The Man Who Cycled the World, by Mark Beaumont

In 2007-08, Swindon-born Mark Beaumont circumnavigated the world by bicycle in 195 days, beginning and ending in Paris.  He had travelled unsupported over 18,000 miles through 20 countries and broken the Guinness world record by 81 days.  Having lost the record in 2010, he regained it in 2017 with a supported circumnavigation which took less than 79 days, a record he still holds.

The Man Who Cycled the World is an account of his first trip cycling/circling the world, published in 2009.  It includes a few pages on the leg through eastern Romania (pp. 97-101) on days 16-19 of his journey, crossing the border from Ukraine. Entering Romania was a process he found easier than getting into and out of Ukraine, a country that for some reason he thought was not part of Europe.  The book is really an amplified logbook with the emphasis on the bicycle and his physical state rather than the places he passed through (‘Don’t ask me what Ukraine looks like,’ he says, ‘as I was staring two metres in front of my wheel all day’).

He seems to have seen more of Romania, which he found attractive: ‘great roads, beautiful villages and scenic rolling hills.’  As soon as he arrived, while studying his map a local shook hands and said ‘welcome to Romania!’  His first stop was Fălticeni and to get there he cycled along roads shared with horse-drawn carts, shepherds in the fields.  Arriving in town and needing an hotel, he asked a police officer in a car who said ‘follow me’ and escorted Beaumont 2km to one (albeit the hotelier was ‘grumpy’).  Beaumont says he was ‘impressed’ by Romania.

The riding was generally straightforward to the town of Roman, though he got lost in Bacău, and he camped in a field near Adjud.  The following day was through more industrial areas, reaching Buzău in the afternoon.  At Râmnicu Sărat he stopped for some supplies and a man standing next to him at the counter took them from him and paid, mentioning something about a bicicletă.  He finished the day in a field near Urziceni.  The temperature was rising and he was conscious of saddle sores.

The next day he passed by Slobozia.  He was feeling weak, having had a small breakfast as he had run out of Romanian currency, but he pushed on to the Bulgarian border.  Unfortunately the border control he arrived at was not open so he was directed to go back up the road and cross the Danube by ferry.  He did not have the fare, however the attendant waved him on to what was essentially a floating platform and he crossed free of charge.  He was close to the border, and entered Bulgaria, en route to Turkey and beyond, in less than a minute.

In the section of photographs there is one of a horse-drawn cart in Romania with the caption ‘iconic images of a world I would have loved to explore more, but the clock never stopped.’

The Last Hundred Days, by Patrick McGuinness

Patrick McGuinness’s first novel The Last Hundred Days, published in 2011, was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and made it onto the Man Booker longlist.  Its unnamed English narrator arrives in Bucharest in 1989, at the tail end of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s regime, and becomes an eyewitness to history.  Despite not having turned up to the job interview in England and having dropped out of higher education without obtaining a degree, he has been offered a job teaching at a university in Bucharest.

His unlovely parents dead and with no ties, he heads off to a country socially and ideologically entirely unlike his own, though the fat cats do well under both systems, and a shameless trickle-down system of corruption thrives in Romania (he is unembarrassedly ripped off at the airport by customs officers who pillage his belongings in front of him with the laconic explanation ‘tax’).  He is assigned the flat of his academic predecessor, the mysterious Dr (or rather ‘Dr’) Belanger, who has left all his possessions, even his clothes, behind.  Belanger, off screen for nearly the whole book, casts a long shadow over the narrator’s life.  The unorthodox job offer may seem an implausible beginning to the novel, but in the surreal world of 1989 Bucharest it comes to feel unremarkable.

The narrator falls in with another expat Briton, Leo O'Heix, also a lecturer at the university, who had wangled him the job apparently on the grounds he would be easily manipulated.  A bogus degree certificate is provided for the newcomer so he is good to go as a lecturer (a doctorate costs extra, an investment Belanger presumably made).  The new boy has no qualms about accepting fraudulent academic credentials, nor, as soon as he arrives at work, in acceding to a ‘request’ from the head of department to provide a reference to study abroad for a student he has never met.  He is compromised morally from the start, but then compromise underpins daily life in Bucharest.  You do wonder about the state of Romanian education at that time if someone without a degree could just stroll in and start teaching, but on this evidence not much teaching was going on anyway.

Leo is in fact the star of the novel around whom much of the action revolves.  He devotes little time to his day job, instead dabbling in the black market, as cynical about daily life in Bucharest as everybody else.  On top of his other activities, legitimate but mostly otherwise, he is writing a book: initially commissioned to produce a guidebook to Bucharest, its sturdy old buildings are being torn down so quickly and replaced by shoddy blocks that he cannot keep up, and like some crazed Walter Benjamin he engages in a futile psychogeographic race to record Bucharest in his The City of Lost Walks even as it disappears around him.  At the same time he tries to save what he can from destruction, part of a network spiriting artefacts away from the bulldozers.  A church’s rood screen may end up in a minister’s flat, but at least it is preserved. 

Even the best of us can have mixed motives, and Leo is no exception.  Despite his boorish, frequently self-serving, ways Leo has a sincere affection for his adopted city.  He is scornful of Romanian politics, but equally scornful of the British diplomatic corps which turns a blind eye to the regime’s dark side in the name of good relations and business opportunities, trying to insulate itself by recreating a small slice of home (down to a pub) yet not immune to the corruption infecting the rest of the population.

