Romania’s Rotten Oligarchy

This interesting article by Kostas Vaxevanis in the New York Times and International Herald Tribune this week about Greece reminded me of Romania:

DEMOCRACY is like a bicycle: if you don’t keep pedalling, you fall. Unfortunately, the bicycle of Greek democracy has long been broken. After the military junta collapsed in 1974, Greece created only a hybrid, diluted form of democracy. You can vote, belong to a party and protest. In essence, however, a small clique exercises all meaningful political power.

For all that has been said about the Greek crisis, much has been left unsaid. The crisis has become a battleground of interests and ideologies. At stake is the role of the public sector and the welfare state. Yes, in Greece we have a dysfunctional public sector; for the past 40 years the ruling parties handed out government jobs to their supporters, regardless of their qualifications.

But the real problem with the public sector is the tiny elite of business people who live off the Greek state while passing themselves off as “entrepreneurs.” They bribe politicians to get fat government contracts, usually at inflated prices. They also own many of the country’s media outlets, and thus manage to ensure that their actions are clothed in silence. Sometimes they’ll even buy a soccer team in order to drum up popular support... 

Romania like neighbouring countries is not really a democracy and how could she be? Will she be one? Some look to the EU to help but how can the EU remedy a democratic deficit? 

On the whole there is a lot more freedom in Romania than in Western Europe. People smoke in restaurants and make sexist remarks and disregard EU regulations. But they do not think government is on their side. Romanians do not have a party system which allows people to choose between parties that reflect different points of view. 

The essence of democracy is that one party leaves office after defeat to be replaced  by another party which brings in distinctly different values and laws from its predecessor, as happened in the UK in 1979 and 1997, in France last year, such as has not happened in Russia. This is democracy, rule by the masses, and this fear of the electorate colours everything democratic governments do. In Romania parties leave office regularly but the same 'Structure' of shadowy interests seems to rule. The 1996 election in Romania which ousted the revamped Communists and the 2000 election which brought them back  did represent real change but since 2004 all parties have seemed corrupt and not to represent divergent philosophies. In Eastern Europe it is hard to think that there are coherent right wing or left wing programmes. The liberals here are not liberal, by which I mean pro-business, and the socialists are not socialist. There are no conservatives as people do not think there is much worth conserving.

The present political class or their successors will In power for generations. I wonder if real democracy is possible in Orthodox countries. What Romania needs is a public minded elite and a moral revolution from below but it is not her destiny to resemble Norway or England. Perhaps corrupt but not too corrupt  Ireland might be a role model.

Economics springs from culture which springs mostly from religion and genetics. Roger Scruton writes interestingly on this  here.

Thank God Romania unlike Greece is not in the euro. 

Psychopaths are motivated by envy

The psychopath, like everyone, is attracted to the qualities he has repressed in himself. Therefore, according to Melanie Klein, he is drawn to good people, whom he envies and wishes to embrace but also to harm, thus relieving his painful feelings of envy. In the same way, good people are sometimes attracted by evil ones, because evil people do the things good people do not dare even want to do. This is why stories about psychopaths sell more than stories about saints.

Envy is one of the psychopath's principal emotions. If the psychopath cannot possess good qualities himself he can devalue people he recognises as good, by insults or harming them, in some cases even by murder. Psychopaths envy everything, for evil is a vacuum, negation. Evil is a very real thing (read crime stories in the press or read some history) and, paradoxically, also nothing, a kind of black hole. 

Envy and pride, not greed or cruelty, are at the heart of evil.  Particularly, envy of another's spiritual good, which the Church has always considered one of the greatest of all sins, a sin against the Holy Spirit. The myth of the fall of Lucifer is accurate, understood in psychological terms.

'His [Othello's] life had a daily beauty in it which made mine ugly.' 

was the only explanation Iago gave for his crimes at the end of Othello. Some people think this a cop out on the part of Shakespeare. In fact, it is good psychology and good theology.

This is one reason why psychotherapy for psychopaths is dangerous (the psychotherapist can be in emotional and even physical danger). Another is the fact that psychotherapy may make the psychopath worse, not better, in the sense of being better able to understand himself and better able to achieve his ends. In any case, as Freud said, the patient needs a conscience for therapy to work. It only works if the subject wants to be a better person. ('How many psychotherapists does it take to change a light bulb? Only one, but the light bulb has to want to be changed.')

The evil eye, which has always been feared in traditional societies, is supposed to be motivated by envy and inflict bad luck. It is interesting that evil people, or at any rate psychopaths, do stare in a remarkably strange way.

