Thursday 26 June 2014

Book review: Edith & I

world-map albania

Greetings!

The Missing Link is finished and the summer is upon us and therefore my postings on UTM are liable to be somewhat erratic as camping trips and mini expeditions intervene. This post is a day early for example, as my brother and I are off to travel the A470 this weekend. “A470? What on earth is that?” I hear you ask. Ah well, the A470 is the Route 66 of Wales, the only road which spans the entire length of the country without actually dipping into England. There’s even been songs written about it.

Nothing is so heavenly,

As travelling on the A470

I get a funny tingle when I go up the spine of Wales.

I catch my breath and smile a lot

When I think about just how much we’ve got

I only wish the journey quicker than a flight to Istanbul.

Ok, so not quite Lennon/McCartney but you get the idea. That’s this weekend and the weekend after I’m off with my son to see the Tour de France in, erm.. Yorkshire. Well, why not, particularly when they’ve the best railway museum in the world nearby with a bullet train, the Mallard, the Rocket and a whole lot more.

So, this blog may become erratic and so until things cool down again, here are a few stand alone postings, starting with another book review, ‘Edith & I’ which is all about Edith Durham, the most famous explorer of Albania and a great inspiration and gude to my brilliant 2009 Albania and Kosova trip.

Keep travelling!

Uncle Travelling Matt

Edith & I: On the Trail of an Edwardian Traveller in Kosovo

Elizabeth Gowing

Edith_&_Final

When I chanced upon a book on the shelves of Waterstones in Birmingham detailing the travels of one modern Englishwoman following in the footsteps of Mary Edith Durham a century before then I just knew that I had to buy it. Ever since reading ‘High Albania’, Durham’s account of her 1908 journey through Northern Albania and Kosovo, I have found her inspirational. Durham was one of that special breed of Britishers who go to an exotic land, explore it and record it and promote it and in the process become beloved by the population and remembered by them whilst being virtually unknown back home. In Bulgaria there was Mercia MacDermott and in Japan Walter Weston, but for the Albanians it will always be Durham, Mbretëresha e Malësoreve, Queen of the Highlanders. But that is Durham, the question is, does Gowing have anything worthwhile to say?

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In all honesty, I found this book mixed. In some areas it is excellent. Gowing is thorough in her research and discovers a lot about her heroine. We meet the surviving members of her family, the descendent of her Albanian guide, check out the ethnographic mementoes she brought back from her travels and speculate on her sexuality, fashion sense and motherly instincts. All well and good and I loved it, even if the image of Durham that came out at the end was rather unlike the one that I had fashioned in my mind from her book. Which is a shame since I based one of my favourite literary creations, the indomitable Mary Jane Hartley on her and now I realise that the two are quite different.

So, if she researches Durham so well, then what’s my issue? Well, I guess my problem lies in the researcher and not the research. The thing is, (and maybe this is just me), but my feeling is that she just doesn’t ‘get’ Edith. She knows the facts and she checks out the places and people but she just doesn’t really understand. Edith Durham was an anthropologist at heart whose primary aim was to record the culture and traditions of one of the most remote corners of Europe. In Gowing though, there is nothing anthropological. True, she helps out at the Ethnographic Museum in Pristina and helps set up a collective of filigree workers, but she never talks about the filigree in detail, classifies it, compares it to other filigree in neighbouring districts and speculates on why it is so popular and refined an art form in those parts.

It’s the ‘compare’ bit actually that gets me. I’m a big believer that if you want to know a culture, you have to explore around it rather than just in it. For example, to understand England you need to know something of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, France and even the Low Countries also. Gowing’s passion is Kosovo; she lives there and she loves it and that’s the problem, for Edith Durham was no lover of Kosovo, she was a devotee of the Balkans with a specific affection for the Albanian people. And that is where Gowing really fails, for Edith’s travels were focussed around all the Albanian lands, but particularly the highlands of Northern Albania. The plain of Kosovo is an afterthought yet read ‘Edith & I’ and you’d think that it was all about Kosovo and Kosovo alone. Only one chapter is devoted to Albania, a country that Gowing clearly does not know and, more worryingly, doesn’t seem that interested in beyond chatting to people whose ancestors met Durham.

Oh dear, this book could have been so much more! Edith Durham was political; she championed the Albanian cause against that of the Serb and the Turk. I would have loved to have heard Gowing’s musings on what Durham would have thought on the modern-day politics of the region. Would she have approved of Kosovan independence or would she have been horrified that Albania was now split into two countries? Yet sadly, these issues were not even looked at.

Not that it was all bad though. There’s a great description of a bus journey through Kosovo and I applaud the work Gowing has done with various charities there. But whilst she gets the facts, she does not get the soul. The most infuriating line for me came when she was checking out the monastery at Deçan and commented, “Of our party, each of us went to our private devotions; I walked around in an atheist’s equivalent of prayer, checking against my guidebook, looking up, staring meditatively.” That my dear, I am afraid to say, is nowhere near akin to prayer, atheist or otherwise. It is plain and simple sightseeing; I should know, I’ve done a lot of both. But then unless you ‘get’ it, then you wouldn’t see the difference now, would you?

Mary Edith Durham on the other hand, I suspect, would.

20th February, 2014

Smallthorne, UK

Saturday 21 June 2014

The Missing Link: Part 3.10: Bucharest (II)

world-map romania

Greetings!