On the surface the regime seems stable despite shortages and general ossification, but there are murmurings across Eastern Europe as communist governments lose their grip on power.  Through Leo, the narrator comes into contact with a wide cross-section of Bucharest life.  He has a brief relationship with the daughter of a senior party official, but a more fulfilling one with a doctor at the local hospital.  At one point he is briefly involved in a people-smuggling ring trying to help individuals reach the west, an expedition ending in tragedy.   Then he meets Sergiu Trofim, a once senior figure who had known Ceaușescu and Stalin but is now on the social periphery, and agrees to help Sergiu write his memoirs – or rather real memoirs dishing the dirt, rather than the sanitised party-approved version he is being obliged to produce, the unexpurgated typescript to be smuggled out and published in Paris.

In these various interactions the narrator quickly finds people are not always what they seem, trust is a precious commodity, and life can be disconcertingly arbitrary.  Through his eyes we are given a convincing overview of what living in a repressive society does to the psyche.  McGuinness draws out the soul-sapping ossification and apathy of daily life, showing that routinisation kills the spirit more effectively than naked repression.  Propaganda everybody sees through is pumped out; nobody believes the statistics but everybody goes along with the deception because it is the only way to survive.  The prevailing mood is one of ennui, or ‘totalitarian boredom’.  You never know who might inform on you, so the best policy is self-surveillance.  In such ways one becomes inured to the discomforts and paranoia, even finding comfort in surveillance, thereby internalising the state’s repression (something Orwell had put his finger on).

For much of the novel the focus is on the narrator, Leo and their circle.  Only in the final third does it shift to the wider political currents, an edifice crumbling like the jerry-built buildings infesting the capital.  The reader brings historical knowledge of the outcome, but from the inside the slow yet accelerating slide to the fall is initially so imperceptible it barely registers.  Despite the book covering the last few months of the Ceaușescu government, for most of that period it must have felt secure despite the injustices and economic stagnation.

The reader knows how it is going to end, and an air of inevitability hangs over the progress towards Christmas Day.  It is part of McGuinness’s skill that he can elicit sympathy for the way the deposed dictators (for it was a joint enterprise with Elena Ceaușescu, and she bore most responsibility for the bloodshed in the final days when Nicolae was in Iran) were treated and summarily executed without due process, rather than glee at them having received their just deserts.

However, will the new politicians be any better than the old ones, leaving aside that many of the old ones have retained their hold on power?  As Leo ruefully notes, ‘new brothel, same old whores….’  Neither Leo nor the narrator has anything to go back to England for, and despite having their visas revoked by the defunct regime, the novel ends with them in Bucharest, looking forward to the future, however things pan out.  For all its faults, there was something about the place which would not let them go, and now it was not the Securitate.

We are never sure how much of this is autobiographical – the narrator certainly seems to rub shoulders with powerful and influential people in ways that seem far-fetched in an Englishman newly arrived – but the observations of Bucharest feel authentic.  McGuinness was in the country at the time, and as he was born in 1968 he was the same age roughly as the protagonist.  It is difficult, however, to believe there is much autobiography in the novel, apart from eyewitness descriptions of living conditions and the events leading up to the fall of Ceaușescu.

There is a tension between the realistic depiction of Romanian life and the implausibility of the acceptance of the narrator into these social structures in a society which McGuinness emphasises was deeply paranoid.  For all his protestations that he is being pushed to the margins, the narrator seems to find himself, thanks to Leo, in the thick of things with no effort, whereas in practice he would have been frozen out.  He even manages an unlikely, albeit brief, relationship with a party princess, putting him in touch with her father who happens to be the deputy interior minister, despite possessing little to commend him to her; and this while she is still in love with his predecessor, the aforementioned Belanger, a gangster who had been living in exile in Belgrade but who returns to take advantage of opportunities opening up in post-Ceaușescu Romania.

In such ways the narrator, in a very short time, smoothly manages the transition from foreigner to insider.  In a conspiratorial society, the fewer the conspirators the better, for reasons of personal safety, and I could not see in whose interest it was to have him around.  In real life he would doubtless have been on a plane back to England within a month, having annoyed everybody and been useless at his job, but unlike Leo having no leverage with which to retain it.  Most probably, even though he has been in the city several years, Leo would have fared little better in terms of access to influential individuals, however many bribes he offered.  These outsiders are effectively ciphers for McGuinness’s exploration of the dying regime, but ring false.

The World's Greatest Railway Journeys: Hungary and Romania

Format: DVD

Rail Away APWDVD 1097

According to the box, this DVD is one of a series presenting over 50 worldwide railway journeys.  It covers Hungary and Romania, sadly devoting a mere 25 minutes to each.  Both films are dated 1997 and display modest production values.  The films are not solely about the railways; in fact they take a while to get to the topic, instead devoting time to scene-setting in the respective capitals.

That may annoy the railway buffs, as may the fact these are not specialised examinations of the railway system of either country but are essentially travelogues, with the emphasis on the journey rather than the means (though naturally there is some information on the trains).  For those not of such a persuasion, they may be pleased there is nothing of a technical nature and the commentary is pitched at a general audience.

The narration is by an American, and I found his pronunciation grated after a while.  The musical accompaniment is off-the-shelf, which reduces costs but is a shame when the country’s music could have been employed to great effect in enhancing the atmosphere.  The tone of the narration tends to be patronising, with much about the quaint old-fashioned way of life in Eastern Europe.  The box’s blurb quotes part of the narrator’s introduction to the Romanian leg:

‘Romania, a country on the borderline of the Middle and East Europe. By rail we travel from the capital Bucharest to the heart of the country. In a way travelling through Romania is like travelling through time. At places where the rails cut through the country, we see pictures that in the West belong to the past. We'll visit the centres of Bucharest and Brasov. With their little bricks and old-fashioned houses these cities provide romantic scenery.’