Ira Einhorn, environmentalist, psychopath and murderer

Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, the Moors murderers, who tortured and killed children

For more about the evil eye, click here.

Books read and films seen this year of grace 2012

The High Window*, Raymond Chandler
The Long Goodbye*, Raymond Chandler
Muhammad, Karen Armstrong
Stalingrad, Anthony Beevor 
Defying Hitler, Sebastian Hafner
Berlin at War: Life and Death in Hitler’s Capital 1939-45, Roger Moorehouse
This Business of Living: Diaries 1925-50*, Cesare Pavese
Relapse into Bondage, Alexandru Cretianu
Friends and Heroes*, Olivia Manning
Waugh in Abyssinia, Evelyn Waugh - I reviewed it here

As You Like It*, William Shakespeare
History of the Roumanians*, R.W.Seton-Watson 
A History of Romania, Kurt Treptow

Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire, Victor Sebestyen

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi - Geoff Dyer
In Ethiopia with a Mule, Dervla Murphy - I reviewed it here
Tippu Tip: The Story of His Career in Zanzibar and Central Africa, Heinrich Brode
First Footsteps in East Africa, Richard Burton
The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat, Ryszard Kapuscinski - I reviewed it here
Here is New York, E. B. White
The Psychopath's Bible*, Christopher Hyatt
Remote People, Evelyn Waugh 

The Diary of Terror: Ethiopia 1974-1991, Dawit Shifaw 
Solitude*, Anthony Storr
Pagans and Christians Robin Lane Fox - I reviewed it here
The Shadow of the Sword. Tom Holland - I reviewed it here.
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon.
The Early Church*, Henry Chadwick

Bold means I loved it. An asterisk means I have read it before. 

What a masculine, middle-aged list. I am even reading military history, which is the last refuge of the middle-aged male. In fact I tried Beevor's Stalingrad on a recommendation from an aesthete friend but it bored and repelled me. Gibbon though is great.

I read Chandler for the prose style not for the plot, though he is a good storyteller. I thought when 14 that The Long Goodbye was too long and too much trying to be a proper novel. Now I absolutely loved it except the ending with the silly twist which I merely skimmed without attempting to understand it.

Karen Armstrong on Muhammad is not worth reading as she does not mention that the evidence for her subject's life is extremely late indeed (two centuries after the event).

Hafner's book, to my great surprise, an account of his uneventful life in Berlin in 1933, found among his papers and published ten years ago, is absolutely wonderful. It is beautifully written and deeply horrifying because of the sheer normality of his life as he describes it in Berlin in 1933 and the ease and rapidity with which Germans accepted Nazism and Nazi indoctrination. I hope it becomes a classic and is read in a hundred years' time as it deserves to be. People follow like sheep. I saw a somewhat faint parallel with another totalitarian ideology with a whiff of sulphur, political correctness, which has made cowards of us all in recent years. 



The Moorehouse book is not particularly well written or strikingly insightful, but it efficiently covers the ground. The story of Stella Kübler, the beautiful blonde Jewess who was used by the Nazis as bait to uncover Jews hiding in Berlin, chilled my blood. She was told that, by her collaborating, her parents would be saved, but unsurprisingly they were sent to the gas chambers anyway. She herself lived to an old age before she committed suicide. One solitary Jew was permitted to survive in the Jewish cemetery burying Jews according to Jewish practice. He was still alive when the Russians came. 

This is what a friend of mine calls Hitler porn but my excuse is that I know very little about German domestic history during the Nazi period, the subject is important and I am interested in biographies of cities, writing as I am one a book on Bucharest. 

Olivia Manning's third volume in the Balkan trilogy, set in Greece, which I reread while spending the weekend in Athens and Hydra, inclines me to think that the reason I like the first two so much is because of my love of and interest in Romania not Manning's writing. She does not create characters. Her characters are clearly drawn from life in many cases and therefore do not come alive. It is the invented ones like Yaki who live. 

Seton-Watson is magisterial and should be read by all foreigners who speak English in Romania. I am ashamed that I had only skimmed it before. I had never opened Treptow, which the author gave me in 1999, before he went inside, and had assumed it would be a facile popularisation but, despite the numerous mistakes and misspellings, it was a more vivid, condensed account than Seton-Watson and taught me rather a lot. Dennis Deletant tells me it was written by a  group of Romanian historians not by Treptow and completed very hurriedly - hence the mistakes and typos - so that Adrian Nastase, when he was Foreign Minister,  had copies to give away when he visited the USA.

Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire by Victor Sebestyen is journalism rather than history, but very interesting.

I read Here is New York, by E. B. White, because Johann Hari tweeted that it was the best essay of all time. It is not but it is very well written and might inspire me to write about Bucharest if I am lucky. But reading Remote People by Evelyn Waugh immediately after Here is New York makes Waugh's prose seem even more dazzling than usual. White is a very good stylist whom Waugh effortlessly outdoes. Although perhaps I am biassed as I 'get' English writers so much better than American ones. Americans speak our language but do not think like we do. And they write in English but not in the setting of the English class system, which always makes reading them seem eerie.

The Psychopath's Bible is a reminder that psychopaths, though amoral or rather immoral, have values they believe in, which they cannot be argued out of - might is right, survival of the fittest, victims want to be victims, selfishness is good, the ideas of Ayn Rand. A reminder that morality, like art, is inspired by love not logic.

'Tom' Holland went to my college years after me and took a Double First in Classics and History and has many books to his credit. I try not to be jealous, but he cannot write.

I haven't decided whether I love Gibbon yet - reading a book on a kindle makes love more difficult, for some reason - but I am enjoying him, though his paganism and contempt for the early church disgust me. He is a very good historian indeed. Cardinal Newman said, "It is melancholy to say it, but the chief, perhaps the only English writer who has any claim to be considered an ecclesiastical historian, is the unbeliever Gibbon."  

Four novels, which is much better than my usual score, although I am not sure the two Raymond Chandler thrillers really count.

Films seen

Six films is also much better than my normal score, which is none. None were any good, except In A Better World. Albert Nobbs was dull, pleasant but in the end a waste of time - please read George Moore's wonderful short story instead. George Moore is an unjustly neglected genius (like me).

The Blue Dahlia (1947)*
The Brasher Doubloon (1947)
Albert Nobbs (2011)
In a Better World (2011)
Thank you for Smoking (2005)
Goodbye, Lenin (2003)

Why Churchill allowed Romania to become Communist

This decision was disastrous, prolonged the war and indirectly led to Romania and Bulgaria becoming Communist. The decision to invade Italy, and not the Balkans, is to blame, not Yalta, as I never tire of explaining to Romanians, who never tire of disbelieving me.

Hallowe'en is rearing its ugly head in Bucharest tonight, four days early

Samhain (pronoun­ced SAH-WEEN), nowadays known as Hallowe'en, approaches. A time, the Druids taught, when the earth begins to deaden and the chasm separating living and dead thins out. The Catholics renamed it All Souls' Eve. It is now a marketing campaign for various businesses, in Romania as everywhere else. 

Just as the North American grey squirrel has made the red squirrel almost extinct so has the North American Hallowe'en taken over with extraordinary swiftness, extinguishing older, weaker traditions. This too is life, I suppose, but it is part of the process by which the whole world is becoming plastic.

Hallowe'en, traditionally marked by apple bobbing, was almost dead in England when I was a boy and I never heard of anyone bobbing apples except in books, but Hallowe'en was taken by the English to America and has been exported back to us and worldwide in recent years, for purely commercial reasons. Romania has her own traditions about ghosts walking the earth on St. Andrew's Eve, 29 November, which alas are nowadays being submerged by Hallowe'en, just as the commercial Western St. Valentine's Day (increasingly the word saint is dropped nowadays) is subsuming Dragobete.

So the American Hallowe’en is an originally pagan and Catholic festival which now reflects America’s core Protestant and English identity. As America becomes less Protestant and less English the traditions change with the times. In America it is the tradition to wear fancy dress for Hallowe'en parties and in the last few years rules have emerged to discourage party goers from ‘perpetuating racial or gender stereotypes’. Dressing as Chinamen or Red Indians or, heavens forfend, from blacking up to impersonate the President, all these are not acceptable in the USA, a country in the grip of a collective nervous breakdown about any sort of discrimination. Rules have emerged to guide party goers.

This costume is definitely outré, it appears:

As is this:

I thought Mynah Bird looked very fetching in her scanty Nazi stormtrooper costume on The Two Ronnies, but that was long ago and in another country and besides the wench is dead.