There’s been a long gap between this post and the last. What is it due to? Have I headed off into the deepest Amazonian jungle to watch my favourite football team lose? Or perhaps decided to brave the dangers of northern Iraq to see what is really happening over there? Such would be good reasons for not posting, but alas, the real one is far less exciting. What really happened is that my computer got a nasty virus and crashed, I lost more or less everything and it had to have a stay in with the repair people who’ve cleaned it out, and rebooted it with fresh new programmes, none of which include MS Word so even the documents I saved, I couldn’t open. Still, back in the saddle now and here we have the very last post of ‘The Missing Link’, the last part of my explorations of the Romanian capital Bucharest. Perhaps not quite as exciting as Manaus or Kirkuk but just as interesting.

Keep travelling!

Uncle Travelling Matt

Links to all parts of the travelogue

Introduction

Ukraine

1.1: Konotop

1.2: Chernobyl and Pripyat

1.3: Kiev

1.4: Kiev to Odessa

1.5: Odessa

1.6: Bolgrad

Moldova and Transdniestra

2.1: Bolgrad to Chisinau

2.2: Chisinau (I)

2.3: Tiraspol and Bender

2.4: Chisinau (II)

Romania

3.1: Iasi (I)

3.2: Iasi (II)

3.3: Suceava

3.4: The Painted Monasteries of Bucovina

3.5: Targu Neamt, Agapia and Sihla

3.6: Suceava to Viseu de Sus

3.7: The Mocanita and Viseu de Sus

3.8: Viseu de Sus to Bucharest

3.9: Bucharest (I)

3.10: Bucharest (II)

My Flickr Album of this trip

MLM12

Bucharest (II)

I woke up late on my last day a free agent. I’d slept surprisingly well in my dorm bed and had nowhere that I particularly longed to see and nothing that I particularly longed to do. However, as with all mornings following a night of drinking, there was one thing that I needed before attempting anything else and that was caffeine, and where better to enjoy a coffee than in the atmospheric confines of the Hanul lui Manuc? For a one-off, hell, I could afford it!

En route I came across an open-air collectables market on Piaţa Universităţii. I checked for old banknotes and they were there aplenty but the prices were sky-high so I declined. I did make one purchase though, some plastic wallets for the notes that I already have, bought off a Bulgarian trader from Ruse who chatted to me in his native tongue about trade across the border, impressed that he had found a foreigner who actually understood him.

Frappé in the han was a pleasant and rejuvenating experience. I sat on the upper floor overlooking the courtyard, kept cool by a fine mist sprayed from ice-cold pipes above my head. Such five-star luxury is what many people crave when they go on holiday. I generally don’t, but I must admit that, now and again, it can be rather fun.

ML161 Frappé in the han

With the best part of the day to kill afterwards, I decided to check out a bit of culture but the History Museum was shut so instead I retired to the Cişmigiu Gardens where I read and relaxed on a bench overlooking the boating lake.

I took a trip on the Metro up to Piaţa Victorei and checked out the Museum of the Romanian Peasant. This is a Bucharest institution and lauded internationally, winning the coveted European Museum of the Year Award in 1996,[1] and so despite Romanian peasants never being high on my list of sightseeing priorities, I expected this to be good.

But was it? Hmm… it’s hard to say to be honest. You see, whilst the Museum of the Romanian Peasant is a museum, it was quite unlike any other museum that I’ve ever set foot in. I can see why it won an award because it is so different that it seems to be trying to redefine what a museum is, but the question remains, does its concept of a museum work? To me it was more like a modern art gallery, short on historical detail and heavy on hand-written notes and experiential and artistic detail. Being a bit of a traditionalist as far as museums are concerned, (after all, if a museum can’t be stuck in the past, then what can?), I was left a bit cold by it all but I could see why some might like it.

The kind of people who use words like ‘contemporary’ in everyday conversation.

I now only had a few hours before I had to head airportwards and that rather oversized stomach of mine was rumbling so I indulged in an experience that I could never indulge in at home.

The Caru’ cu Bere is Bucharest’s best-known and oldest eatery. Established in 1879, it has been in its present premises since 1899. A pricy establishment in the heart of the Lipscani District, it is famed for its gorgeous Gothic interior, excellent traditional food and large glasses of beer. In short, it’s the kind of establishment that, in England, I would never dream of going anywhere near, (unless someone else is paying…), but one of the joys of travelling through the world’s cheaper regions is that, whilst one does not live it up all the time and must still economise, on occasions, if one really wants to, one can drink frappé at the Hanul lui Manuc and dine at the Caru’ cu Bere. And that can enhance a trip immeasurably for it takes much of the worry and stress out of travel. If a holiday is a time to relax and let it all go, then how can one truly achieve such an aim pinching the pennies every minute? I remember a trip that I took with my ex-wife to south-western France five years before. At every meal and every hotel we were checking our outgoings anxiously and suffering minor strokes every time the drinks bill was presented to us, and whilst the area where we were travelling was incredible and the food unbelievable, the cost did impact seriously on our enjoyment of the trip. I’d loved to have stayed longer there, to tour around as I had done on this trip, stopping here, dining there and taking the train between the two but at €20 a meal, €50 a night and €5 a beer then you can forget it.

A more practical example of what I am trying to say is when I went to Bolgrad. Not on the itinerary, off the beaten track, I arrived in town with no connections, no accommodation booked and no idea of hotel prices. In Western Europe such a strategy would be unthinkable as there’s always a good chance that the only accommodation available might either bankrupt me or involve a taxi journey that would do the same, (I’m always especially wary by the way, of establishments which describe themselves as ‘boutique’ hotels or guesthouses ‘with character’; they are always stupidly overpriced), but in Bolgrad I knew that whatever the cost, I could afford it and that knowledge provides a great peace of mind.