This is an all-too common way of describing Romania, in terms of picturesque primitivism.  The Hungarian film covers two separate journeys starting in Budapest, whereas the Romanian one focuses on a single journey from Bucharest, travelling north to Ploiești*, Sinaia, Brașov, and ending at Vatra Dornei, a distance of about 265 miles.

There is a limit to what can be included in under half an hour but it still possible to admire the countryside, even if the commentary is at times frustratingly bland about the sights along the way.  Little time is spent on Bucharest compared to the amount the Hungarian film spends on Budapest as there seems to be more to see outside the capital in Romania.

Naturally much has happened since 1997 – not least admission to the EU – so the Romanian film is not representative of the current state of the railway system, but it is still a useful introduction to that particular route.  One cannot help feeling, though, it was a missed opportunity to explore the country’s rail network more broadly, and enthusiasts are probably going to feel short-changed.  Both films are available on Youtube.  This is the Romanian episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTyQnspr5bc.

* By chance I discovered today that the Romanian artist Geta Brătescu, who died on 19 September 2018 aged 92, was born in Ploiești.

Romanian colours in random places!

'Romanian' muffin cases:

When I saw these muffin cases I thought there was something familiar about them.  This is exactly the order in which they were placed in the packaging.

27 September 2018

Histon, Cambridge, Sunday morning:

25 July 2021

Histon, Cambridge, Thursday morning:

7 April 2022

My kitchen:

1 June 2022

E.ON logo:

25 July 2022

My wardrobe:

5 August 2022

Popped up on Facebook:

5 September 2022

Impington Village College sign:

12 January 2024

Uneasy Rider, by Mike Carter

Published in 2008, Mike Carter’s Uneasy Rider is an account by the author of his six-month ride in 2006 on a large BMW R1200GS motorbike through 27 European countries, covering almost 20,000 miles and travelling as far as eastern Turkey.  The impetus for this epic ride was Carter having reached the age of 42, ‘the nadir of a man’s life’ in his estimation, recently divorced and generally feeling at low ebb.

Despite neither owning nor being able to ride a motorbike, he makes a drunken bet at work, which is sub-editor on the Observer, that he will spend six months riding round Europe (if he had worked at the Guardian nobody would have noticed his absence).  After some training this he eventually does, cushioned financially by letting his London flat and writing progress reports for his paper.  Uneasy Rider is the book of the journey.

One of the chapters (‘What am I doing here?’) recounts his time in Romania.  This was his second visit, the first a holiday in Bucharest five years previously with his then-wife.  He had been suspicious of the locals, fearing they were going to rob him, that Romania was ‘the end of civilisation’.  His trouble-free stay he attributed to luck.  This time, having arrived at ground level rather than by aeroplane, he can see how mistaken his assumptions had been.

His first stop is Cluj-Napoca, where he notices the prevalence of the Dracula theme: ‘the entire population of northern Romania seemed to be working for Dracula plc,’ every town claiming a connection, with the attendant souvenir business.  The one major tourist spot in Cluj is a ‘big statue of a man on a horse’, inviting comparisons in Carter’s mind between Cluj and Nuneaton.  We do not learn the identity of the man on the horse (he is referring to the Matthias Corvinus Monument), perhaps because too much hard information would break the whimsical mood.

In a fish-out-of-water moment he goes to a restaurant to find revellers wearing ‘traditional Romanian peasant costume’ and realises only when the bride enters that far from being ‘fancy dress night’, as he initially thought, he has inadvertently crashed a wedding party.  He leaves his champagne half-drunk and slips away.  Going into a bar called Diesel he gets into conversation with the barman to find yet another person keen to leave the country after Romania joins the EU.  In the nightclub downstairs he meets a ghastly Australian policeman on the pull in Eastern Europe with his mates.

Then it is on to Sighișoara, with its mediaeval citadel which Carter concedes is stunning.  However, the main industry of the place seems to be selling Dracula memorabilia and running Dracula tours.  The house Vlad was born in was now the Casa Dracula themed restaurant.  He looks around, chats to an envious car park attendant who would also like to take off on a big motorbike, and that is it for Sighișoara.

Intending to pitch camp in the forest and dine on vodka and garlic sausage (ho ho) he finds himself in a Roma village ‘somewhere in the sixteenth century’, presumably one of the abandoned Saxon settlements, though we are not told so.  Apprehensive at being there in the dusk (gypsies!), with men carrying old bolt-action rifles in evidence, he is met with warm hospitality.  He is fed, drinks vodka, and plays football with young boys.

Immediately afterwards he is riding along the Transfagarasan, a biker’s dream of a road snaking over the Fagaras Mountains.  Here you feel Romania finally comes alive for Carter as he climbs higher, an experience marred only by the atrocious state of the road surface, with potholes so big people are fishing in some (it sounds preposterous, but he mentions it again later so presumably it was true).  The views are fantastic, complete with a golden eagle riding the thermals, but they are not enough to stop him focusing on the bike and coming back down the mountain at high speed, rather a waste of a fine experience.  It results in an attempted shake-down by a corrupt local policeman and a much smaller fine at the police station.

Then it is on to Turkey.  The chapters are all very abbreviated, with only time for a few wry observations before moving on to the next place.  It is a lightweight tour of the continent and is short on analysis, so do not expect to find out much about the countries visited, including Romania.  This is more about Carter and his machine than it is about the places he visits (the subtext of the journey is to find himself after all).