Out of laziness, I asked my friend Valentin Nas, who knows very much about Romanian folklore and traditions, to advise me about the significance of St. Andrew's Eve and he tells me:

There are many legends and customs related to the night of St. Andrew when the souls of the dead are believed to come out of graves and fight the living undead. The ghosts return to their graves at dawn, when they hear the first rooster. If the undead have nobody to fight, they go to people's homes and try to suck the blood of those they can catch. Garlic is believed to keep them away, therefore, in order to stay safe from ghosts and undead, people use to brush with garlic their windows and doors before evening comes. 

A common tradition on this day is to plant wheat seeds and keep them indoors until New Year’s Eve. Tradition says that the person who plants the wheat will be able to tell how next year will be based on how the plants will look like. Another tradition is to take small branches from a fruit tree, put them in water and keep them until the Christmas holiday. The branches should bloom, which is another sign of how fruitful next year will be.

The last line of Agatha Christie's Hallowe'en Party provides a final thought for the 31st., from Hercule Poirot: 

Halloween is not a time for the telling of the stories macabre, but to light the candles for the dead. Come, mes amis, let us do so.

Note written on November 1st: Last night charming girls in Hallowe'en costumes walking down my street looking for Hallowe'en parties made me realise that I only wrote part of the truth. Hallowe'en  is transmogrified and made charming by Romanians and it is great craich.

Chiajna Monastery on the outskirts of Bucharest

I am ashamed I never heard of the Chiajna Monastery on the outskirts of Bucharest until today, when Rupert Wolfe-Murray mentioned it- it looks enchanting. I must go there and to what other places?


This wonderful picture is by Mihai Petre and won first prize in the Wiki Loves Monuments competition in December 2011.

Today King Michael of Romania is 91

Today King Michael of Romania is 91, the last surviving Head of State and Commander-in-Chief from the Second World War. Why has Romania not restored the monarchy?








How sad dethroned kings are, their faces like worn coins. Today the king unveiled a statue to himself at a square that is being named after him at the intersection of Şoseaua Kisileff and Strada Ion Mincu, at the invitation of the Mayor of Bucharest. It is a short distance from the palace where he lived as a boy, which now houses the ING Bank. All very sad. 




If the impeachments of President Basescu show anything, whatever ones view of him, surely they show the advantages of a hereditary monarch and a head of state who is, like Caesar's wife, above suspicion.

What is England's secret? Freedom. Hah.

And what is [England's] secret? Freedom, ordered freedom, within the law, with force in the background and not in the foreground: a society in which authority and freedom are blended in due proportion, in which state and citizen are both ends and means. It is an empire organised for peace and for the free development of the individual in and through an infinite variety of voluntary associations. It neither deifies the state nor its rulers.

So said Stanley Baldwin in his last speech as Prime Minister in 1937, when we were considered the most important and even the most progressive country in the world. When I was growing up he was loathed for letting Germany rearm and the second hand bookshops groaned with collections of his speeches on the theme of England's greatness. Only I bought and read them. 

Then they seemed charming but banal. Now reading him is desperately sad-making. His praise of the British race seems like something from an extremist right wing group, his praise of the Empire almost as subversive. He extolled horse-drawn ploughs in the English countryside just as the countryside was collapsing into ever deeper depression and the cinema was bringing global culture to the small towns and villages. His premiership coincided with the building of hideous ribbon development that ruined much of the landscape and his government authorised the building of pylons over the fields he eulogised: putting the wires underground was judged to be too expensive.

As for freedom, I used to think of England as a very free country when I came in 1998 to live in Romania. Now when I go back as I did last weekend it feels like a very agreeable police state, patrolled by armed police who are increasingly unpopular. People are gaoled for offensive tweets and for saying homosexual acts are sins. Evangelical street preachers are moved on by the police for handing out pamphlets 'in a Muslim area'. Someone was sent down for revving his car in a racist manner and an Oxford undergraduate spent a night in the cells for telling a policeman his horse was gay. And the list of stories would fill half of cyberspace. 

People in England who wanted to be stroppy used to say 'It's a free country' if you asked if you could sit at their table in a pub or in similar situations. It is impossible to imagine them using the expression any more, except ironically.

Post-Communist Romania is very much freer. How much has changed in both countries since the Revolution of 1989.

Thoughts

The Balkans is not a geographical expression but a state of mind.


Romania is the Orient dreaming that it is France.


Time is all we have.


History, like poetry, art and jokes, exists to reveal a hidden order and meaning in the world.


Economics is in itself unimportant - economics reflects culture which reflects, in the broadest sense of the idea, religion (and genetics).