I knew that I liked the Caru’ cu Bere even before I stepped in since the booking desk on the street was manned by a bevy of extremely pretty and buxom wenches attired in some sort of faux Bavarian beer girl-cum-peasant maiden costume which emphasised artistically their impressive cleavages. Happy indeed to sign up for a table, I was led indoors by one of these Romanian Heidis and shown to a small table upstairs. There however, I discovered that the interior serving staff, whilst also dressed in cheesy peasantesque uniforms, were disappointingly a). mostly male and b). these uniforms were far more modesty both in skirt length and chest coverage. Ho hum. Still, I couldn’t complain too much, for here there was much else to look at; my seat surveyed a glorious Gothic interior which resembled a Hogwarts classroom although, alas, one without Hermione Grainger in it. [2]

ML162   ML163

Caru’ cu Bere: inviting

And there, in that citadel of Romanian tradition and culture, with a fine dose of peasant fare before me, I concluded my Missing Link expedition. As I sat and chomped on my spicy sausage and slurped my soup in a cottage loaf, I mused on how it had been and what I’d learnt.

Boiling things down to their very basics, I had to say that, looking at its original remit, the trip had been a success. My aim had been to close the gap between Konotop and Bucharest and not only had I done that, but I’d done it in a far more interesting fashion that I would have done had not the Ukrainian border police thwarted me a decade previously. Back then I’d simply intended to go straight from Kiev to Bucharest on the overnight train, but this time I’d managed to explore seven living cities, two ghost cities, five sleepy towns, one new country and one new almost-a-country.[3] Not bad for under three weeks.

The highlights had been many, (wandering through the overgrown precincts of Pripyat, the Hotel Cosmos in Chișinău, the trek up to Sihla and chatting with Anton Bremer on the Mocănița to name but a few), whilst the lowlights were few and far between, (I was a little disappointed with Odessa and Tiraspol). Most of all though, the trip had done what all trips should do: it had educated me. I now know more about the Chernobyl Disaster, the Holocaust east of Poland, the Bessarabian Bulgarians, the Gagauz, the Transdniestrian Conflict and Moldovan politics, Romanian Orthodoxy and church architecture, the German minority in the Maramureș and, (more importantly, that Kievean girls are without compare and that the Caru’ cu Bere hostesses wear the best-designed uniform on the planet.

But if I’d gained all of this invaluable knowledge, which questions remained unanswered? Primarily there was the big one that I’d been puzzling over before the trip: Is Romania Balkan? Sat drinking frappe in the Hanul lui Manuc and one could only answer in the affirmative, but riding the rails of the Maramureș and the answer is definitely a negative. Stood in the precincts of the Cetățuia Monastery near to Iași and no definitive answer can be conjured up.

Perhaps the problem was not the answer but the question itself? ‘Balkan’ is a man-made construct and what does it mean exactly? Turkey in Europe? Count out Slovenia. Post-communist world fractured by ethno-nationalism? Greece and Turkey cannot be Balkan then. Byzantium? Parts of Romania definitely don’t qualify. Beyond the cultural reach of the Germans perhaps? The fact is that Romania fits into all of the above categories yet at the same time, does not. The Turks were there but not for very long; post-communist yet, but a unique brand of communism and whilst nationalism has had a role to play since the 1989 Revolution, it has never threatened to rip the state apart, (although it has done with Moldova which is never considered as being Balkan); the Byzantines were only present in parts of the country but they had a wider influence and as for the Germans, they definitely had a huge influence in the north and the west of Romania, but in Wallachia and Moldavia, their presence and cultural imprint has been minimal.

The fact is that such questions can never be definitively answered, but they are worth asking for it is in the process of mulling them over that we can begin to comprehend the world in which we live in and travel through. Which brings us back to the big purpose behind the whole expedition: Why did I so want to fill in the gap between Konotop and Bucharest in the first place?

And the answer to that is simple: because no place is the same as another and travel gives us that unique opportunity to observe how one reality evolves into another. Back in 2002 I learnt how Japan evolves into Moscow; in 2003 I discovered how Bulgaria evolves into Britain. Now I could link up the both of them to see how the Balkans become Central Europe becomes Moldavia becomes the vast wheat plains of Ukraine. I have now seen with my own eyes, heard with my own ears, tasted with my own tongue, smelt with my own nose and touched with my own hands how from Konotop to Kilkenny, Tiraspol to Tokyo, Bucharest to Beersheva and Vișeu de Sus to Van, although we are all different, we are also all the same and our destinies are intertwined far more than we ever realise.

And there aren’t many lessons on Earth as fine and important as that one to learn.

Copyright © 2013, Matthew E. Pointon

Written April 2013, Smallthorne, UK

My Flickr Album of this trip 

1 The other recipients of this prestigious award that I’ve visited are the Ironbridge Gorge Museum, UK (1977), Zuiderzeemuseum, Netherlands (1984), the Museum of Anatolian Civilisations, Turkey (1997), the National Railway Museum, UK (2001), the Chester Beattie Library, Ireland (2002), the Victoria & Albert Museum, UK (2003). All of them, I must say, were exceptional. Aside from the Museum of the Romanian Peasant, only one other Eastern European museum has won the award.

2 I must clarify here, that I am referring to the Hermione of the last three films, not the first five.

3 Respectively: Seven living cities: Kiev, Odessa, Chișinău, Tiraspol, Bendery, Iași, Suceava; two ghost cities: Chernobyl and Pripyat; five towns: Konotop, Bolgrad, Tȃrgo Neamț, Gura Humorlui and Vișeu de Sus; one new country: Moldova and the almost-a-country is of course Transdniestria.

