It has not been a great couple of weeks for Romanian tourism. The country’s new tourism slogan and logo were unveiled in Shanghai last Thursday by Minister of Tourism Elena Udrea and the usual suspects to general derision, caused in the main by accusations that the logo was remarkably familiar to a number of others.
Too much (almost all of it complete rubbish; The Economist’s take on things is an exception) has since been written on the subject for us to have any will to make further comment. All we will say is that debating the merits of a slogan and logo is beating around a very large bush.
Romania’s problems as a tourism destination will not be solved by a slogan and logo, be they plagiarised or not.
So instead of joining in the bashing, we thought that we would give Romanian tourism a little bit of love. Fortunately, we spent last weekend in the perfect place to put us in the mood to do so: Cabana Susai.
Not two weeks since we had nearly frozen at the top of Snowdon, the highest ‘mountain’ in England and Wales, we decided last week that we fancied a bit more mountain action, this time closer to home, on some proper mountains.
Now, when we say ‘proper mountains’ we don’t mean the Fagaras range, or Mount Omu: at least for now. We will get to scale them one day. For now we fancied something a bit more leisurely, so we decided to head for Cabana Susai, an hour’s trek uphill from Cioplea, just above the ski resort of Predeal.
First, a little history.
Searching for photos of Cabana Susai as was, we discovered that the original cabin was built in the 1930s by the lunatic Iron Guard/Legionnaire movement. (It was clearly built on one of the days when the Legionnaires weren’t running around Bucharest butchering Jews as young as five).
Anyway, the original cabin looked like this:
Then it was rebuilt and for a time looked like this:
Today it looks like this:
It is certainly no longer a bog-standard mountain hut, and we didn’t bump into any Jew-butchering lunatics the whole time we were there. Which is always a bonus.
The best feature of the place is the swimming pool; what might be described as ‘a pool with a view’:
A night at Susai (including breakfast and free use of the pool and spa centre) goes from €80 for a double to €200+ for one of the rather special apartments. A couple of years ago we knew a man who knew the man who owned the place, and got to stay in one of the apartments for nothing.
This time, as paying customers, we had to make do with a simple double; perfectly satisfactory though.
At 1440 metres it is not the highest cabin in the country, but we think it might be the highest pool, and high-altitude in Romania doesn’t usually come with such a degree of luxury. For the perfect ‘get me out of Bucharest’ weekend, it’s hard to beat. Drive to Cioplea, leave the car there and walk up.
Driving up to Susai misses the whole point of going.
{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }
I forgot to mention that in WW1 after being badly beaten and taken out of the war, the country decided to re-enter the war against Germany with just 1 (one) day before the armistice was signed
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And in WW2 after the country had taken its armies all the way to Stalingrad (where they were blown apart in a single night), they decided to switch sides again and go with the Russians
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If sheikh Abu Yahia al-Libi of Al-Qaeda records a video to address Romania, the country would be shaking in its underwear so much that they would be ready to convert to islam
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I’ve been doing some research and introspection lately, starting from the way things are going in Afghanistan and Iraq and all the way to what alternatives the people in this country still have.
It’s curious how the Legionnaire movement appeared in Romania because it could be considered the only proof of personality and national identity that the people of this country had even shown.
Dictators, authoritarian regimes, traitors, thieves etc… have a history of prosperous existance in this country because they are surrounded by cowards.
As opposed to the mujahideen in Irak and Afghanistan who are ready to cut off the heads of whoever may want to take a piece of their land, Romanians are too coward to even organize street protests when corrupt politicians steal directly from their pockets.
Cowards can not live on the same earth with warriors; maybe not in our lifetime but surely at a certain moment Romania will cease to exist as a state.
You have to look deep into history to have a glimpse into the Romanian national character- “coward” as you name it. That is a simple and very efficient survival strategy. What is today Romania started as a tribal state (Dacia) two millennia ago, wiped out by the Roman Empire in an extermination operation akin with the Spanish conquest of Mexico and Hitler’s Holocaust put together. The Roman colonists settled there and the small indigenous communities were left to their devices when the empire had to pull out only one and a half century later. Since then, the place has been a junction point of alien empires and powerful neighbouring kingdoms, which just perennially devastated the place. That fact even entered the folklore, the famous ballad ‘Miorita’ describing metaphorically that state of fact. That is a very traumatising experience in the European context. The locals through a meek and resigning attitude have managed to survive and stealthy gain ground as an ethnic and for the last 150 years as a national community. A character shaped throughout two millennia is very hard to change now. I also attribute to that fact the immense number of harlots emanating from what is today Romania and R. of Moldova. As for Legionaries, you have to do a bit of ethnic analysis of their membership: most of them were “fringe” Romanians, ie Aromanians, Bessarabians, Bucovineans, Transylvanians from Partium etc. The displaced frontier people are having that kind of character, not the mainland ones. Romanians are now after 50 years of communist social engineering and melt potting a nation of meek mainlanders.
I hope that the above would make more sense to you why Romanians are not “warriors” and probably, contrary to what you think, will be the most successful in the region in keeping their identity and state in the time to come.
Which came first? The meekness or the being kicked about? Your position seems to be “we were kicked about so became meek and resigned”, perhaps down to a combination of bad luck and geography. Perhaps it was the other way round? Romanians got kicked about because they were easily subdued and wouldn’t stick up for each other.
