A Look At Romania And Romanians

A theme park dedicated to Dracula will be built near the Romanian capital rather than in Transylvania.

A feasibility study carried out by PriceWaterhouseCoopers claims the park would attract more than a million tourists a year if it were located near the Romanian capital.

They add just 600,000 visitors would come if it was built in the area where the vampire is said to have come from.

Sighisoara was initially chosen because it gave birth to the 15th century prince Vlad the Impaler.

According to legend, the bloodthirsty prince captured invading Turks and common criminals and impaled them on stakes in public market places. That legend inspired Bram Stoker's 1897 novel of the bloodsucking count.

However, residents and officials in Sighisoara are angry at the results of the study, as they had hoped the park would help revive the struggling local economy.

PriceWaterhouseCoopers is to identify the best location for the park near the capital by March, said Tone.

Bucharest also has alleged ties to the prince. Vlad's body is believed to be buried in a monastery he built on an island of Snagov lake, just north of the capital.

Building the park near the capital would also appease conservationists, who have claimed that intensive tourism and construction would damage a medieval citadel in Sighisoara and a protected oak forest.

Romania hopes the park will bring hundreds of thousands of Western tourists.

The Creation of the World

The creation of the world in Romanian folklore is most probably based on mazdeist doctrines, which entered the mythologies of many peoples including the Daci, the ancestors of the Romanian people, and which were left behind by these. As such, far from coinciding with the story in the Book of Genesis, cosmogony is largely dualist in nature, depicting the Earth as the common opus of God and the Devil, imagined as counterparts of Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu rather than in the biblical way. However, different stories suggest God made the earth with the help of animals, while Satan was trying to thwart his plans.

In the majority of versions, before the earth existed, a boundless ocean called Apa Sâmbetei was the abode of God and the Devil, seen as master and servant rather than equals. Upon deciding to create the earth, God sent the Devil to bring a handful of clay from the ground of the World Ocean in his holy name. The Devil set forth and tried to bring it to the surface in his name instead, but could not succeed until he brought it up in the name of God. As this piece of clay grew into the earth, God laid himself down to sleep. The Devil tried to push him over the side, but the ever expanding earth would hinder that. After trying to throw God off the earth in every one of the four cardinal directions, he shied away from the cross he drew in the ground himself.

The Origin of Evil

Other accounts, closer to the biblical one, suggest that the Devil and his demons were once angels of God. The Devil, however, tried to rebel, and, in response, God opened up the Heavens so that he might fall to the earth. Fearing that Heaven might be voided, the archangel Michael re-sealed it, thus freezing the demons that had not yet fallen to hell in place. This is related to the concept of soul customs, where every soul is intercepted on its way to Heaven by these demons, who force it into hell. It has also given rise to the Romanian saying până ajungi la Dumnezeu, te mănâncă sfinţii (before you reach God, the saints will eat you).

The Origin of God

Another question commonly addressed is that of the origin of God, which is explained in a Russian doll type fashion. Before every God there was another God that created him. Thus explaining the many names the Bible used for God, the Oltenians believed the first God was called Sabaoth, followed by Amon, Apollo, the Creator God of the Bible, and finally, Jesus Christ.

The Origin of Race

Quite surprisingly for a Caucasian race, Romanian folklore asserts that, as God had made the humans out of clay, and clay was perceived to be black like soil, the first humans were black-skinned. It was later during the time of Cain and Abel that God did punish the murderous Cain by bleaching his skin. This is identified as the source of the expression a se îngălbeni de frică (to go yellow with fear), which can also be found in various forms in the folklore of other peoples.

Although, some sources attest that the Dacians were already familiar with dark-skinned people as evidence of the existence of an African race appears to have been found on the territory of Romania:

A new people has been discovered in prehistoric Dacia, this time of ethiopian race and of a blackish-yellow or tan colour. Its stay there has left deep marks in our ethnic, heraldic and geographical nomenclature as to how prehistoric Dacia was first called Ethiopia, then Arabia, and through a longer process, Bessarabia.

– Ionescu, G.M., Etiopienii în Dacia Preistorică / The Ethiopians in Prehistoric Dacia, 1926, Bucharest: Tipografia de Carti LUCIA, p 3.

The Earth

As in other cultures, the Earth was regarded as a giver of life even before Christianity had spread to the Romanian lands, and as such, was personified as the feminine archetype of the Great Mother. This form can be traced back to the Iranian mazdeist religion, where Spenta Armaiti is found as the personification of the Earth. This form endured even after Christian imagery and symbolism became part of Romanian culture, Mother Earth often being identified as the consort of God, the heavenly Father.