Friday 6 June 2014

The Missing Link: Part 3.9: Bucharest (I)

world-map iasi

Greetings!

As well as updating this blog, this week I’ve also been working hard on the new Uncle Travelling Matt Flickr Site. On it can be found all the photos from my trips described in these pages. Naturally, as it’s a work in progresr, then they aren’t all there yet but you can check out the snaps from Across Asia with a A Lowlander, my 2011 Trans-Balkan Expedition and this trip from Konotop to Bucharest. Enjoy!

Keep travelling!

Uncle Travelling Matt

Links to all parts of the travelogue

Introduction

Ukraine

1.1: Konotop

1.2: Chernobyl and Pripyat

1.3: Kiev

1.4: Kiev to Odessa

1.5: Odessa

1.6: Bolgrad

Moldova and Transdniestra

2.1: Bolgrad to Chisinau

2.2: Chisinau (I)

2.3: Tiraspol and Bender

2.4: Chisinau (II)

Romania

3.1: Iasi (I)

3.2: Iasi (II)

3.3: Suceava

3.4: The Painted Monasteries of Bucovina

3.5: Targu Neamt, Agapia and Sihla

3.6: Suceava to Viseu de Sus

3.7: The Mocanita and Viseu de Sus

3.8: Viseu de Sus to Bucharest

3.9: Bucharest (I)

3.10: Bucharest (II)

My Flickr Album of this trip

MLM12

Bucharest (I)

Bucharest’s Garǎ de Nord is an old friend. It is where the bus from the airport dropped me off on my first-ever visit to Eastern Europe fourteen years before and it was from there that I took a train onwards, across the Danube and into Bulgaria, the country that was to become my first love in travel. It was also my point of entry and exit for the Romanian capital back in 2003 and the station that I should have arrived into on my 2002 trip had the Konotop Constabulary not had other ideas. Now though, it is more than just an old friend; now the Garǎ de Nord is the place where the Missing Link was closed, the spot from which my travels spanning three continents spread out like the tentacles of an octopus, (albeit one with four legs – a tetrapus?), south over the Danube to a mesh of Balkan journeys and then two legs, the first from Piraeus, across the Mediterranean to Israel and thence Egypt, the second through Turkey to Tbilisi; then there’s north-west, across Central Europe to the Netherlands and thence Britain and eventually Ireland, and then finally east, across the link that is missing no more, to Konotop, Moscow, Central Asia, China, South Korea and then Japan. [1] 

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The Garǎ de Nord is a nice station. Not sumptuously ornate or architecturally splendid like Budapest Keleti or Amsterdam Centraal, but pleasant in a more low-key fashion, light and airy, and a worthy place to link up one’s transcontinental travels. Mind you, she’s looking a lot smarter these days; sometime since EU ascension she’s undergone a makeover and is now spick and span with facilities and signage worthy of her Western European counterparts. Back in 1998 she was dusty, grimy, difficult to navigate and the tickets issued were either the old card Edmondson one – a British design unchanged since the 19th century – or for the international trains, huge handwritten slips purchased from a special bureau. Nowadays it’s the standard computer printouts for everything, progress I suppose, but definitely at the expense of character.

It still being extremely early, I decided to walk to my hotel of choice, the Midland Youth Hostel 2, a distance of around a kilometre, through Bucharest’s dusty streets. Well, to be honest, that’s not quite true. My accommodation of choice is never a youth hostel as I can’t abide staying in dormitories, but the prices of the hotel rooms in Bucharest are considerably higher than elsewhere in Romania and my funds, this being the very end of the trip and accommodation costs having been much higher than anticipated in Ukraine and Moldova too, I decided to slum it. Well, one is a real traveller you know…

To be fair, my previous experience of Bucharest’s hotel scene did not inspire much confidence. Back in 1998 I’d stayed in a reasonable enough place close to the railway station, except that upon leaving by the reception desk, a man who’d been chatting with the receptionist had asked where I was from and upon learning that it was the UK, had asked if I had any British money as he’d like to take a look at some. Naively, I’d shown him what was in my wallet and by a clever sleight-of-hand trick he swapped my £40 for a handful of worthless lei and I only noticed what had happened when I’d opened up my wallet in the station. [2] And back in 2003 the place that I’d chosen had been so awful that it was the main factor in the Sibling and I risking the option of a homestay when arriving in Braşov. No, all things considered, maybe the option of a youth hostel was not such a stupid one after all?

The walk to the Midland Youth Hostel 2 was, surprisingly, quite pleasant. I say “surprisingly” because it was made carrying a very heavy rucksack on my back and a lighter but still annoying backpack (my hand luggage) on my front. I tend to pack light these days, but as trips progress my packs get heavier and heavier as I acquire trinkets, tacky snow globes (for the Sibling who collects them), books about Ceauşescu, DVDs and COGO sets for the son and heir, so by the time I hot Bucharest, lugging my baggage around was not much fun at all.[3] But no, despite the bags, it was not unpleasant strolling through the streets of a city that appears like a faded Paris without the Gallic pretensions and prices, towards a grand building that was obviously much classier than it is today but now finds itself in a rundown area that is fast becoming fashionable again.

My first task after checking in was to get the receptionist to make a phone call and book me on a tour. Back in 1998 there had been one sight that I’d been desperate to see. To be fair, back then, there was only one thing that I really knew about Bucharest and that was this particularly mammoth sight, Ceauşescu’s greatest folly, the House of the People. [4] It is the second-largest building on earth, a monument to the ego of the former president and I’d ogled it with awe in both 1998 and 2003, but that was all. There were tours around, but you needed to book them in advance and I just wasn’t that organised. However, after purchasing and reading a book all about it when I was in Iaşi, I promised myself that I would not miss out this time around. So it was that the call was made and I took up the next available slot, 12:45, which gave me several hours in which to do a little shopping.