‎Islam in Romania

Sheik Omar Bakri, who has claimed responsibility for the suicide bombing of a busload of Israeli tourists in Burgas, in Bulgaria, in July, said in an interview published in the Bulgarian press that both Romania and Bulgaria are legitimate targets for attacks, because they are ‘Islamic land’ and because troops from those countries are fighting in Afghanistan. 

"Once Islam enters a land, that land becomes Islamic and the Muslim have the duty to liberate it some day. Spain, for example, is Islamic land, and so is Eastern Europe: Romania, Albania, Macedonia, Serbia, Kosovo and Bosnia."

The head of Romania’s Intelligence Service (SRI), George Maior commented on this on television:

“We are not exempt from terrorist threats. It is increasing and we are on the map of terrorism organizations as a potential target because of our presence in Afghanistan and because of the anti-missile shield. And we are very careful. Omar Bakri was under analysis by the Service in the past, he tried to come to Romania, he has connections in Romania, he’s a man we are looking at carefully.”

Actually, the Sheik's history is not accurate, at least not about most of Romania, though he could have dragged in the Ukraine, Hungary, Greece and Southern Italy where Islam did enter (even Rome was sacked, but not occupied, by the Muslims). All of what is now Romania was, it is true, once in some sense part of the Ottoman Empire and shown as such on the maps, but Islam never 'entered' Romania, except for the Dobrudgea, the Bucovina and for 150 years the Banat. The great achievement of the Wallachians, Moldavians and Transylvanians was, when they could no longer resist the Turk by force of arms, to make terms and preserve their autonomy and the property of their landowners. Serbia, Albania, Bulgaria and Greece failed to preserve their system of landownership and government. The three principalities which made up most of what is now Romania simply paid tribute to the Sublime Porte and were untouched by Islam. They were always ruled by Christian princes, owned by Christian landlords and governed by their own laws. In fact, Wallachia and Moldavia were never territories of the Ottoman Empire but protectorates.The only other semi-detached part of the Ottoman Empire which had this form of self-government was the Lebanon. Romanian landlords and nobles were very lucky to escape the fate of their counterparts elsewhere in South-Eastern Europe.

Mosque at Constanza

Muslims were forbidden to settle in Wallachia and Moldavia to prevent them from appealing to the Sultan for protection against the Christian authorities. Ethnicity in the era before nationalism was less important than religion and every Christian who owned land was a citizen. Greeks, Serbs, Armenians and Albanians were magistrates and bishops. Jews could settle, but could not be citizens unless they converted.

It is not clear how we should describe the status of the Regat in English, but protectorate or suzerainty are inaccurate approximations. Home rule is not quite right for the Phanariot era in the 18th Century, when the principalities were ruled by Greeks, who bought their throne from the Sultan and did not last long, but would apply to the periods of native princes in the seventeenth century and after the Wallachian uprising of 1821. At any rate the Sultan played no part in ruling the Regat whose rulers had far more freedom from Constantinople than Romania now has from Brussels. Only in 1876 did the new Ottoman constitution for the first time enact that Wallachia and Moldavia were full parts of the empire. The War of Independence followed in 1877, a war, though, that was not really fought for de jure independence, but under compulsion from the Czar who would have marched his army across the principalities in any case.

Romanians tell me that Romania resembles other Balkan countries, especially Serbia and Greece, and they should know much better than me, but I always fancy that the Balkan feeling, which you get in other Balkan countries, Albania most of all, and which is really a Turkish feeling, is sensibly less in evidence here. This may be simply due to the fact that Romanian is, despite all attempts to deny it, a Latin language. But if I am right and it goes deeper than this, this would be the explanation. At any rate, there are no mosques here, except in the Dobrudgea.

Ali Ghazi Mosque in Babadag, built in the 16th century, is the oldest mosque in Romania. 

I first came to the Balkans in 1990 by train, hoping to see Europe morph into Asia. Strada Lipscani felt utterly sui generis and un-Western, with gypsy or Arab music playing from transistor radios, but, apart from the old town in Bucharest, Romania was Europe and so was Bulgaria, despite her statues of Lenin, mosques and the gypsy quarter in Plovdiv. In 1990, after Romania, Istanbul was almost a bore - it was back to capitalism and Mars bars and foreign newspapers - but it was Muslim and the East. It felt like Asia. Now that I have lived in the Balkans for fourteen years, Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey feel as if they have very much in common. At moments they almost feel like the same country, which historically they were - Greater Greece, Byzantium. 