The Romanian character is that typical of ancestral natives of a region with a well defined geography; among the first ethnic layers of such an areal, similar with the Irish or the Basques, or some African populations before colonialism. The meekness is an ingrained characteristic in many such instances of peoples well adapted to a particular geography, reinforced by being periodically kicked about by waves of better organised and technologically more advanced newcomers. Over some centuries of such processes there emerges a particular character, much despised by observers and ‘warrior’ dreamers, but well suited to survive and thrive in such adverse conditions, etc.
You might be right, just posing the question. Do all people with such set ups end up the same? What inspires a people to become more organised and advanced instead of meek and adaptable. Why didn’t Ireland end up invading England?
http://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Societies/dp/0393317552
The answer is a cohesive ideology! Actually the Irish had once a cohesive ideology, the organised early Christianity, when not many had that in the rest of Europe and their monks thus ‘invaded’ England and many other European outposts and brought those people to or back to the Christian fold. Only think at the Iona, Lindisfarne or Bradwell on Sea outposts manned by Irish monks in what in the 6th century was human wilderness, known today as England. Another reason why in my opinion the Irish did not ‘properly’ invade England was that they had everything what was needed at home- this is what I meant by people adapted to a well defined geography, the same can be said of what we call now Romanians in their ancestral Carpathian highlands. What made the English conquerors were the Normans and their conquest driven elite society that goes back to the Vikings and before that. Conquest ideology on the same lines had the Mongols, Hungarians, etc.
Absolutely – Ireland was the seat of the church and preserved it for all of Europe. But then in reality the Irish are not meek, but definitely adaptable. The English are in a distinct geographical place and were screwed by the Romans, Vikings, Normans etc so perhaps should be less polite, stiff and warrior-like and more meek and adaptable. It’s just that it’s really easy to describe why a people are they way they are in retrospect. You describe a people’s history and say “yes, that’s the sequence of events that led them to be the way they are”. I just don’t buy that a certain geography leads to a people automatically being the way they are. Perhaps Romanians should not be given this excuse.
The lands of Romania never really represented an objective of territorial conquest after the Roman empire.
Except for a few periods in history when the lords of the Romanian lands could rally their armies and ideology behind the European crusaders, Romanian states were economically and politically controlled by the Turks.
Turks who didn’t really eye territorial conquest over Eastern Europe as their armies were busy ravaging Alexandria and expanding into Middle East at that time.
So when the Turks were the strongest in the region, Romanians subdued to the Turks.
A few hundreds of years after Turkish domination in Eastern Europe, the unification between Muscowy and Novgorod created the Russian Empire, a new force which eyed domination on the European stage.
Romanians changed sides, subdued to the Russians and fought the Romanian Independence War alongside the Russians. So Romania owes its state of independence to the Russians, it wasn’t an act of bravery that took the country to independence (like it happened in the U.S. for example), it was a simple act of speculation – siding with the strongest party in a certain context.
After that came the WW1 and Romania didn’t have many sides to switch. They entered the war in 1916 and remained on the offensive for about 1 week before its armies were driven back by German forces. Statistically Romania had lost soldiers in 16 months of war to count for about half of what the British Empire lost in the entire war. It was the first moment in the country’s history when quality was needed; obviously it couldn’t be found. The existance of the Romanian state after WW1 is a pure irony of faith as in only 16 months the country was actually wiped from the map.
I will continue tomorrow with WW2…
Not sure what your point is other than Romania/Romanians haven’t been much of a force in history and have switched sides depending on who is power. I doubt if anyone will argue with this.
That’s exactly my point, Romania could have been a strong country but switching sides to whoever was the strongest at a certain time showed everyone that the country couldn’t be trusted.
Although it did ensure survival of the nation (lots of luck involved though), the price paid was quite high as nobody takes the country seriously anymore, inside or outside.
This is why a joke-macabre like Traian Basescu and Emil Boc could arrive in power, this is why they are still alive today when in other countries they would have been shot long ago (see the case of Zoran Djindjic for example).
Looks great, but can you camp there? In fact, can you tell me where there are some decent campsites in Romania? I’ve just invested in a great new tent from Decathlon
Camping? Not that I saw. Come to think of it, I do not ever remember seeing anyone camping in Romania.
Hi, I noticed again some bloody annoying misspellings etc. in my previous message, apologises: when writing and even revising I “see” no problems: I explained yesterday why I keep doing that
cheers V.
Cabana Susai is one of the practical outcomes of Legionarie’s policies to develop a racially pure Romanian economy, if I can put it that way. They set up ethnically Romanian owed grocery shops, cafes, theatres, schools and holiday establishment such as this alpine hut. An interesting fact is the name chosen for these places, sounding like coming “la Roumanie profonde” to paraphrase someone. For example cafe “Zahanaua Ciresica” in Bucharest was and still is one of the most eloquent such establishment, as was of course “Cabana Susai”- name suffering to a plant (“swine thistle” in E., I think), which incidentally does not grow at 1400m altitude, used for spring salads by Romanian peasants; “susai” is a very Romanian name indeed.
These names survived the communist regime period because the idealogical overlap between the Romanian national-socialism (the Legionaries) and national-communism. It is a very interesting cultural aspect, which deserves further thought