The Razing of Romania's Past:
Swick, Thomas
CEAUSESCU'S FOLLY THE RAZING OF ROMANIA'S PAST Dinu C. Giurescu The Preservation Press, $19.95, 210 pp. Thomas Swick This detailing of Romania's architectural treasures and their destruction...
...The book, sponsored by the Kress Foundation European Preservation Program of the World Monuments Fund, is divided into four brief chapters chronicling the urban and rural architectural heritage, the conservation and restoration work of the postwar years, and the destruction and resettlement projects that, in many cases, wiped out these earlier efforts...
...Surely the author, in writing this book, could not have foreseen the propitious circumstances in which it is now being reviewed...
...Giurescu notes that, by 1989, at least twenty-nine towns had been razed and demolition had commenced in thirty-seven others...
...There is, first, relief that the process of callous, costly, antinational demolition (a kind of architectural fratricide) has been halted with the execution of Nicolae Ceausescu...
...Among the most pleasing structures are the traditional Romanian rural houses, with their wide, sloping roofs and second-floor balconies decorated with intricate wooden latticework...
...He and his family left Romania in 1988 and since then have lived in the U.S...
...It would have been lamentable enough had a foreign occupying force planned to destroy this heritage, but that it was to be extinguished by the country's own leaders is incomprehensible and, in Giurescu's view, unprecedented...
...The ultimate goal was "to accelerate the process of homogenization of the Romanian socialist society, to reduce the main differences between village and town, and to achieve a single society of the working people...
...The photographs give a sense of Romania's architectural richness not only in the capital, but in the countryside...
...Actual figures of the destruction were difficult to come by...
...in 1973 "sketches of systematization were drawn up for 125 communities in Ilfov county...
...The author, Dinu C. Giurescu, is a historian who served for ten years on the Romanian Central Commission of the National Patrimony...
...They had, the text explains, been lovingly restored in the renovation carried out in the mid-1970s...
...Toward the back of the book, rich in architectural photographs, is a series of views of the Vacaresti Monastery in Bucharest, "the most outstanding achievement," according to the late art historian Vasile Dragut, "of eighteenth-century Romanian architecture...
...Every nation," reads a letter from the Central State Commission for the National Cultural Patrimony, "legitimizes its existence through its creativity...
...But with this relief comes remorse at the vast amount of irreparable damage that has been done...
...Its execution was given impetus, he claims, by the earthquake on March 4,1977, which provided administrators an excuse for destroying old and damaged buildings...
...Among the photographs is one of a double gallery: small, graceful, clean white arches rising out of a courtyard of snow...
...Thomas Swick This detailing of Romania's architectural treasures and their destruction provokes a range of emotions not usually associated with the reading of what is, in effect, an archival study...
...When the evidence of this creativity is suppressed piece by piece, the very identity of a nation is gradually lost...
...To destroy this rural heritage and to replace it with standardized construction means not only to destroy a c enturies-long evolution but at the same time to change the essence of a nation through a kind of social engineering never seen and never before accomplished at this scale in Europe's long history...
...In its fallen, ignominious position in an abandoned courtyard, it presages per-fectly the ultimate fate of Nicolae Ceausescu...
...not only ecclesiastical (the monasteries of Romania are justly renowned) but secular...
...In Bucharest, for example, no overall plan was ever released...
...Dinu C. Ciiurcscu The Hazing of Romania's Past News of Ceausescu's plan of rural sys-tematization only reached the West over the last few years, when he announced its implementation...
...According to Giurescu, this plan had its genesis much earlier...
...One of the most striking pictures in this book is of a sculptured column of the Vacaresti Monastery lying broken on the ground...
...Especially moving are the voices of architects and historians who had the courage to publicly oppose the plan...
...This is followed by the news that in December 1984 demolition work began...
...An entire country, obliged to live in collective dwellings, is subjected to a kind of social engineering never recorded in Europe's history...
...This rural heritage--- houses, households, and sites of specific fabric is the very synthesis of a people's history and expresses the national identity...
...Giurescu himself, in an interview in 1983, declared that "To demolish the urban architectural building stock means to erase pages of history from people's minds and hearts...
...Through this plan, some 7,000-8,000 villages were to be destroyed (more than half of those in the entire country) and the residents to be housed in modern agro-industrial complexes...
...not only in the national style, but in German and Hungarian styles as well...
...residents were sometimes given no more than a few weeks' notice that they would have to abandon their homes...
...There had already been reports of his ongoing demolition of large sections of Bucharest...
Vol. 117 • February 1990 • No. 3