Ok, let’s start with a few facts. Ceauşescu’s House of the People is the second-largest building in the world in surface area, (the Pentagon in Washington DC is first), and the third in volume. It stands 85m high and has a nuclear bunker underneath that is 20m deep; it covers 330,000m² and to build it more than 700 architects and three shifts of 20,000 workers toiled for twenty-four hours a day for five years.

Despite all of that though, even today it isn’t finished. What is complete mind you, beggars belief, from the 2.5 tonne chandelier in the Human Rights Hall, (an ironic name that, considering the regime that built it), to the fact that when it was built, powering the building consumed a day’s electricity supply for the entire city in just four hours!

I give all these figures in the hope that they somehow enable you to comprehend the sheer size and scope of the project. They probably fail in that task though; this is simply one of those things that you just have to see for yourself.

So, that was the facts, now the opinions, and regarding the House of the People, there are no shortages of those floating around.

Most are negative. They talk of the immense cost – both human and cultural – that it exacted on the Romanian people. Ancient churches and neighbourhoods were levelled to build it; people starved and hospitals went short of medicine to pay for it. How, therefore, can a building drenched in such misery from the outset, be anything but awful?

They point to the mastermind behind it all: an ignorant peasant with no artistic or architectural sensibilities whatsoever. His vision was the vision of a nouveau riche oligarch – he thought that bigger = better, that gold = good taste. Plus he came to the construction site regularly, interfering, demanding that this staircase and that hall be remodelled according to his latest whim. And the result? An incongruous hotchpotch of styles, no overall clarity of vision save for lashings of Stalinist socialist classical triumphalism, a style that was unfashionable even in the communist world , more suited to the 1950s than the 1980s. So strong were these voices that after the Revolution, there were strong calls to tear the whole sorry edifice down.

But they didn’t tear it down; it still stands proudly today and instead is the current home of the parliament and the place where all foreign dignitaries are welcomed. It has also recently become home to a modern art museum, (not sure what Ceauşescu would have made of that), and I believe that it stays standing because in amongst the crescendo of negativity – alas, such a feature of post-communist Eastern Europe – there is a still small voice which pleads, “Look, d’you know what; this thing ain’t so bad after all! In fact, step back for a minute and examine it objectively; it’s actually got quite a lot going for it…”

Well, that and the fact that it would cost an absolute fortune to demolish and what on earth would they do with the vast wasteland left over at the end?

But no, I mean what I said, it ain’t that bad. I mean, look at it this way. It was built in the 1980s for God’s sake and can you think of any good buildings anywhere in the world constructed during that sorry decade? It was the era of dull design and dodgy construction practices. In the time of the Barratt Home, awful office blocks like the NatWest tower or clever crap like the Lloyds Building in London which age worse than Brigitte Bardot, then the House of the People actually stands out as a beacon of taste and purpose. It was bold and arrogant enough to point to a brave new world yet at the same time had respect for tradition in its styles. And it also represented well the nation that built it for all the materials used are Romanian [5] and all the architects were Romanians. And if it is a veritable hotchpotch of styles then surely, does no country in Europe match that description more than Romania?

ML153The House of the People: big

But the House of the People was not the full extent of the Conducător’s vision. Like I said before, Ceauşescu visited North Korea in 1971 and came back inspired. Most of the (admittedly few) tourists who head Pyongyang way go for a dose of car crash tourism, a chance to ogle at how bad things can get, maybe taking back a Kim Il Sung clock as a souvenir, but not the peasant turned president who instead watched the troops parade past Kim Il Sung Square and thought that this was as good, not as bad, as it gets and at the end wanted more than a quirky timepiece, he wanted to take the whole city home.

And that being impossible, he did the next best thing: he built his own.

Again let me hit you with a few facts. One sixth of Bucharest was demolished to make way for the Pyongyang-in-Romania that the Conducător envisaged. The resulting masterpiece/disaster (*delete according to your architectural preferences) covers 500 hectares and is roughly 1km wide and 5km long. All the damage caused by the bombing of World War II and the 1977 earthquake only equates to 18% of the destruction rained on Bucharest by Ceauşescu’s wrecking balls and bulldozers which levelled countless historical buildings, (250 hectares of the new city lies on what were considered to be historical districts) including churches, monasteries and synagogues and even a statue attributed to Gustave Eiffel. And the end product – well, not quite the end product since the 1989 Revolution intervened before it could be properly finished – has been christened ‘Ceauşima’, a contraction of ‘Ceauşescu’s Hiroshima’ by the locals. Wanna know why? Check out the urban wastelands of bulldozed localities and unfinished apartment blocks left by the convulsions of 1989 and you’ll soon understand.

I took the Metro, (another of the Conducător’s megaprojects – this one actually useful), to Piaţa Unirii, the vast plaza at the heart of the Centrul Civic (the official title of Ceauşima), situated on the grand Boulevard of the Victory of Socialism, (now unimaginatively renamed Blvd. Unirii), dead straight, 3.5km in length and deliberately half a metre wider than the Champs Elysées. Flanked on all sides bar one by the massive grey monoliths of Ceauşescu’s vision, I headed for the largest of them all, the Unirea Shopping Centre, now festooned with huge advertising hoardings that must make the Conducător turn in his grave, this was conceived after he took a visit to New York, shopped in Macy’s and then decided he’d build his own grand department store right in the heart of Bucharest.

