CLUJ-NAPOCA, Romania | It’s Christmastime in Cluj-Napoca, but here, and throughout Romania, the holidays bring more than the hustle and bustle of frantic shopping and snow-hampered commutes. This year Romanians are also celebrating 20 years since winning their freedom – if “celebrating” is the right word.
“It feels like much of what we fought for during that glorious December has been overshadowed by frustration that democracy did not instantly bring gratification for everyone,” says Nicolae Badescu, a 59-year-old engineer who was out in the streets of this western Romanian city during the revolution of 1989. Continue reading …
In September 2009 in Bratislava, Transitions Online and the CEE Trust hosted Social Innovation Camp Central and Eastern Europe. This three-day event brought together Web developers, designers, and civil-society actors from seven post-communist countries and formed them into teams to build effective online solutions to real social problems.
During the camp, TOL executive director Jeremy Druker asked several of the participants to share their memories of the 1989 revolutions and their thoughts about their societies today.
[Editor’s note: A native of Bulgaria’s Montana province, journalist and poet Diana Ivanova is working on projects that explore personal and collective memories of the socialist period. This article is drawn from one such project with students in the region. Photo of Vratsa by Elena Chochkova.]
VRATSA, Bulgaria | “Teacher, you disappointed me when you said you were with the Communists!”
The dialogue occurs in Vratsa, a town in northwestern Bulgaria. It’s a 10th-grader’s reaction to his teacher’s recollection about her father: a member of the Bulgarian Communist Party in 1989, he thought the protesters in the streets of Sofia wanted to plunge the country into chaos.
The exchange is part of 1989: Mapping the Northwest, a project of the New Culture Foundation, a network of writers, artists, and new media designers in the region. The student’s comment is tongue-in-cheek, but it stays with me – maybe because I have a similar story. Continue reading …
LAKE BALATON AND PRAGUE | Laszlo Takacs sweats over a bubbling fryer, deftly wielding his tongs to pull out another Frisbee-shaped langos. One swimsuit-clad customer after another requests Takacs’ deep-fried dough disks, especially the classic: slathered with sour cream, sprinkled with grated Trappist cheese, and drizzled with garlic sauce for good measure.
“Hungarians have always loved langos, and they always will,” Takacs says. “It’s a national specialty, like goulash.”
This was Hungary’s communist-era version of fast food – oily, cheap, tasty, and reliably belly-filling. Today it’s a relative rarity, overwhelmed by Western staples like pizza, hamburgers, hotdogs, even shwarma and Chinese food. Continue reading …
By Boyko Vassilev, Lucie Kavanova, Anita Komuves, Wojciech Kosc, Sinziana Demian and Pavol Szalai
[As we look at how life has changed – or stayed the same – over the past 20 years, TOL correspondents in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Romania asked people in various professions to describe their working life today compared with conditions before 1989. This collection of interviews with doctors is the third in the series that resulted.
MARIETTA GECHEVA, 47, BULGARIA
Gecheva, a radiologist who specializes in endoscopy, worked in the Pirogov emergency hospital before and after 1989. For the past nine years, she and her husband have run a private clinic.
Some doctors profited from the change. Among the successful were those who could afford to join a good medical institution that functions absolutely professionally, without professional compromises. But that’s only a few people. That happened with [me and my husband], because we had the chance to have some land restituted, which allowed us to found our clinic. If the restitution hadn’t happened, we would have been working in state hospitals. Don’t get me wrong, they have good specialists as well, even extraordinarily high level medics. However, the financial problems in state hospitals matter and make things difficult for these specialists. The Hippocratic oath is fine, but it can’t do what machines can. And for that, you need money. Continue reading …
By Boyko Vassilev, Lucie Kavanova, Anita Komuves, Wojciech Kosc, Sinziana Demian, and Pavol Szalai
As we look at how life has changed – or stayed the same – over the past 20 years, TOL correspondents in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia asked people in various professions to describe their working life today compared with conditions before 1989. This collection of interviews with artists is the first in the series that resulted.
Part 1: What does an artist, accustomed to using metaphor and subterfuge under communism, do when the lid comes off? Continue reading …
By Diana Ivanova