Constantin Brâncuși at Kettle’s Yard

Golden Fish

Kettle’s Yard is an exhibition space owned by the University of Cambridge.  It began life as the home of Jim Ede, a curator at the Tate Gallery, collector, and author of Savage Messiah (1931), about the artist Henri Gaudier-Brzeska.  Ede and his wife lived at Kettle’s Yard from 1957 to 1973.  The original house, originally three cottages which were combined, has a gallery next door which runs an adventurous exhibition programme devoted to modern art.  The house is retained as it was when the Edes lived there, complete with the artworks Jim collected.

Earlier this year the gallery reopened after a massive expansion programme, resulting in extra floors and the inevitable café being added.  This week I visited to see an exhibition and took the opportunity to revisit the house.

A number of the works Ede collected are by Constantin Brâncuși.  Brâncuși was born in the village of Hobița, Peștișani, south-west Romania, in 1876.  He moved to Paris in 1904 and remained there for the rest of his life, dying in 1957.  The two knew each other and Ede visited Brâncuși at his studio in Paris.  There are a number of the artist’s works at Kettle Yard, helpfully itemised in the Kettle’s Yard database, of which I viewed only those on display (i.e. not those listed as being in the reserve collection):

The Prayer (reserve collection) 1907:

A photograph of one of Brâncuși’s sculptures, in the National Museum of Art of Romania, Bucharest.

Leda (reserve collection) c. 1920:

This is a photograph of one of Brâncuși’s sculptures now in the Art Institute of Chicago.

Prometheus (displayed) 1912:

Cement cast of the 1911 marble original.  Given by Brâncuși to Vera Moore in 1930 and bought by Ede from her in 1969.  It sits on top of a baby grand piano.

Golden Fish (displayed) posthumous cast, 1969:

Brass and steel.  The cast of the 1924 original sits on top of a tapering barrel which has a metal band around the top.

Nude (displayed) 1902-26?:

The end date for this drawing is 1926, when the artist gave it to Ede.  It is displayed on the wall behind Prometheus.

Oiseau dans l’espace (reserve collection) 1926-27:

This photograph is of one of a series of sculptures investigating birds and flight.

Letter with sketches of The Kiss (reserve collection) 22 December 1933:

Letter in French to Jim Ede, accompanied by pencil sketches.

There is one more reference to Brâncuși at Kettle’s Yard: a drawing by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska of an African tribal mask, with Brâncuși’s name under it, indicating Gaudier-Brzeska’s admiration for him.  On display in the attic among a number of Gaudier-Brzeska’s works, it is undated.

Update 16 October 2018: The house in which Brâncuși was born has collapsed

While not related to Brâncuși’s presence at Kettle’s Yard, I thought it worth recording the news reported by Irina Marica on the website Romania Insider on 12 October that the house he was born in had collapsed the day before.  This does not seem to have come as a surprise as the wooden structure  had been in an advanced state of decay for some time.

George Ivascu, the Romanian Minister of Culture, said the government could not intervene because the building was in private hands but added that the Gorj County Department for Culture would make an inspection, implying a bunch of local bureaucrats standing round surveying a pile of rotten lumber.  What they could do at this stage he did not say.

Getting into his stride, Ivascu added it was crucial for money to be allocated to protect historic structures at risk, but because of a lack of political will over so many years, the Ministry didn’t have the necessary funds to buy such properties.  He added that what had happened at Hobița should act as a wake-up call.  Well, that is the essence, though the minister opined at greater length.

The website Romania Journal today adds details highlighting the confusion leading to this sad state.  Brâncuși has 13 heirs, but none has been interested in taking responsibility, nor has anybody else, including Peștișani town hall.  The courtyard has been used by locals for their chickens.  Apparently in 2001 a sculptor from the capital bought the house but when he tried to change the roof the council halted the work, and the place was left roofless.

The reason the local municipality is not too bothered is perhaps because there is in Hobița a replica ‘memorial house’, opened in 1971, which houses a small museum visited, according to the curator, by 10,000 tourists a year.  This is despite Brâncuși never having lived in it.  The cynical thought also arises that perhaps the land is worth more without the ruined house on it than with it.

Perhaps someone needs to suggest to Ivascu a system of listing sites of historic importance, putting the onus on the owner to maintain them within tight rules, rather than standing by helplessly because cash is not available to buy them on behalf of the state.  Also, the local authorities should be ashamed of themselves; Brâncuși being born there is probably the biggest thing that has happened in the area, and they should have been more conscious of their responsibility towards the community’s cultural heritage.

Dacians: Unsettling Truths (Dacii: Adevaruri Tulburatoare) (2012)

Daniel Roxin presents a documentary about Dacia, country of the ‘bravest and most just of the Thracians’ as they were described by Herodotus, in which he argues that the history of Romania has been misrepresented by historians.  The film asks the question why in official and academic terms the Dacians have been dismissed as a primitive tribe which was erased from history by the Romans, and Romanians have been told they trace their lineage from Rome.  It makes the point that only about 14% of the Dacians’ territory was conquered, so the opportunity for Latin to penetrate Dacia as a whole was limited, yet we are expected to believe that Latin displaced the Dacian language entirely.

But how could it be that the Dacians would forget their language and traditions, especially as they were under Roman occupation for much less time than some other parts of the empire, where those subjugated did not forget their own language?  People in such places as Gaul, Palestine, Spain and Britain did not carry on using Latin after the withdrawal of the legions, yet we are expected to believe that Roman influence in Dacia was such that the entire region was permanently Latinised.  A possible explanation is that Romanian was not derived from Latin but both were derived from an earlier proto-language, and are thus sister languages.