The origin of mountains is explained in a number of ways by the cultures of the different regions of Romania. One account is that mountains formed as a response to God demanding the Earth to nurture all life, to which the earth shuddered and brought forth mountains. Another version suggests the Earth was too large to fit under the firmament, and so God attempted to shrink it, thus raising mountains. Often, these accounts are accompanied by the imagery of one or several World Pillars, which sustain the earth from below and are usually placed beneath mountains. Earthquakes are frequently attributed to the earth slipping due to the Devil's constant gnawing at these pillars, which are rebuilt by God and his angels in times of fasting.

The Myth Of The Blajini

As Romanians generally perceived the earth as a disc, they were naturally creative enough to imagine what existed on the other side. This other earth is imagined as a mirror image of our own, and as a home to creatures called Blajini [bla'ʒinʲ] (rom. gentle/kind-hearted ones), sometimes given the name Rohmani ['roh.manʲ] (in Bucovina. They are described as anthropomorphic and short, sometimes having the head of a rat. They are either described as malicious or as having great respect for God and leading a sinless life. They are considered to fast the year through, and thus doing humans a great service.

The Romanian holiday Paştele Blajinilor (the Easter of the Blajini) is a way to repay them for the benefits they bring. Since they live in isolation, they have no way of knowing when Easter comes. It is for this reason that Romanians eat dyed eggs and let the shells flow downstream, from there they believe they will get to the Apa Sâmbetei, and from there to the Blajini.

Some explain them as the descendants of Adam's son Seth. Others state that they used to live alongside humans on the earth, but that Moses, seeing his people oppressed by them, parted the waters and, after he and his people had retreated to safety, poured the waters back onto them, sending them to their current abode.

Some ruins left to remind us of the Communist regime.





Photographs come from the PhotoBlog of Cornel Gingarasu

Happy cows give more milk. This was the belief of five Romanian farmers who are now subject of police investigation after they were found to have been feeding cannabis to their cows.

The farmer aged between 57 and 82, claiming they didn’t know they were doing something illegal by growing the drug in their field, tod the police officers that the drug actually help the cows in producing more milk.

One of the farmers, Ion Astarastoaie said: “We grew it because the cows seemed to like it, and happy cows give more milk.”

Errmmmm......no comment.

What are these pieces of art worth?

In normal times it’s easy to mistake cost for value. You might also say it’s the difference between cash and culture, the price of something and what’s ultimately priceless.

As Romanians, it seems, we have been prone to confuse the two since even before the revolution that overthrew the country’s Communist dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, and executed him and his wife, Elena, nearly 20 years ago.

That’s one explanation, at least, for why, when the courts here recently ruled that some art formerly in the possession of the Ceausescu family should be returned to Nicolae’s only surviving child, Valentin, Romanians hardly blinked.

The art is mostly Romanian paintings, but also some Goya prints. That ruling was not quite an equivalent to German courts handing art formerly at Berchtesgaden over to Hitler’s relatives. But it was close.

A soft-spoken 60-year-old physicist who never helped run his father’s regime, Valentin Ceausescu has said the works he wanted to get back belonged to his own former wife, Iordana, an art historian and the daughter of a onetime Communist leader. Valentin’s father, who didn’t approve of the marriage, expelled her years ago to Canada.



Other works being returned, however, belonged to Valentin’s brother, Nicu, a much-loathed figure when he was the dictator’s heir apparent. He died of cirrhosis in 1996, at 45. (Ceausescu’s third child, a daughter, Zoe, who also had some works of art, died from lung cancer in 2006, at 57.)

Ultimately, of course, everything that belonged to the family of Ceausescu, a onetime apprentice shoemaker from a peasant village, derived from the privileges of power.

The case went through many convolutions over seven years. Valentin argued in court that what had been confiscated from him after his father was overthrown was not state property — never mind if, as the state argued, none of the Ceausescus ever bothered to document properly what was in their possession, as the Ceausescu regime required every Romanian to do.

An eyebrow or two might have been raised when the court then agreed with Valentin, at least among Romanians who could recall how the dictator enriched his homes, his family members and others close to him by seizing art and property from innumerable countrymen.

But the ho-hum response here speaks volumes about this struggling country’s cash-versus-culture climate. With most barely scraping by, Romanians admire private enterprise more than they value some vague notion of shared artistic heritage.

“Since the revolution the country is only about private enterprise,” said Cristian Stanescu, a journalist who covered the trial for the local newspaper, The Guardian. He echoed what others here say: “Romanians sympathize with Valentin because he worked the system to his advantage. Our idea of culture now is making money. We still have too many basic needs to worry about elevated ones like art and the state.”