A department store it may have been conceived as but now it’s just a plain old shopping centre, full of smaller units selling overpriced capitalist temptations. I headed to that temple of commerce because I had a job to do. The son and heir had requested that I bring him back a Spiderman T-shirt from my wanderings but where does one buy such items? I guessed that Unirea would be as good a place as any to start, so I scoured the fashionable stores of the modern Romania before locating a suitable specimen and then, that done, retreating to a coffee shop overlooking the square to recover from that most harrowing of all the world’s traumatic ordeals: clothes shopping.

ML154 Unirea Shopping Centre: Kim Il Sung meets Macy’s

I took a walk along the banks of the concrete-clad Dâmboviţa River to the House of the People. The river was, like systemisation and the Centrul Civic, another of the Conducător’s not-quite-realised projects. His dream this time was to link the river – which is little more than a trickle only a couple of metres deep – up to the Danube with a shipping canal and thus turn Bucharest into a grand seaport with great liners docking in front of the House of the People. These days though, there’s nothing larger than rowing boats to be found bobbing on its surface.

One sight well worth checking out on its banks is the glorious Justice Palace which lies just within the boundaries of the redevelopment zone but got spared and so predates its neighbours by almost a century. Built 1890-5, this glorious Gothic pile is a reminder of why Bucharest was once referred to as the ‘Paris of the East’ for it would look more at home in Haussmann’s redeveloped city than in does in Ceauşescu’s.

ML155 The Dâmboviţa River with the Justice Palace on the right

The House of the People was, as I expected, one of those sights which can only be referred to as ‘unmissable’. It impresses primarily by its size: enormous rooms with ornate decorations, like Chatsworth on acid, which is not a bad metaphor when you think of it for Britain’s stately homes were, in many respects, the Casa Poporuluis of their day, where omnipotent local tyrants could reshape their landscape with virtually unlimited resources and with no need to take into account the wishes or needs of the folk who lived thereabouts.

And like those 17th and 18th landowners’ retreats, the House of the People bears the stamp of the dictator who oversaw it, including his quirks. One of these was an obsessive loathing of air conditioning which he believed made him ill, (a man after my own heart indeed – anyone know of a poverty-stricken country looking for a dictator?), and so despite its size and the crushing Romanian summer heat, there is no air conditioning whatsoever in the House of the People and instead the building is cooled by an elaborate network of ducts and grilles which is actually extremely effective.

ML156 Chatsworth on acid

As well as buying a ticket for the tour, one is also required to purchase an exorbitantly-priced photography permit should you wish to record your experience for posterity. I refused point-blank to fund such daylight robbery but photographed anyway, surreptitiously at first and then, when it became clear that the rest of the group were doing it and our guide didn’t care, brazenly. But to be fair, my photos hardly did justice to the vast and sumptuous chambers that we were shown around.

The highlight of it all was being led onto the balcony which overlooks the ramrod-straight Boulevard of the Victory of Socialism as it disappears off into the summer haze. It was an incredible sight, worthy of a dictator far grander than the Conducător and as I stood there I imagined him also standing on that same spot, waving at the adoring masses before him, truly believing that he was beloved by them all, that he was the Saviour of the Nation and that the Victory of Socialism that his great avenue proclaimed had, at last, truly arrived.

ML157 A wannabe dictator on the balcony of the Casa Poporului

Except that he never did stand there to wave at his people. The 1989 Revolution came before he had a chance to and whilst during that Winter of Discontent he did appear on a balcony before a crowd of a hundred thousand, it was in nearby Piaţa Revoluţei instead, and in place of the adulation he craved, he received boos and shouts of “Murderer!” and “Timişoara!”, (where he’d recently ordered the army in to crush a demonstration). Alarmed, he reacted in the same fashion and the scene soon descended into a massacre in which over a thousand protesters were killed. The very next day he tried again to address the crowd from that balcony but this time he failed completely and was forced to flee the city by helicopter to Târgovişte where he and his wife, the hated Elena, were arrested. Three days later they were tried by a kangaroo court and executed by a firing squad and the 1990 Revolution was over.

After exploring Ceauşescu’s masterpiece I then headed down to see one of the victims of the remodelling of Bucharest. Whilst the Centrul Civic project destroyed over twenty churches, a few were moved rather than demolished, the entire building being placed on rollers and shifted several hundred metres out of the way of the new developments. And so it is that, set rather incongruously behind some 1980s apartment blocks, one can find the glorious Biserica Mihai Voda (1594) which was shifted some 294m by the redevelopers. Once part of a large monastery complex that was seen as the symbol of the city, (hence the building getting saved), this exquisite church was well-worth the visit and looks as if it has always sat where it is now. The aspect that I enjoyed the most however, (though I wonder how it managed to survive the ravages of Ceauşescu), were some murals of important national figures of the 1930s including the Fascist dictator Ion Antonescu.

ML158 ML159

The Mihai Voda Church and its Antonescu mural

I crossed the Dâmboviţa River to the Lipscani Quarter, the part of old Bucharest that survived Ceauşescu’s megalomaniac meddling. I’d wandered through it before in 1998 and been distinctly unimpressed; an area of dusty, pot-holed streets lined with ramshackle, patched-up buildings, but this time it was quite different. Recently renovated, the Lipscani Quarter is now buzzing and vibrant; restored 19th century buildings house fashionable cafés and pulsating bars and the energy of New Bucharest saturates the air. My favourite spot was the beautifully-restored Hanul lui Manuc, an incredible han (inn) dating from 1808, built to shelter travellers and act as a warehouse and trading place, it gets its name from its original owner, an Armenian named Emanuel Mârzaian, better known by his Turkish title of Manuc-bej.

