Go on, admit it: you never knew there was one, or at the very least assumed it went the way of every other piece of Soviet statuary in those iconoclastic days that followed the 1989 revolution (that being removed, dumped and forgotten).
Well, as we discovered (by accident) this morning, Bucharest’s Soviet War Memorial survives, well intact and well cared for. It is found along with the Red Army cemetery, in the north of the city, just by Aurel Vlaicu metro station.
The land on which it stands is part of the Russian Embassy – we were told this by the security guard on duty – and you aren’t allowed in without Russian permission. And the days when we were on first name terms with the Russian ambassador to Romania are long since gone.
So we had to make do with snapping a few shots through the fence. But we will add it to our listings in Bucharest In Your Pocket: it is our raison d’etre to include the obscure as well as the obvious.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
@Mac I am not aware of war graves from a 1919 conflict in that zone on Prahova Valley. The Romanian army was involved in that year in a bit of bloody battles with Hungarian Bolsheviks around Budapest prior to the occupation of that city. The year might be 1916, when Romania entered the war on the Entente’s side (after two years of neutrality) and was badly beaten after a short lived invasion of Transylvania in the passes of the Transylvanian Alps (Prahova Valley is one of them). There are a few such war grave grounds on the course of the road and one of them probably relates to that hasty retreat from 1916 pounded by the advancing to the German and Autstro-Hungarian armies. There is also on that road an interesting Romanian-Russian war cementery from the WWII, when the Germans were pushed to the opposite direction.
@Mac Romania fought a war for much of 1919 with Bela Kun’s short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic, though almost all of the fighting was in Hungary (Romanian troops even occupied Budapest for a few days) or in north-western Romania. However, the memorial in question is most likely to be that for Mihai Saulescu, a poet who died in fighting in Predeal in 1916 during the Central Powers counter-offensive that led to the fall of Bucharest and the Romanian government’s retreat to Iasi soon afterwards.
On a related note, there is what seems to be a memorial on the main Bucharest-Brasov road (on the corkscrew mountain road bit) which I’m almost sure reads 1919. Forgive my ignorance (and laziness for not stopping) but does anyone know what this relates to? (The Great War ended in 1918?).
There is a Russian War Graves Commission that takes care of the war graves associated with the Russian state all over the world, just as its British counterpart, but with much less money at its disposal unfortunately. Nevertheless, their war graves in Romania are fairly well tended and that is to be appreciated, after all they helped liberate the country from the German and Romanian Nazis, a disgusting lot, scams of the earth, and a much worse bunch that their communist successors. The Romanian war grave grounds are often in very bad shape, although often they are in the vicinity of the Russian ones, but tended by the native war memorial organisation.
Did we say the Soviet War Memorial was cool? No. We simply said it was there. That it existed. That is all we said. Please read these posts and digest the meaning (in this case: none whatsoever) before putting finger to keyboard.
As for being warped, yes we are. We have no problem with that bit.
the jewish memerial is no good but the russian one is cool? You guys are warped
{ 1 trackback }