There is ample evidence that the Dacians were highly respected by classical authors, and statuary of Dacians by Roman sculptors is plentiful.  However, when Romanian nationhood was being formed in the nineteenth century, a disproportionate influence was wielded by Transylvanian Catholics indoctrinated by the Vatican who emphasised the Roman aspects and marginalised the Dacians as barbarians who were exterminated by the Romans, so that they could argue present-day Romanians were descended from the Romans.  They entirely ignored the historical continuity of Dacia.  Despite this, many Romanian intellectuals have sought to stress the Dacian links, while the failure of some modern historians to mention the Dacian heritage throws their credibility into question.

Another line of evidence is provided by paleogenetics, studying preserved genetic material.  Analysis of bone fragments from the Bronze and Iron Ages by researchers in Hamburg was compared to the DNA of modern Romanians and it found that while there were similarities with Bulgarians and Greeks, markers for Italians were in general less close.  Mitochondrial DNA markers showed a close relationship between the population living in the Romanian area during the Bronze and Iron Ages and modern Romanians.  Romanians are not descended from Rome as Italians belong genetically to a different group.

However there are genetic links with northern Italians.  Drawing on Livy, the film argues that after the fall of Troy, which was in Thracian territory, Aeneas and his crew founded Rome; Troy had been in Anatolia, in Thracian territory, so that thus far from the Romanians being descended from Rome, Romans are descended from Thracians.  This would explain the respect Romans had for the Dacians, Dio Cassius referring to war between Trajan and Decebalus (the last Dacian king) as war between two brothers.  Therefore the history of Romania as generally presented is based on a false view of its origins.

Moving on to writing, it had been assumed that Sumerian was the oldest writing system, but recent evidence shows that the Tărtăria tablets from the Neolithic Turdaș–Vinča culture, which was partly settled in present-day Romania, are 1-2,000 years older than Sumerian writing.  Dating of bones found with the tablets established that they were 7,500 years old, so the tablets would be as old, if not older, overturning the accepted wisdom that they were no older than 2,000 BC.  Yet in the official historiography these important tablets and other artefacts have not been given their due place in the history of Romania.  Is this due to neglect, or are there more sinister forces at work?  Roxin promises further documentaries.

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgmKrGSJVnU

The Nun in Romania

News reaches me that the forthcoming film The Nun is set, and was entirely shot, in Romania.  This is the latest instalment in the Conjuring franchise and is directed by Corin Hardy from a story co-written by James Wan, who directed The Conjuring and The Conjuring 2.  Originally scheduled for release this month, the date has been pushed back to early September.

Set in 1952, the plot concerns a Roman Catholic priest, who is of course haunted by his past, and a novice, played by Taissa Farmiga, who are sent to Romania to investigate the suicide of a nun.  According to the teaser trailer, Sister Irene has been having a series of visions each ending with the image of a nun, leading to this piece of dialogue:  ‘Word of my visions reached the Church and I was asked to accompany a priest to an abbey in Romania.’

Well of course she was.  Naturally, as they investigate the pair find that not all there is as it should be (doorway to Hell, etc.).  This is a long way from Audrey Hepburn and Peter Finch in The Nun’s Story.  Wan has said one influence on the film is the 1986 film version of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, but it is obvious that whereas William of Baskerville uncovered a human perpetrator, The Nun’s is going to be demonic.

Taissa Farmiga is sister of Vera, who played Lorraine Warren in The Conjuring and The Conjuring 2.  The Nun is a spin-off of the latter, featuring Valak the demon nun, a character seen proving troublesome to Lorraine and husband Ed in the suburban setting of Enfield, north London.  Valak is again played by Bonnie Aarons, and in chronological terms the film is first in the Conjuring cinematic universe.

But Catholics in an overwhelmingly Orthodox country?  According to promotional material the setting is the Cârța Monastery, near Sibiu in southern Transylvania (a structure which has its own tales of ghostly monks).  The Cârța monastery was originally a Cistercian establishment but is now a Lutheran church in one of the remaining Saxon communities, the monks having been expelled by Matthias Corvinus in 1474, somewhat before the film’s setting.  How the script deals with the presence of nuns in the monastery, and presumably an absence of monks, will either be ingenious or, more likely, the difficulty will be ignored.

Some filming was done in Bucharest, at Castel Film Studios and at the Palace of the Parliament, as well as at Hunyadi Castle and in Sighișoara.  Why 1952 was chosen has not been revealed.  It could be because that was the year a new constitution was unveiled, ‘the constitution of building Socialism’, consolidating communist power, or perhaps merely to fit in with the Conjuring universe’s timeline.  It will be interesting to see if there is any sense of the political situation in the country.  Bearing in mind how The Conjuring 2 played fast and loose with the Enfield case, probably not, and it is unlikely much of the film will be taken up with visa applications.

One of the nuns is played by Ingrid Bisu, who was born in Bucharest.  Appearing on a San Diego Comic-Con 2018 panel (18 July), she is quoted as saying, ‘It was awesome to be known hopefully for something different than “Dracula”.  We’re ready for something fresh.’  Different and fresh?  The Nun is not a huge leap from Dracula in genre terms, and it sounds as if the film is trading on Transylvania’s image as somewhere mysterious and menacing, for which Stoker’s story is largely responsible.  Bisu went on to talk about the crew’s exposure to Romanian food, particularly the sour cream aspect, so at least it sounds as if everyone was well fed.

Update 27 July 2018

Also at San Diego Comic-Con, director Corin Hardy claimed he had seen a pair of ghosts during filming.  As ghosts have allegedly put in appearances on previous Conjuring films, a paranormal event on the set of The Nun could be expected.  This experience involved a sequence called ‘The Corridor of Crosses’ being shot ‘in a fortress’, as Hardy put it.

Hardy had monitors set up in a small cell-like room off a long corridor.  As he walked into the room, which only had one door, he noticed a couple of men sitting at the back, and as he assumed they were from the sound department they must have looked normal, and wearing clothes that were unremarkable.