Although only dating from the first decade of the 19th century, the design and layout of the han – a courtyard surrounded by buildings with a balconied upper storey – date from much earlier and it reminded me immediately of Sarajevo’s Morića Han  which is over a century older. But that should come as no surprise, for the han is essentially an Islamic institution, roadside inns built to facilitate trade and protect travellers and pilgrims, often supported by a waqf (Islamic religious endowment), they are also referred to as ‘caravanserais’ (literally: palaces for caravans) and can be found wherever the ottomans and Arabs once held sway. I’ve been to many across Turkey and the Balkans but this was by far the finest that I’ve seen in Europe. As well as being pleasant, the Hanul lui Manuc was also a reminder – of which I’d seen very few so far on my trip – that the Ottomans had ruled here once, for wherever the Ottomans were, both hans and Armenians followed. This was a very Balkan corner of Bucharest and a cultural world away from the very Mitteleuropean Maramureş that I’d been in the previous day.

ML160Hanul lui Manuc: Balkan Bucharest

By this time the lack of sleep caused by my journey from that place was beginning to catch up on me so I made my way back to the Midland Youth Hostel 2 to catch up on a few hours before venturing out again after sunset. And it was imperative that I did head out that night for England were playing, this time taking on Sweden in a make-or-break game that would see which of the two progressed out of the group and into the knockout stages of Euro 2012.

I selected an Irish bar which I thought might have a good atmosphere and was not disappointed, watching the game with an English ex-pat and his Swedish colleague. It was, quite frankly, the best England performance that I’d witnessed since 2002, (although that isn’t saying a great deal…), and when they ran out 3-2 winners I was a happier guy than my drinking companion with Viking blood who left pretty quickly. After that I fell into conversation with another Englishman, a travelling salesman who’d just come back from Bulgarian where he’d been selling industrial lasers to a company in Gabrovo that produce parts for Ikea, (£80,000 a pop for the lasers). I asked him what he thought of the little country that I love so well and he confessed to being most impressed with it, particularly the women whom he described as being ”the most beautiful I’ve ever seen mate.” Three weeks before, I would have agreed with him whole-heartedly, but after checking out Kiev I could no longer do so. Nonetheless, the man had taste and was an excellent drinking companion and so it was that I had a few more before finally staggering off to my dormitory bunk.

Next part: Bucharest (II)

My Flickr Album of this trip

1 Of course, the Garǎ de Nord is only symbolically the place where I closed the gap; in actual fact it was eliminated sometime during the night at Braşov where the Baia Mare line, (along which I was travelling), meets up with the Bucharest to Arad line along which the Sibling and I sped nine years before.

2 Older and wiser now, I’ve had countless people try the same ruse on me since and just laughed at them every time, so, in retrospect, perhaps not too expensive a lesson.

3 Not much fun for me although, (and this is no joke), some people walk about with ridiculously heavy baggage as a hobby!!! It’s called ‘yomping’ apparently, was inspired by the Royal Marines who trekked across East Falkland during the 1982 Falklands War, (YOMP is an acronym for ‘Your Own Marching Pace’), when they surprised the Argentineans and retook the island. I have an ex-kibbutz comrade who, (judging by her Facebook page at least), seems to do it every weekend. Mad, plain mad!

4 Since 1989 officially renamed as ‘The Palace of the Parliament’.

5 Save for a set of doors donated by Ceauşescu’s old friend, the Congolese dictator, Mobutu.

Sunday 1 June 2014

The Missing Link: Part 3.8: Viseu de Sus to Bucharest

world-map viseu

Greetings!

And finally, as we draw near to the end of this travelogue, that missing link which gave it its name, is closed. It’s a satisfying feeling, linking up two very disparate places, two alien realities evolving from one to the other. That’s why I always prefer overland travel and that’s why closing this gap was always going to be so very important to me. I’d lived in Japan and knew that reality well; I’ve lived also in Greece and Bulgaria and Israel, not to mention my home, the UK. But how does one become the other, how do the pieces of the jigsaw fit together? Overland trips like this help no end and I genuinely believe that there is far more value to a trip like this than five or six jet in and jet out ones. So, the missing link is closed. Well, that missing link, though there are several more. What about joining up my journeys around South east Asia and my time living in Vietnam with China and the Japan to UK axis? Hmm… let’s get looking at those ticket prices…

Keep travelling!

Uncle Travelling Matt

Links to all parts of the travelogue

Introduction

Ukraine

1.1: Konotop

1.2: Chernobyl and Pripyat

1.3: Kiev

1.4: Kiev to Odessa

1.5: Odessa

1.6: Bolgrad

Moldova and Transdniestra

2.1: Bolgrad to Chisinau

2.2: Chisinau (I)

2.3: Tiraspol and Bender

2.4: Chisinau (II)

Romania

3.1: Iasi (I)

3.2: Iasi (II)

3.3: Suceava

3.4: The Painted Monasteries of Bucovina

3.5: Targu Neamt, Agapia and Sihla

3.6: Suceava to Viseu de Sus

3.7: The Mocanita and Viseu de Sus

3.8: Viseu de Sus to Bucharest

3.9: Bucharest (I)

3.10: Bucharest (II)

My Flickr Album of this trip

MLM12

Journey: Vişeu de Sus to Bucharest

I took a taxi down to Vişeu de Jos and spent a couple of hours writing up my diary and ‘Interval’, the story which had formed in my mind during the stop at Fiad on the journey up.