When I went to Constanza for the first time in 1999 and saw the mosque there, overlooking the Black Sea, I felt that I was in an odd, hybrid place. My generation was the last that could forget that there were large numbers of Muslims in Western Europe. That was in 1999 and we cannot forget them now. The roughly 20,000 Romanian Muslims, inaccurately labelled Turks, are a tiny number compared with the millions in England, France, Germany and Spain. The town where I was born, like Constanza, now has two mosques.

I have met three or four Romanian so-called Turks, who were all very nice people. The one I liked most was a very sympathetic young woman (she might have had gypsy blood) in Constanza who told me she had converted to Christianity and in her spare time went around Muslim villages, trying to convert other Muslims. She wanted, she said, to set them free. How different from the Anglican way of doing things. Something about her simplicity moved me a great deal.

Emil Perhinschi, to whom I am indebted for teaching me much about Romanian history, comments as follows (Ion Bratianu was Liberal Prime Minister during the War of independence and Mihail Kogalniceanu was a highly regarded former Prime Minister):

"At moments they almost feel like the same country, which historically they were - Greater Greece, Byzantium." 
that country was calling itself (herself ?) Romania, too ;) not Greater Greece, nor Byzantium, and the Romaioi and Rumanians North of the Danube were the last to abandon the original Megali Ideea, which was to restore the Eastern Roman Empire ... the former 48ers were still talking about a Greek-Rumanian confederation until close to 1860. At least they were accused by their enemies of having such plans ... Barbu Catargiu mentions this in his speeches.
"I suspect there were not very many Romanians in the Dobrudgea in 1878 and think it was poor substitute for Bessarabia which Alexander II and Disraeli ensured the Romanians lost." 
Very likely Bratianu traded Bessarabia for Dobrudgea when he made the secret deal with the Russians, but had to pretend he does not agree since his deal was not extremely popular. ... in 1877 there were hot debates against whom should Rumania go to war, and while the wives were entertaining Russian officers at court receptions the husbands were drilling the army in Oltenia and would have gone against the Russians but for the article 7 in the 1876 Ottoman constitution.
Rumania needed a useable sea port. Galatz and Ibrail were accessible to sea-going vessels, but only to small ships, and the Delta route was long, dangerous and infested with malaria ... around 1840s it was said that 1/10 of the sailors that crossed the Delta got infected. The Sulina channel was dredged since at least 1820, but the depth varied and at the mouth it was very low, ships had to be unloaded before crossing the bar then loaded back. Chilia was deeper, but lengthened very much the time needed to get to the Bosphorus.
Before 1878 Kustendge was a village of fishermen with very small docks, and the railway from Cernavoda was almost bankrupt because the docs in Kustendge were very poor and not protected, so very little traffic went that way. The port was built after 1878. 
During winter Dobrudgea was a popular destination for Rumanian shepherds, so there was a sizable Rumanian population, but no Rumanian majority, not even during the winter :). Dobrudgea was not very populated anyway: invasions and pitched battles fought in your backyard every 20 years took care of that. Some Circassian refugees were settled there after 1840, too. Taxes were much lower in the Ottoman Empire so when Dobrudgea became part of Rumania a lot of the natives sold their land and left before the government realized what is going on and lowered the land tax (Kogalniceanu took advantage of the sales then lobbied for a lower tax rate when he realized he sunk money in semi-desert). 

Sinca Veche, a Transylvanian Stonehenge

Mihai came round early on Sunday morning to take me out with a couple of his boxing friends -- big bald men who filled the car very amply -- and we set off.  Finally, I got the hang of male friendships.  Men are good chaps and, if not as interesting as women or as good at conversation, just as intelligent.

Mihai said we were going to Fagaras, and I thought he meant the town, where I never was, but in fact we were going to Sinca Veche, twenty-eight miles from Brasov and fourteen from Fagaras.  I am ashamed that I had never heard of it.

Sinca Veche is notable for its (former) monastery which is in fact not recognisable as a monastery but is a cave (or grotto) cut out of chalk.  Before it was consecrated by Christians (who built the two small altars or shrines which stand in the middle of the cave-monastery) it was a prehistoric temple which locals say is seven thousand years old.  You enter it through a tunnel cut from the chalk.  Light enters from above, through a hole in the chalk.  The hole was constructed in such a way that the sun shines straight into the temple on the vernal and autumnal equinoxes.  It is a kind of Transylvanian Stonehenge.