Hardy briefly said hello and sat with his back to them.  The scene was a difficult one, so he concentrated on the monitors for about half an hour.  Shot completed, he turned round to see what the pair behind him thought, only there was nobody there.  He concluded there never had been because they were obviously ghosts.

His evidence largely hinges on the claim he felt they were there the whole time, and they could not have left without him noticing.  Yet if he had been absorbed in organising the shot, they could easily have walked past without him realising they had gone.  Hardy apparently made no effort to find out if they were flesh and blood.

When talking to CinemaBlend (20 July) about what happened he concluded, ‘I can only assume that they were probably like Romanian soldiers…’, though one would expect costumes to match, and he should have noticed such a distinctive manner of dress when he walked into the room.  The most likely verdict is that Mr Hardy is ramping up the hype for his film, but without putting much effort into conjuring a convincing story.  The fans will love it though.

Update 7 August 2018

The Daily Mirror (4 August) carried an article on the film which covered its mysterious on-set happenings.  Undermining Ingrid Bisu’s claim that ‘It was awesome to be known hopefully for something different than “Dracula”.  We’re ready for something fresh,’ the article cites screenwriter Gary Dauberman:

‘Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula was an important visual and tonal reference for The Nun. It’s a fair comparison as much of the filming was done in the vampiric Romania in order to capture the right mood. While the movie is set in 1952, a lot of sets were based in 14th century buildings.’

Worse, Taissa Farmiga is quoted as saying ‘it [the ambience] helped her get into character. “With castles, cloisters and rolling countryside it doesn’t feel as if you’re in the modern day – it feels as if you’re transported back in time,” she said. “It feels as is a demon could possibly be around the corner.”’  If I were a Transylvanian I’m sure this sort of attitude would annoy me.

Father Cosmin, an Orthodox priest, blessed the production at Hunyadi Castle, though Hardy later found a ‘handprint’ he could not account for in the dust there (no details given as to why this was noteworthy).  The article mentions the anecdote of the Romanian soldiers/sound technicians/guys caught illicitly putting their feet up and sliding out discreetly while the boss is busy, and gives the location as Mogoșoaia, adding that Hardy believed they were Romanian soldiers ‘curious about the filming’.  Why then did they not stick around to give their verdict?

Dracula Country, by Andrew MacKenzie

As the subtitle ‘Travels and Folk Beliefs in Romania’ indicates, Andrew Mackenzie’s 1977 book covers more than Dracula, though the historical figure looms large.  MacKenzie had been travelling to Romania annually since 1968, initially for general journalistic purposes, and had become interested in the country’s folklore.*  He was visiting during a period when the stories were disappearing under the weight of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s modernisation programme, though the traditions still lingered in remoter regions, mostly among the elderly.

At the same time the country was opening to tourism and beginning to capitalise (albeit with some reluctance) on the Dracula associations, and the book is a combination of travelogue, history and investigation of what remained of rural folk traditions  In that sense the title is misleading as there is much more here than the Dracula myth, though it is a useful peg to generate interest (more likely to attract readers than the subtitle would have had it been used as the title), and MacKenzie’s aim is to draw attention to a neglected corner of Europe which was still seen as mysterious in the 1970s.

MacKenzie intertwines a stab at outlining Romania’s complicated past with chapters on Dracula in fiction and the busy, and gruesome, career of Vlad Țepeș, followed by portraits of Sighișoara, Dracula’s birthplace, and Poenari Castle, which has more right to be considered his castle than is Bran Castle, that staple of present-day Dracula tourism.  MacKenzie then discusses beliefs in strigoi and werewolves before resuming his geographical treatment, dealing with the history and folklore of different areas: ‘Sibiu and tales from the villages’, ‘Cluj and tales from the mountains’, ‘Bistrița and folk customs in the valleys’, and Maramureș, with a conclusion in which he reiterates how the sorts of stories he has recounted are becoming rarer as life changes under the impact of industrialisation, tourism and television.

This is a valuable snapshot of Romania in the 1970s, when it was exerting its independence from Moscow but still following a strict ideological line.  When MacKenzie was writing travel in remote areas was a significant achievement, and Dracula Country is still a useful addition to the literature despite its age, but there are weaknesses.  Firstly, he did not speak Romanian and relied on translators, which he concedes was a problem in interviews when he was often told that something could not properly be rendered into English, but also meant he had to rely on English-language sources for his historical perspective.

More significantly, he does not acknowledge the extent to which what he was told might have been coloured by adherence to approved policies.  In his preface he notes ‘the benefit of three excellent interpreters provided, with a car and driver, by the Ministry of Tourism.’  These were not just interpreters but were there to keep an eye on MacKenzie and his interviewees, who must have known it even if Mackenzie did not, and this could have influenced the information he was given.  MacKenzie talks little about the regime and reading the book it is easy to forget the political situation of the period.  He might not have wanted to offend his hosts by highlighting the issue, but as a result he comes across as naive.

Despite these flaws one has to admire MacKenzie’s industry, and the result is worth reading both for the travel aspects and the folklore he collected despite obstacles of language.  The history is too compressed, and requires some background knowledge for it to make sense, but MacKenzie’s affection for the landscape and the people he met are obvious.  Despite the difficulties Romanians were facing as part of the Eastern Bloc, MacKenzie had huge optimism for the future: ‘In the long run they have everything – natural riches, great scenic variety, widespread education, gifted people – which will make for a brilliant future’.  When he was writing there was little available about the country in English, and almost total ignorance about its history and culture, and it is books like this that to an extent have helped remedy that situation.

