped in golden light, longing for the outdoor cafés of Bucharest, drinking new wine, all of us young, intoxicated with poetry and song. I missed the smells of flowering linden trees, the blue reflections of deep mountain snow in the evenings, the old peasant villages that Ceaușescu's insanity almost wiped off the face of the earth. I missed the real fairy tales I was raised on. The story of the waters of life and death, youth without age, the tale of the sheep Mioritza that recites the cosmic poetry of the sky, the story of the poplars that grew pears..."

"In days too long ago now to remember, Romania was a breadbasket and among the largest corn producers in the world, and Bucharest was lush with fruits, vegetables and every delicacy."

"Driving through the Rumanian countryside I found was an unmixed pleasure. The landscape is very beautiful, and entirely unspoiled. The roads are either Roman and straight, or romantic and devious and narrow. There is little traffic, and one moves fast."

"România este stat național, suveran și independent, unitar și indivizibil."

"Madam President, I was a student leader in Ireland 30 years ago and, inspired by the heroism of Romanian students and workers, I travelled to Bucharest and Timișoara and spent over a month there in the midst of those revolutionary days. I have to say that it was one of the most defining experiences of my youth to witness the overthrow of Ceaușescu's brutal totalitarian regime, an elite which enriched themselves at the expense of the population and developed a vicious secret police and state apparatus to do so. It was an absolutely incredible experience. To feel the hopes of the population for the future, for democracy, for a say in their lives and for a more stable economic experience was very humbling. But we have to be honest as well, because what did they get? In many ways they got much of the same elite in new clothes, combined also with a new elite – a new neoliberal elite – and many people have unresolved issues there. We have to ask why Romania has got the second biggest diaspora in the world, second only to Syria – five million driven out of that country. There is a lot of corruption still to tackle. So I stand continually in solidarity with those people. The revolution has not been completed there."

"Romania is the only country in Europe between the two great regions of instability and uncertainty -- the former Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union. For the sake of ourselves and Europe we need to remain politically stable. We need NATO more than any other country in Europe."

"Romania had reaped a handsome territorial dividend from her wartime sufferings, acquiring Bessarabia (from Russia), Bukovina (from Austria), southern Dobruja (from Bulgaria) and Transylvania (from Hungary). But the effect was that nearly one in three inhabitants of the country was not Romanian at all: 8 per cent were Hungarians, 4 per cent Germans, 3 per cent Ukrainians - in all there were eighteen ethnic minorities recorded in the 1930 census. The preponderance of non-Romanians was especially pronounced in urban areas. Even the Romanians themselves were divided along religious lines, between the Uniate Christians of Transylvania and the Orthodox Christians of the Romanian heartland, the Regat."

"Once Caspian Sea oil starts flowing to Europe across the Black Sea, Romania's international-security profile will grow. Romania is no longer on the periphery of Europe. It is in the middle of a volatile new region between Europe and the Caspian."

"The subject of opening diplomatic relations with Roumania and Servia, now become independent sovereignties, is at present under consideration, and is the subject of diplomatic correspondence. There is a gratifying increase of trade with nearly all European and American countries, and it is believed that, with judicious action in regard to its development, it can and will be still more enhanced, and that American products and manufactures will find new and expanding markets."

"When Nicolea Ceausescu was asked by a foreign journalist why Romanians were not allowed to leave the country when such a right was guaranteed by the constitution, the communist leader responded that the constitution also guaranteed people the right to a safe and prosperous country. By allowing some Romanians to leave, he meant, it risked the prosperity and safety of others."