Alin Ciupala, a thoughtful young historian of Romanian history at Bucharest University, put his countrymen’s indifference to their artistic heritage another way: “In Romania under Ceausescu there didn’t exist, as there did in the Soviet Union or Czechoslovakia, any underground cultural movement. There was no samizdat culture. And so there never was a tradition here of cultural liberalism, of cultural resistance. Intellectuals were opportunistic. The instinct to survive has always been highly developed in this country.

“If Valentin had obtained from the courts big castles, or land, it might have provoked a reaction and reduced public sympathy for him. But paintings and prints, works of art? They don’t mean that much for most Romanians.”

The art the court agreed should be handed over to Mr. Ceausescu is still in storage in the National Art Museum, where it has been since being seized years ago. One estimate put the price tag for the lot of pictures, some 40, at somewhat less than $1 million, but that was only a wild guess.

Goya aside, the best-known artists among the work being returned, Victor Brauner and Theodor Pallady, aren’t exactly big names outside the country. Like Valentin Ceausescu and his wife, but for very different reasons, Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu also amassed works by Romanian artists, in their case pre-modern and Socialist Realist, although for a while, while the Communist leader was courting Richard M. Nixon and Charles de Gaulle during the 1960s, the state officially tolerated modern art for the sake of Western consumption. Briefly Romanian artists had a window onto what was happening in America and Western Europe.

But then, culture having only been a political tool, the window eventually shut. After Ceausescu visited Pyongyang in North Korea, he decided to rebuild his own capital city. The result was to wipe out much of historic Bucharest to make way for grotesque and gigantic building projects that still spoil the city center, and sycophants kept a virtual army of state-approved artists busy painting portraits of Ceausescu and his wife, thousands of them. These ended up in public buildings and in the various homes of the dictator, who loved to receive as birthday gifts pictures of himself showing how much the Romanian people loved him. Ceausescu constructed a whole building to store these portraits.

As it happened, the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest had some of them on view the other day. Mihai Oroveanu, the museum’s director, hung them in one gallery — diagonally, to make clear that the show was not actually a tribute.

Big, brightly colored scenes of Communist kitsch, they showed the dictator and his wife smiling before reverent mobs of workers, receiving flowers from ruddy-cheeked female soldiers, and wearing white 1970s leisure suits that, like the peaked winter hat Ceausescu made de rigeur for all loyal apparatchiks, became the height of Romanian fashion once upon a time.

Radu Filipescu, a former dissident imprisoned and beaten under Ceausescu for distributing anti-government leaflets, recalled Romanian life back then. “The most interesting books I read were in prison,” he said one recent evening, with a laugh. “There was not a lot else to do.” But he was also half-serious.

“Today Romanians are totally consumed by competition and money,” he explained. “It’s easier for them to keep warm memories of the past, when life certainly was not better, but in some ways it was not as difficult. They don’t want to concern themselves with Ceausescu at the moment.”

All of Europe wrestles with the last century, at different speeds. A generation of Spaniards is just getting around to unearthing the graves of Republicans killed under the rule of Francisco Franco, more than three decades after his death; France and Poland still haven’t quite confronted their conflicted roles during World War II. Germany struggles with addressing the legacy of its division, 20 years after the Wall fall.

Here, Ceausescu and his wife aside, few Romanians were prosecuted for what happened during the Ceausescu era. Nobody served more than a few years in jail.

“It is incredible to give back paintings to the son of a dictator,” said Stejarel Olaru. He oversees the government-sponsored Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes in Romania. “But people don’t care.”

And so it’s left to Valentin Ceausescu, of all people, to deal with the past. He agreed to meet one afternoon in a nearly empty restaurant outside Bucharest. Nervous and defensive, he stressed that the art his parents had in their homes was borrowed from state-owned museums. The works he fought to recover, the only ones he really cares about, he said, were collected by him and his former wife, a private affair.

“I was defending my name,” he said. “These works were part of my past, my life. Some were gifts from a painter who was a friend.”

If the museum abides by the court order and turns the pictures over, which he said he still doubts, Mr. Ceausescu plans to give most of the works to Iordana, keep two or three for himself, but sell none.

The issue was never profit, said the son of the dead dictator. It was justice.

“I’m not pressed for money,” he wanted to make clear. “The whole point was that there should be a fair trial.”

BUCHAREST, Romania - A mass grave containing the bodies of three members of Romanian's anti-communist resistance group, White Guard, turned up on Monday (April 27th) near the village of Nepos in northern Romania, media reported.

The grave contained bones and a boot that will undergo forensic analysis, said experts from the Romanian Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes.

Authorities tentatively identified the dead as Ioan Leonida Bodiu, Ioan Burdet and Toader Dumitru. The communist-era secret police Securitate executed and buried them in 1949.

When will we finally be rid of this communist shadow, when will we be allowed to forget those days and live a normal free life that isn't overcast by the memories of these 'animals' that ruled our country for so long. When...........not in my lifetime !!