*MacKenzie was a Council member of the Society for Psychical Research.  Dracula Country was reviewed in the Journal of the SPR by Renée Haynes though the suspicion arises that at best she merely skimmed it, and as a devout Catholic was surely not the best person to ask.

A ‘black ambulance’ in Bucharest

Credit: Euronews

Euronews (9 July 2018) carries a peculiar article about a woman sleeping overnight in a van in Bucharest attacked by a mob which suspected she was involved in the abduction of children [1].  Apparently they mistook the vehicle she was sleeping in for a mythical ‘black ambulance’.  The black ambulance is an urban legend in parts of Central and Eastern Europe, seen as a sinister means whereby organ harvesters ply their grisly trade abducting children and murdering them for their blood and body parts.

According to the Euronews report, such stories originated in Poland and were promoted both to help instil hatred of the West and to help cover up abductions by the secret police.   However, an article on Polish urban legends notes that in the 1960s the vehicle was a Soviet Volga, painted black, and the alleged market was the Soviet Union (presumably symbolising blood-sucking Russia) rather than the West [2].  The legend travelled to Czechoslovakia, where the car became a black ambulance.  In both Poland and Czechoslovakia the fear was alive in the 1980s and ‘90s [1, 2, 3, 4]; it travelled even further, to Romania, where it clearly still exists.

In the present case, Romanian writer Doina Popescu-Brăila had hit on the idea of converting an old ambulance in order to travel round on a book tour as cheaply as possible.  She lives and sleeps in it and uses it to sell her work.  Its purpose is unambiguously proclaimed by a sign on the side which says: ‘Ambulance for literature’ (Ambulanţă pentru literatură), a rather nice idea.

On 4 July she parked up for the night near Bucharest’s main railway station but just before midnight a hostile crowd gathered, believing the ambulance was there for the abduction of children.  Initiated by several ‘hysterical’ women, the incident snowballed as more people arrived.  Later Popescu-Brăila gave an interview to Euronews in which she said that the crowd formed quickly, trapping her, and seemed organised.  Social media posts publicised what was happening, drawing still more participants.  Even if the numbers are an overestimate it must have been a terrifying experience for her, which included physical assault:

‘“They started filming me, they got into the ambulance and someone put out a cigarette on my cheek”, the writer told Euronews. “They started going through my things, they saw the caravan toilet chemicals and believed it might be blood or a medical substance of sorts. I showed them my books and they got so scared as if I was showing them voodoo dolls. When the police got to the scene, there were close to 500-600 people from the surrounding neighbourhood encircling the van. A woman even stole the ambulance number plates to help fuel the general hysteria.”’ [1]

A commentator puts the figure at 100, which may also be a back-of-a-fag-packet estimate but is more plausible [5].  Popescu-Brăila herself rang the police, who arrested three people, a man and two women [1, 6, 7] (the Romania Insider report indicates five men were directly involved in the assault [6]).  Demonstrators then gathered at the police station, angry that Popescu-Brăila had not herself been arrested.  She was given medical treatment at the police station but refused to go to hospital because she feared for her safety there.  She was upset at the lack of support from fellow authors and at the way the business was treated by a sensationalist media in search of ratings:

‘“I am a writer, not an organ trafficker. I am shocked to see no other writer or intellectual taking a stance against this incident. I am even more surprised by how the entire thing was depicted on TV, with some news shows, in their quest for ratings, talking about the “black ambulance” as if it were a real thing not a bogus story”, Mrs Popescu Brăila decried the event.’ [1]

She had begun the project in 2016 and this was the first time she had run into trouble.  Despite her ordeal she vowed to continue her tour.  On Facebook, the police and Ministry for Internal Affairs urged calm and rational behaviour, and requested that individuals refrain from posting fake stories about the non-existent black ambulance [1, 6].

A paper presented by Petr Janácek at the thirtieth Perspectives On Contemporary Legend Conference, at Göttingen, Germany, in 2012, was titled ‘The Black Volga Revisited: Child Abduction Legends and Rumours in Countries of the Eastern Bloc’, and he draws attention to the complex nature of the theme [4].  While prevalent in various countries previously within the Soviet orbit, such rumours were not confined to them he said, having appeared in places as far apart as Italy, Brazil and Nigeria.

He notes that these stories began circulating in the 1930s, with a generic black Soviet car as the basis.  They have constituted a stable and long-lasting narrative with social, economic and political implications, for example attitudes to state-run health services and xenophobia towards Jews, Germans and Arabs, all of whom at various times were accused of driving black vehicles in pursuit of children.  He considers racism the most common driver nowadays, but this would hardly cover Popescu-Brăila’s dreadful encounter.

In fact the whole affair is hard to credit, unless the entire crowd possessed zero literacy skills and could not read the sign on the side of the ambulance (which would have been ironic given their target).  The only common feature between the author and the alleged organ harvesters is the ambulance, but here it is blue and white, not black, and has its function displayed on the side as well as her name in very large letters.  This is hardly the behaviour one would expect from a murderer hoping to work undetected.

Such panics are symptomatic of social malaise, as Janácek indicated in his talk, but why this urban legend has persisted is a mystery, as is why Popescu-Brăila suddenly became a target after two years on the road without any problems.  It is also curious that it occurred in the middle of Buchaest rather than in a rural area, where superstitions might persist longer than in an urban environment.  Perhaps there was an anti-intellectual element, dislike of an independent woman travelling alone, or a group of poorly educated and bored individuals seeking a licence to vent their frustrations on someone seen as an eccentric outsider.