The train back down the valley to Salva was the same rumbling blue diesel which had brought me up. I took my place in an empty compartment only to be shooed out by an annoying peasant woman who had apparently reserved a ticket for that particular seat, the only reserved ticket it seemed, on the entire train. I moved on to an adjacent compartment which was inhabited by an inebriated yokel who was most jovial and convivial and kept plying me with his homemade liquor which he drank directly from an old Coke bottle whilst cadging cigarettes off me. I christened him ‘A-ous!’ since that was what he kept on saying to me. The conductor, who found him hilarious, asked if A-ous wasn’t bothering me and whilst I assured him that I could cope with it, I also took the opportunity to enquire exactly what “A-ous!” means.

“Listen to me!” he replied.

ML147 A-ous!

The train that I boarded at Salva was a lot swisher than the one that I’d just alighted from, for it was an overnight sleeper express with deep red coaches which boasted interiors of faux wood panelling. I’d been on one of these before, back in 2003 with the Sibling, when we’d taken an overnight train from Braşov to Budapest and whilst passing through the Mediaeval villages of Transylvania had witnessed the most incredible thunderstorm erupt over the peaks of the Carpathians.

It was good to recall that trip for sometime that night whilst I was sound asleep in my bunk, the Missing Link between my Asiatic and European travels would finally be closed and a continuous line could be drawn from Toyama, my home in Japan, to my current home in Stoke-on-Trent, (or alternatively, to Luxor in Egypt, Tbilisi in Georgia or Cork in Ireland).

But the majority of that long thin line consists of three trips: the first, as I’ve already discussed, was my epic ‘Long March’ from Toyama to Moscow with the Lowlander and thence onwards with the Sibling to Bulgaria until it ended in ignominious failure in a police cell on Konotop railway station. The bit onwards from there, the last piece of the jigsaw, was of course this trip, the 2012 bridging of the gap, the Konotop to Bucharest ‘Missing Link’ but the final part of that line was that 2003 ‘Trans-Europe Express’ trip from Varna in Bulgaria to Zierikzee in the Netherlands with the Sibling again my travelling companion.

Then we had crossed over into Romania from Ruse in Bulgaria to Giurgiu on the mighty Friendship Bridge, the furthest crossing downstream over the Danube, then onwards to Bucharest where we’d stayed the night.

That was not my first trip to the Romanian capital of course; I’d flown in and out of it in 1998, (on my first-ever trip to Bulgaria; back then it was much cheaper than flying into Sofia), and checked out the Village Museum, (another skansen), the Arc d’Triumphe, (modelled after the one in Paris and built to celebrate the unification of Romania), and Ceauşescu’s much-maligned – but in my mind, rather impressive – remodelling of the south end of the city centre. So, in 2003 Bucharest was nothing new, a dusty, poverty-stricken metropolis with little of note to see save for a half-finished copy of Pyongyang.

But after Bucharest we’d taken a three-hour train journey through the impoverished villages of Wallachia and into the lush green folds of the Carpathians to Braşov. I recall chatting to a young lady in our compartment who told us that times were so hard under Ceauşescu that they were even short of bread to eat, and of a young monk who came down the corridor stopping at every compartment with a collecting tin, saving to rebuild a church, an act which far from impressed our young travelling companion who thought that there were far more pressing causes deserving of her cash.

At Braşov we were approached by locals offering us homestay rooms and, for the first time ever, I took one up. It proved to be an excellent decision since we ended up sharing an atmospheric room in the back of a traditional house near to the old city owned by a guy called Gheorghe who hoped to become a mover and shaker in the city’s embryonic backpacker trade and who turned out to be the perfect host both in terms of his knowledge and his friendliness.

ML148 The Sibling in our Braşov homestay

We both loved Braşov, the picture-postcard perfect fairy tale city of the Carpathians, surrounded by stout walls and wooded slopes. We wandered into her Black Church, across Piaţa Sfatului, (which I half-expected to fill up with porridge from the Magic Porridge Pot), along Str. Storii, one of Europe’s narrowest streets, (and is that not the Pied Piper leading the rats along it…?), and up Mt. Tampa, (where I’m sure I saw Rip van Winkle asleep under a tree).

ML149 Braşov

Braşov is a magical place and made even more so by the surreal tour offered by our host: for the princely sum of $1 we were driven to the outskirts of the new city in his Dacia where we parked up by a row of bins and then watched in amazement as wild bears descended from the woods to scavenge in those bins only metres away from the watching crowd. A unique experience indeed, although the sight of those grizzly mothers with their cute cubs did mar our enjoyment of the meal that we ate in the bear meat restaurant the next day!

But not only was Braşov incredible, so too were the places nearby. We headed out on the bus to the cheese-fest of Bran Castle, (billed as Dracula’s Castle, although in fact Vlad Ţepeş had nothing whatsoever to do with it), and the far more dramatic Râşnov Castle, (also no Dracula connections), and then on the train to the stunningly beautiful Şighişoara whose Dracula links are genuine – Vlad Ţepeş was born there – before we finally moved onwards towards Hungary on that sleeper train during that storm of storms which could only ever have occurred in the domain of the evil Count Dracula.

ML150 Râşnov Castle

ML151 Şighişoara

And so, as the night closed in, I reminisced, drank beers bought from the carriage attendant and finished off ‘Interval’ before finally switching off the light and settling down, safe in the knowledge that, when I awoke, the Missing Link would be missing no more.

 Next part: Bucharest (I)

My Flickr Album of this trip