When God came to handing out gifts, Alina Puscau got more than her fair share. Already famous as one of the world’s most beautiful women, the Victoria’s Secret model and GQ cover girl is now set for pop stardom with a debut single destined to be one of the defining songs of this summer.

Two months before its release, Alina’s When You Leave (Numa Numa) had already notched up more than four million views on YouTube, made the Billboard dance chart Top 10 and been lauded by P Diddy and Kanye West. Effervescent Eurodisco at its most infectious, the song is proof that some models can do much more than look pretty.

Remixed by Swedish wunderkind Basshunter and based on an English language adaptation of Romanian band O-Zone’s hit Dragostea Din Tei, When You Leave (Numa Numa) exploded online at the start of this year thanks to a steamy video shot by A-list Hollywood director Brett Ratner (Rush Hour, X Men and happens also to be Alina’s boyfriend) and choreographed by Fatima Robinson, who has previously worked with Aaliyah, Rihanna and Mary J. Blige.

“The video captures the energy of the song,” says Alina. “It’s fun, fresh and colourful, a little bit naughty, but always playful. So many videos these days look the same. This one really stands out.

“Every scene was filmed in Brett’s house in L.A., which has a disco downstairs. He built the hospital set in one garage and, in another, tried to recreate the red light district of Amsterdam. “We shot from 7am to 4am the next day, which was totally exhausting, but also good fun. I’ve been on lots of long modeling shoots, but nothing like that. I don’t think I’ve ever done a tougher day’s work.”

Born in Bucharest, Alina spent the first 15 years of her life dreaming of fame. The youngest of three children, she sang Madonna and Mariah Carey songs in to a hairbrush in front of the mirror, though never imagined she would one day meet both her idols. Music didn’t run in the family – her father is an electrician, her mother a carpet weaver – and money was so scarce, she couldn’t afford to go to concerts.

At 16, Alina’s life changed overnight when she won Elite Model Look, a global modelling competition. Signed to the world’s most prestigious model agency, she immediately began flying to jobs all over the world. She appeared in Glamour, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, Cosmopolitan and Vogue and was shot by leading fashion photographers, including Bruce Weber, Patrick Demarchelier and Marc Baptiste.

For the first two years, she returned to Romania as often as possible to continue her studies, but at 19, moved permanently to New York. Within months, she was a star of Victoria’s Secret – she appeared in their taboo-breaking TV commercials and infamous catalogues – and bagged a role in the film Shallow Hal, alongside Jack Black and Gwyneth Paltrow.

“I loved making the movie, but at the time, my English was terrible,” recalls Alina. “I decided that if I wanted to act again, I’d have to study first. I signed up at NYU to study speech and at Lee Strasberg to improve my acting.”

Then a Romanian producer called Rad heard her sing and insisted she make a record with him. At first, she turned him down. After six months, Alina relented and returned to Romania, where she recorded a tongue-in-cheek track called Everybody Wants Me. She thought she was singing for fun, but when the song was passed to Brett Ratner, then directing Rush Hour 3, he was so impressed, he put it on the soundtrack.

“It was an amazing break for me,” says Alina, “Every artist wants their song in a big movie. It’s in a great scene too, where Chris Tucker is directing traffic, listening to his iPod."

Last year, Alina was invited to Mariah Carey’s house and was shocked to discover her idol knew the song.

“She was singing it back at me,” laughs Alina. “It was one of those moments that will forever be fixed in my mind. Mariah is a goddess to me. We met and got on like a house on fire. When he said ‘You’ve got a great voice, girl’, I was so flattered, I almost fainted.”

When You Leave (Numa Numa) is the real launch of Alina’s pop career and she can’t wait to promote it.

“I’ve only performed it live a few times so far,” she admits. “The first time was for a radio station in Seattle. The second was on New Year’s Eve at a party in Miami. The DJ put on my song and everyone went crazy for it. When he found out I was there, I was asked on stage to sing it live. I went on right after Jamie Foxx had performed, which was scary enough, then I looked down and Joaquim Phoenix was right in front of me. The next day, I was in a hotel and P Diddy came to tell me how much he loved the song. I hadn’t even known he was there.”

It was Alina’s mum who discovered Kanye West was also a fan, after the rapper made the model his Girl Of The Week on his website. Alina’s celebrity fans and startling start to her pop career mean she is more in demand than ever – she was recently announced as the face of Playboy.com.

After performing alongside The Prodigy at dance festival Ultrafest in March, and with scores of shows being set up throughout the summer, for the time being Alina wants most to concentrate on music.

“I only started singing for fun, but now that’s it’s going so well, I couldn’t be more excited,” says Alina. “As long as I’m enjoying it, I’m going to keep at it and see how the future unfolds.”