"[Mădălina Dumitru in her book "The Broken Flight"] raises the difficult question of why [the Movement of Spiritual Integration into the Absolute] was subject to such extraordinary persecution in Romania. She identifies two reasons. One is the Communist legacy. Alternative spirituality and its leaders, including [MISA's founder Gregorian] Bivolaru, started being persecuted during the Ceaușescu regime, and several police officers and prosecutors of Communist times kept their positions in democratic Romania. The second is the attempt of corrupted politicians, including social-democrat Prime Minister , who ended up in jail, to divert the public’s attention from political scandals by having the media focusing on “cults” in general and the juicy sex-connected story of MISA in particular. Politicians were also accused of tolerating very real human trafficking of minors forced into prostitution, and prosecuting MISA for its non-existing human trafficking gave the impression they were “doing something” about the issue."

"Of the Balkan states, Romania made the greatest advances. Food processing, with the emphasis on flour and sugar, was the major industry. At the beginning of the twentieth century the oil of the Ploești region began to be exploited. Nevertheless, the country remained predominantly agricultural. In 1914 only 1.5 percent of the national wealth was in industry; agricultural products accounted for 75.7 percent of the exports. Bulgaria, Serbia, and Greece, of course, retained their strongly agrarian structures."

"In Romania, hitchhiking is not the daring means of travel it is in the United States. The shortage of cars and the collapse of the intercity bus system under the Draconian fuel rationing of the late dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, forged an informal, nationwide car-pool network. In the countryside, everyone hitches, including old ladies with shopping bags, and most drivers are obliging. Since I was intent on trekking some of the time, it was frustrating to have a car pull up even when I didn't have my finger out. The custom is to pay the driver about 10 percent of the taxi rate for the distance. But when drivers learned that I was an American journalist, they usually refused to take money. Off the beaten path, meeting a westerner is still a novel experience for Romanians. I was anxious for a ride up the pass, however, and was soon picked up by a man driving a Dacia, Romania's homemade car, which even by Communist standards is barely functional."

"Romania is a less extreme version of Egypt, with a mass of peasantry and a precocious consumer class that is limited mainly to a few districts of the capital. As my train entered Bucharest from the north, I saw miles of corrugated-metal squatter settlements as bad as many in Africa, Asia, and Latin America."

"Rumania's actual Latin origins are somewhat obscure, for the region was virtually lost to recorded history for a millennium between the end of Roman and the onset of Turkish dominion."

"To the foreigner who visits Rumania for the first time this country and its mixed population seems full of inexplicable and insoluble contradictions."

"Greater Rumania was primarily an agricultural country, but its industry held an important place in the economy of South-Eastern Europe. With its fertile soil, great reserves of mineral resources and considerable water-power Rumania could have been one of the richest countries of Europe. But while the land was full of natural wealth the standard of living of the people remained a low one. Only a small part of Rumania's resources was exploited, and an even smaller part for the benefit of her inhabitants."

"This so-called maverick policy of foreign policy has lured the United States into an unsavory courtship of Romania. Moreover, there is a great deal of evidence that this idea of Romanian foreign policy independence is more fiction than fact, more perception than reality, and should not be used to gloss over their tragic record on human rights."

"At least 1 million people left Ukraine so far and have crossed our borders. And Romania has welcomed almost 150,000 people and provided them with food and shelter. Romanians have given such a moving example to the world. As the war started, Romanians were rushing in droves to the Vama Siret crossing point to welcome refugees with food, water, blankets and baby milk. People are opening their homes for families. They are organising collections and fund-raising on social media. Romania has really stepped up to welcome the refugees and I really thank you for that. But Romania is not only welcoming the refugees, it is also helping their neighbours, like Moldova. You provided electricity generators, for example, which is extremely important for Moldova. Romania provided medicines to Ukraine. You are a shining example of European solidarity and I really want to commend and thank you for that."

"For much of Rumania's charm is to be found in her mountains. Unforgettable is the first sight of the Carpathians, so thickly, richly wooded that, at a distance, it seems impossible that there could be roads or even paths piercing the greenness."

"Indeed Rumania is full of song: the epic songs sung in country inns and roadside halts; ancient versions of the “walling-in sacrifice” and the Icarus myth; ballads of the Turkish occupation; the haiducks’ songs of revolt and battle; the slow, long-drawn out melody of the doina."