Sources:

[1] Writer attacked by mob who mistook her van for mythical 'black ambulance': http://www.euronews.com/2018/07/09/writer-attacked-by-mob-who-mistook-her-van-for-mythical-black-ambulance-

[2] Polish urban legend: https://www.whalekiss.com/2018/02/08/polish-urban-legend/

[3] The Black Ambulance and other Urban Legends: http://www.radio.cz/en/section/panorama/the-black-ambulance-and-other-urban-legends

[4] FOAFTale News: http://www.folklore.ee/FOAFtale/ftn79.htm

[5] http://picbear.online/media/1817017705444467598_1928480601?ref=ajax

[6] Romanian writer assaulted in urban legend frenzy: https://www.romania-insider.com/romanian-writer-assaulted-urban-legend/

[7] Cele trei persoane suspectate că au agresat-o pe scriitoarea din Brăila care dormea într-o maşină asemănătoare ambulanţei, plasate sub control judiciar: https://www.news.ro/social/cele-trei-persoane-suspectate-ca-au-agresat-o-pe-scriitoarea-din-braila-care-dormea-intr-o-masina-asemanatoare-ambulantei-plasate-sub-control-judiciar-1922403506002018071418222322

Update 25 November 2023:

The black ambulance as a sinister concept is back in the news, though its form and colour are flexible.  On 13 August 2023 an article by George-Andrei Cristescu on the Romanian-language website Adevarul.ro asked if there was ‘A new "Black Ambulance" case in Ilfov?’  Ilfov is the county surrounding Bucharest.  According to Cristescu, a message on several Facebook pages reported that two individuals in a black car were accosting teenage girls, in Cristescu’s opinion probably to kidnap them in order to traffick their organs, which he considered an established campaign [1].

At 10 am on 12 August in Fermei street, in the village of Săftica, a couple of men in a black car tried to accost two 14-year-old girls.  One of the girls screamed and the individuals fled.  The poster apparently saw this happen as the message continues that from the window it was not possible to see many details, though one perpetrator was described as having dark hair and a beard.

The post adds the girls were scared by the episode and did not want to leave the house, and concludes with an appeal to people to share the warning, and for the authorities to take action.  Police were said to be conducting checks of CCTV footage, but I’ve not seen any follow-ups so it seems likely the story fizzled out.  The two men may well have been sex pests trying to chat up the girls, rather than intent on abducting them, their black vehicle evoking the sinister black ambulance and stirring up anxiety.

 

The article has a link to a 27 March 2019 article by Madalina Spulber on the same website describing how Romanians were abused in Paris after being falsely accused of attempting to steal children, but this time in a white van [2].  The episode has the hallmarks of social hysteria victimising an unpopular outgroup.  Social media posts warned parents that a white van was travelling between the Parisian suburbs of Nanterre and Colombes to kidnap children and young women for the purposes of drug trafficking, organ harvesting and prostitution networks.  The panic was sparked by an incident when a girl was winked at and followed briefly by a man in a car, near which by chance was a white van.

As a consequence, racist attacks were conducted by vigilantes who felt the police were not doing their job.  Romanians were targeted, especially Roma or if driving vans registered in Romania, and even more so if the van was white.  The white van stories bled into a wider anti-Romanian prejudice.  On 16 March, twenty people from Colombes attacked two Romanian men who were pulled out of a white van and assaulted.  They escaped and ran into a building nearby where they called the police.  Meanwhile the mob set fire to their vehicle, then attacked the police and firefighters.  The men were taken to hospital and twenty people were arrested for assault.

Police tried to cool the situation, using Twitter to urge people not to spread false information that incited violence, and labelling the rumours ‘fake news’.  Their efforts were to no avail, despite them emphasising there were no credible reports of abductions, with further accounts surfacing of would-be kidnappers operating in the Paris region.  There was pushback by Romanian pressure groups who called for the Roma to be defended by the community, pointing out this wave of hostility was the latest manifestation of prejudice, including the myth of child stealing, stretching back centuries, and was similar to expressions of French xenophobia towards other minority groups.

The article goes on to link the French outbreak with the black ambulance:

‘In Romania, the equivalent of this story would be the myth of the "Black Ambulance", a legend that has circulated in Eastern Europe since the 60s and 70s, with variations depending on the country, such as the "Black Volga", the "Black Mercedes", in Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Belarus, Hungary, the list goes on. On board these "evil" vehicles, driven by Jews, Satanists, priests, vampires and other diabolical creatures, children were kidnapped as their blood was needed by rich capitalists from the West or Arabs suffering from leukaemia.’

It provides further examples of incidents in Romania as well as in France, Belgium and Germany.  In these examples, white vans seem to have taken over from black ambulances, presumably because they are ubiquitous and therefore better suited to the rumour mill as it is more plausible to claim a white van is prowling with bad intent than to say the same of a distinctive black vehicle (and white van drivers already come with negative stereotypes).  The underlying mechanisms are the same, however.

The article concludes that where urban legends propelled by racist fake news and circulated on social media are concerned, ‘in the case of the intellectually and psychologically vulnerable public, they are impervious to rational arguments.’  In other words, you can’t convince idiots they are wrong.  The black ambulance may mutate, but it is unlikely to go away.

Sources:

[1] George-Andrei Cristescu. Un nou caz „Ambulanța neagră” în Ilfov?: https://adevarul.ro/stiri-interne/evenimente/un-nou-caz-ambulanta-neagra-in-ilfov-2291651.html?utm_source=ground.news&utm_medium=referral#google_vignette

[2] Madalina Spulber. „Ambulanţa neagră“, varianta franceză. Români bătuţi după ce au fost acuzaţi că fură copii în periferiile Parisului: https://adevarul.ro/stiri-externe/europa/ambulanta-neagra-varianta-franceza-romani-1933410.html