Nicolae Ceausescu

What’s wrong with ‘Ceausescu Tourism’?

by Craig Turp October 31, 2011 Media

 Why do we do it? Why do we watch questionable talk shows on questionable television channels (in this case Antena 3) knowing how loaded the content is, how subjective the guests are and – to all intents and purposes – knowing exactly what will be said. Last night the subject was a report that had [...]

15 comments Read the full article →

Bucharest’s stray dog problem has nothing to do with Nicolae Ceausescu

by Craig Turp March 11, 2011 Bucharest

 We come in peace. Whatever side of the barricades you find yourself on in the the Bucharest stray dog debate, can we suggest that we all decide to agree on the fact that the stray dog problem – like so many others for which he gets the blame in contemporary Romania – has nothing whatsoever [...]

15 comments Read the full article →

A tale of two Bucharest cathedrals

by Craig Turp February 15, 2011 Bucharest

 Two enormous cathedrals are currently being built in Bucharest: one orthodox, and one secular. The orthodox cathedral was last week handed 10 million lei (around €2.5 million) in funding by the Romanian state, a move which sparked (understandable) outrage amongst a large section of liberal Romanian society (which believes that the state should not be [...]

30 comments Read the full article →

The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu

by Craig Turp February 14, 2011 Romania

 Just as Hosni Mubarak was being forced to step down as president of Egypt on Friday night, we poured ourselves a large Campari and settled on to the sofa to watch Andrei Ujica’s epic The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu. The premise of the film was to make a thorough biography of Nicolae Ceausescu’s period as [...]

11 comments Read the full article →

Romania, keep your lights on!

by Craig Turp March 17, 2010 Romania

 That turning off the lights for an hour has become such an acceptable (and, let’s face it, painless) way of protesting says much about the top down, elitist green movement’s world view, which sees deprivation and poverty as lifestyle choices, and thinks that people in the developing world should be spared the excesses of our [...]

18 comments Read the full article →

Bucharest Life 2009

by Craig Turp January 4, 2010 Bucharest

 A week or so late, here is Bucharest Life’s Review of the Year that was 2009. January A new government, led by Traian Basescu and Little Emil Boc, installed following parliamentary elections at the end of 2008, introduces, amongst other moves of sheer political genius, a compulsory profit tax for small companies (even those that [...]

3 comments Read the full article →

Where all is rationed, but praise for the leader…

by Craig Turp December 3, 2009 Bucharest

 Raided the New York Times (NYT) archive again this morning. Found this, a very good despatch from the NYT’s man in Bucharest, Alan Riding, filed 20 years ago to the day: With foreign delegates and journalists in town for this month’s Rumanian Communist Party congress, it was standard practice for the Government to supply Bucharest’s [...]

3 comments Read the full article →

← Previous Entries