The grim barracks where Romania’s brutal communist despot Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena were executed are to be opened to the public in the latest bid to boost “dictator tourism.”
The former military unit at Targoviste, 100km northwest of Bucharest, is to be turned into a museum and is due to welcome its first visitors in next month.
“Many Romanians and foreigners said they wanted to see the wall against which Ceausescu and his wife Elena were shot on Dec. 25, 1989,” said Ovidiu Carstina, director of the museum.
The death of the Ceausescus became one of the defining images of the revolutions which convulsed eastern and central Europe in 1989.
On Dec. 22, as angry crowds gathered in front of the Communist Party headquarters, they fled the capital Bucharest in a helicopter. It was to be their final journey. They were stopped by the army, detained in Targoviste, and shot after a makeshift trial.
It brought to a grisly end more than 20 years of repressive rule aided by a huge security apparatus, where any free speech was ruthlessly suppressed. The population suffered from food and power shortages and on top of that, Ceascescu’s rule was marked by nepotism, paranoia and a deeply ingrained personality cult. Wife Elena was seen as the regime’s “No. 2.”
“Our aim is to present events as they unfolded, without making comments on the trial, the Ceausescus’ life or the cult of personality,” Carstina said.
In the barracks, built in 1907, time seems to have stood still since the execution.
The makeshift dock where Nicolae and Elena, dressed in their winter coats, sat listening to the charges against them will be put back in the very place where the couple were tried and sentenced to death.
Outside, the wall against which they were shot just a few minutes later still carries bullet holes.
Sociologist Vasile Dancu said “every nation must acknowledge its history, without trying to hide certain events.”
A group of Swedish tourists has already booked tickets for the museum, Carstina said.
Also on their must-see list is the grandiose Palace of Parliament in the heart of Bucharest.
To erect the building, initially called “House of the People,” Ceausescu ordered the razing of much of the city’s historic district, forcing the relocation of about 40,000 people, who lost their homes.
The palace is now one of Romania’s top attractions. More than 144,000 tourists visited it in last year, 110,000 of them foreigners.
However, Lucia Morariu, head of the local tour operators’ association, felt turning Ceausescu into a tourist brand was not a good idea.
“Why encourage those who mourn him? Romania boasts other highlights,” she said, citing the Danube delta, part of UNESCO’s heritage, or the picturesque natural reserve of the Retezat mountains, home to Europe’s biggest bear and wolves populations.
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS