Blue Danube to Black Sea Day 5: The Dictator’s Capital City

Wednesday 29 May
Overnight we have travelled a hundred miles downstream and crossed over to the Romanian side. We are decanted into our coaches to take us to Bucharest for the day. It’s a beautiful morning with the promise of a hot day to come.

The journey takes an hour. I’m puzzled by my feeling more relaxed on this left bank of the Danube than the right. Perhaps the Romanian landscape feels more familiar to a Western European visitor? Maybe. But I think it’s more to do with the reassurance offered by signs along the road. For we are back in territory where they use the Roman alphabet, and (a big moreover), speak a Romance language. I can begin to make sense of this, or some of it, with my French and Latin. If I were lost or in some kind of predicament in Romania, I could get by (as a last resort speaking French because I’m told that it’s most people’s second language).

I ponder this as we travel into Bucharest, this relief at being back in familiar linguistic territory after these recent days of Hungarian, Serbian and Bulgarian. It helps me realise how fundamentally language forms us, shapes our patterns of thinking and responding. Maybe I shouldn’t say “our”. Perhaps it depends on your feeling for words. Mine, I realise, is fundamental to my identity. It’s not that as a Western European I somehow assume that the west is culturally superior to the east. Romania may speak a Latinate language. “Romania” was the Roman province of conquered Dacia, north of the Danube, where, according to the "continuity" theory of its history, people went on speaking Latin after the Romans departed. But this is the Latin of the eastern Empire not the western, Constantinopolitan rather than Roman. I don’t know enough about the morphology of the western and eastern branches of the romance languages. I doubt that in its details, Romanian has a lot in common with the Gallego I was overhearing in Galicia a couple of weeks ago. But the family likeness will be there. And apart from my own, the languages I know best belong to this family.

On the way our guide, a more elderly man than we’ve had up to now, instructs us in the history, politics and culture of Romania. There is something laboured about his way of speaking, his ability, as someone else puts it, to say interesting things in a dull way. It sounds like a text he is reading from rather than an extempore live talk.  I've heard sermons like this from time to time. I ask someone near the front if I'm right about this, but no, all he has in his hands are a few notes.

We are driven round Bucharest to get a feel for the city. Our first impression is that this is a *real* city with a strong sense of place. It’s a lot bigger than I’d imagined, but the epithet “Paris of the east” is not unjustified. We drive along broad streets and boulevards, and round squares and past grand buildings that Haussmann himself would have been proud of. This city is proud and, on the face of it, prosperous - at least compared to Belgrade a few days ago. The people we see in the streets, not least the children and young people, look affluent and confident. The buildings look to be well cared for. The shops are those you would see in any city in the west. Yellow and white banners deck the streets, for Pope Francis is coming to visit this weekend. What a nice city we are all saying to one another.

Yes I know. That’s a highly superficial judgment. How do you judge a city from a bus? How do you judge a city in a day? We tourists are being shown the capital city its country wants us to see. Tours like these are not so much a showing as a showing off. A hermeneutic of suspicion is needed. Don’t be taken in. Don’t trust appearances. Look behind the scenes, discover what’s real and what could be a Potemkin facade, poke around in the back streets, get out into the suburbs, above all meet its citizens and discover what life is really like here.

The building that prompts these questions is the People’s (aka President’s) Palace of Nikolai Ceausescu. Every tour is obliged to begin here, in front of what is confidently announced to be the largest building in Europe and the second largest in the world, after the Pentagon. We get out of the coach and gawp suitably. But it’s not likeable. A building as monumental as this ought to contribute something to the world’s architectural legacy, something pioneering or beautiful of which it could be proud. This palace adds nothing. The register (rhetoric?) is neo-classical but not in any way that lifts the spirits. It’s merely bloated and ponderous, lacking all the restraint and proportion that’s a hallmark of true art. In short, it’s hubristic, absurd. Indeed, none of the buildings in this plaza or in the mall leading up to it are distinguished. And to achieve this grand projet, a vast area of the historic centre was razed to the ground by its monomaniac begetter.

I turn my back on the Palace and see the big banners on buildings opposite, announcing that Romania is holding the Presidency of the European Union in this first half of 2019. Now that is something to shout about for a nation that only joined the EU little more than a decade ago, yet seems now to be as fervently European as the EU’s founding peoples. I feel not a little tinge of envy for a country riding high as a member state while Britain is preoccupied with leaving the Union.

In Revolution Square we are given a lecture about Ceausescu and the Romanian Revolution. He (with his wife Elena) was one of the most repressive leaders of a Warsaw Pact nation despite having secured popular support initially by condemning the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. His mismanagement of the nation’s finances and the brutality with which his secret police, the Securitate, dealt with dissidents meant that by 1989 no love was lost between ruler and people. During demonstrations in Timisoara in December 1989m the military opened fire on the crowd causing many deaths and injuries. This only fed dissent which by the time it reached Bucharest, and become focused on this square, had begun to be dubbed a revolution. Fleeing the city, Ceausescu and his wife were captured, tried and convicted of economic sabotage and genocide. They were executed by firing squad on Christmas Day. It was the only violent overthrow of a communist regime that year.

The Ceausescu years seem as engraved on the memories of Romanians as the Hungarian Uprising of 1956. In Revolution Square there is a not very prominent memorial tablet in Romanian and English commemorating the Revolutionaries of 1989. Here we are in the country almost 30 years after these events. It hadn’t occurred to me before we set foot in Budapest that the winter of 2019 would no doubt see many commemorations of the 30th anniversary of the liberation of Eastern Europe. It still feels to me as a European to have been a year of wonders. Who will ever forget those scenes on 9 November when people, especially the young, sat astride the Berlin Wall and started tearing it down with bare hands?

We are taken to walk in the old city. Outside a beautiful church, there has been an unpleasant incident. Someone from our party (but in a different group) has had his wallet stolen by a pickpocket inside the church. When we arrive there are eight police officers in attendance asking him questions. It seems that he lost quite a lot of money: 500 euros is mentioned, along with bank cards. It’s ironic that earlier our tour leader had specifically warned us about the risk of carrying money around with us in our back pockets. I feel for this poor couple. It’s a horrid thing to happen on your holiday.

After a drink we head back to Revolution Square to visit the National Gallery of Art. We enjoy the Italian, German and Flemish renaissance paintings. Unfortunately the next floor containing French and Spanish art together with the nineteenth and twentieth century collections is closed today. So we go to the other part of the gallery dedicated to Romanian art. We are prepared to hurry through this quite quickly, imagining rooms filled with enjoyable but not necessarily memorable folk art from Romania’s past and present. Instead we are treated to displays of the highest quality. Especially impressive are the vast galleries dedicated to Romanian church art - icons, crucifixes, church plate, vestments, paintings, sculpture, entire iconostases. It’s an extremely beautiful and well presented exhibition that no visitor to the city who is interested in these things should miss. After this we have little time left to visit the upper galleries that present a comprehensive survey of Romanian art and sculpture from the renaissance to the present day. It seems discourteous to have to leave the gallery after a few enjoyable minutes to rejoin our group and get back on the coach.

We drive for two hours across the sunny Romanian plains and rejoin the ship. Here on the forty fifth latitude, sunshine and colour seem to describe this country that has emerged from terrible times with a positive story to tell about itself as a fully-fledged European state. People who have been to Romania, including two of our children, have spoken warmly of the country and its people. Our visit is bearing that out.