Mihai, the very learned amateur archaeologist, tells me that chalk cannot be carbon dated and so there is no way of telling the age of the carvings on the walls.  This pleases me. The Star of David ,is carved on the wall and inside it are the ying and yang symbols, though no-one knows who built it or why.  In W.H.Auden's words, it was all so unimaginably long ago.  Long before the Emperor Trajan conquered Dacia, or before prehistoric property developers began building on the seven hills of Rome, Sinca Veche was already ancient.  Or at least it is presumed so, because we do not know for sure.

In fact, the whole place, as well as the little valley in which the cave sits, and the plateau above the cave, are filled with the most extraordinary peace and sense of spirituality.  Whether this feeling is Christian or pre-Christian, I do not know, but I suspect the latter.

Sinca Veche is in Transylvania, which was for nine hundred years till 1919 part of Hungary, but close to the Wallachian border, which runs along the Carpathian Mountains.  In other words, close to the border between the Near East and the furthest redoubt of Catholic Europe.  When the Orthodox Church was being persecuted by the government of the Empress Maria Theresa, Orthodox priests hid in this place. 

Locals call it the Temple of Fate, believing that the place has a powerful energy, and that if you pray here your prayers will be answered.  Romania has been Christian for a very long time, even if she probably was not converted by the apostle St. Andrew, but it is hard to believe that these beliefs are not very much older than Christianity.  Iris Murdoch said that Protestants let too much light in on mystery.  A great deal of light floods into the monastery or temple at Sinca Veche but it does nothing to illuminate the deep, palpable mystery of the place.

The feeling of calm is something you find much more often in Romania than other countries but it reminded me, in particular, of the grotto of St. Andrew, near the village of Ion Corvin in Dobrudgea, on the way from Bucharest to Constanta, to which Mihai also took me on another occasion. The apostle is supposed, on very flimsy evidence, to have taken shelter there.  The older and newer churches by the grotto are not attractive but the grotto, for some reason, is moving, and the setting itself has a remarkable feeling of heavenly calm.  There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.

The journey to Sinca Veche and the exploration of this sacred place had made me very hungry.  We set off in the direction of Fagaras to get some lunch but had a very pleasant surprise on the way: a newly built touristic complex nearby called Inexdor, which was empty in preparation for a wedding party later on, but which nevertheless was able to rustle up a good lunch for us.  We all thought the food - simple Romanian dishes - was excellent and I believe it was good value --  although for some reason I was not allowed to contribute to the bill; yes, these burly, bald, fighting men were, indeed, good chaps.  We said we would go back for a weekend and I look forward to it.

And finally to make the day perfect we altered our return route and came back on the most magical road in the world, as far as I know at least: the Transfagaras Highway, with its fifty miles of dizzying twists and turns.  It is a road that only a dictatorship could have built -- for dictatorships can be extravagant with manual labour -- and this road was built by Ceausescu for defensive purposes.  Not, of course, to defend Romania from attack by NATO, which was never a possibility, but from her ally the Soviet Union.  Compounding the beauty of the abysses and mountains, there is also the Vidraru Dam and Reservoir to admire, as well as the wonderfully dramatic Poienari Castle, perched on a crag, and built by that famous builder and disciplinarian, Vlad the Impaler, who is always identified rather inexactly with Dracula.

My companions, whom I would certainly want on my side in the case of a bar fight, and I agreed that the excursion was as fine a way to fill a day as one could ever imagine.  

To contact the Inexdor touristic complex, which does not have a site, call 0040-727-200 670 or 0040-760 185 912.

Sixty Years a Queen

Yes the Queen made it. She has been Sixty Years a Queen. For a moment we forget about equality and all the other cant of the age.   For a moment the republicans and trendy people fall silent.

There are many reasons why people love the monarchy. I like the monarchy for all those reasons but most of all because there is no damned merit in it.

The Queen is marvellous, has never put a foot wrong, we all agree. She has managed when everything was going so badly to save our national face. She has reminded us of our institutions and our state religion when these things are often downplayed or attacked.  

But did the British public ever fully take the present Queen  to their heart? Certainly not in the same way that they did the Queen Mother or the old Prince of Wales, ‘the first gentleman of the Empire’, who turned out not to be a gentleman at all, or the dark  Diana, Princess of Wales, who was mad, bad and, in the Prince of Wales’s case,  dangerous to know.


Lord Altrincham shocked a lot of people in all  classes when he said of our present Queen in 1957, “The personality conveyed by the utterances which are put into her mouth is that of a priggish schoolgirl, captain of the hockey team, a prefect, and a recent candidate for Confirmation." But even at her present great age she still has something of the well brought-up, earnest schoolgirl. King George V's and Queen Mary's slightly Germanic accents made them oddly classless. Queen Elizabeth is not 'grand', despite being the Queen but she is very pre-1939 upper class.

The public greatly respected the Queen but had not really taken her to their hearts before I left England in 1998. They may well have done so since. Nor does this matter anyway - monarchy is not a popularity contest. The Queen believes in the divine right of kings but is increasingly seen by her subjects as a public servant whom they employ and the great majority of them are very pleased with the service they receive.

In Romania I see how lucky England is to have a decent monarchy and ruling class. Likewise the resignation a few days ago of the German President makes the same point. (If only French Presidents resigned when they behaved unethically.)  Only 8 countries have preserved their system of government without violent interruption for the last 100 years and the Queen is Queen of 4 of them. And a fifth South Africa is a former dominion of hers. The others are Sweden, Switzerland and (another former British colony) the USA.

The Queen is a descendant of Mahomet, via King Pedro the Cruel of Portugal. She descends too from  Brian Boru, High King of Ireland and she is related to Vlad the Impaler as well as  George Washington, Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Hillary Clinton.  She is also Queen of France of course. 


She is very funny we are often told in private. When Clare Short was about to kiss hands her mobile telephone went off in her bag. She scattered the contents of the bag over the floor in front of the Queen before dredging up the telephone which died in her hands. The Queen said, ‘I do hope it wasn’t somebody important.’

She is wonderfully old-fashioned and asked Norman Hartnell “not to make me look like Miss Collins”.

Our Queen has I am told a lot of influence which is very reassuring. But I wish she had used it to stop the very many awful things that have happened since 1952 from women priests to abolishing habeas corpus, to making smoking illegal in clubs, to building over the green belt, to selling out Northern Ireland, to.... to... to....


Do we have as much to celebrate as we had in 1897? We have much more, despite the loss of the Empire. For most of Her Majesty's the last 60 years have been ones of miraculous prosperity and improved living standards. The Englishman living on the dole or old age pension is far richer in many respects than a Victorian Duke. But very very much has been lost. We now have vast numbers of divorces and abortions, AIDS, loss of religious faith, violence and gang crime, loss of belief in our traditions, more practical freedom but far fewer civil liberties in the true sense of restraints on the state. We have all the problems that always come with  ethnic minorities.  All very different from the homogeneous respectable sexually conservative vaguely Christian England over which the Queen came to reign in 1952 in what was called the 'Second Elizabethan Era', when net curtains twitched, people worried what the nighbours might think, England still thought she was a great power and people expected Kenya would be a good colony for English emigrants to settle.


Ill fares the land, to hast'ning ills a prey, where wealth accumulates, and men decay. My father grandmother and adults who remembered working class life in London before the war all told me how much better life was in those days. It was better because they were young but when I came to Romania in 1998, a country where it still seemed to be the 1950s in many respects I saw their point. 

Princess Margaret the Queen's very beautiful younger sister was far more regal. I met her when I was twenty and she was fifty and completely to my surprise I was very smitten. Elizabeth Taylor was not in it.  Princess Margaret  was a true Hanoverian whereas Her Majesty is Saxe-Coburg Gotha. She would have made an impossibly glamorous, possibly rather naughty and extremely haughty Queen – like a Queen from the pages of a romantic novelist. It would probably not have done. Instead poor Princess Margaret  slid from view in the last thirty years. She was cremated in Slough Crematorium, which somehow seems a Joe Orton ending to a William Douglas-Home drama.


P.S A good post on the Queen as England's most impressive religious leader by Damian Thompson whom I always greatly enjoy - he is so much better than more famous journalists like D'Ancona, those various talentless women or, save the mark,  the ghastly Hari. I utterly wasted my talents in the late 80s when I almost got myself a job on the Daily Telegraph where I would have fitted in very well. I remember meeting the people who worked on the Peterborough column at the Telegraph and Damien asked me: "What's your religion?" "I'm a papist."  (Alas, in those days lapsed.)  "Good. We're all papists here and we want to keep it that way." Sound man, Thompson.

The Impaler - even Bucharest’s germ is dark, unwholesome, fascinating

The first record of Bucharest is a document dated 1459 six years after Constantinople fell signed by Prince Vlad III - Vlad the Impaler! –so named generations after his death for his characteristic and unspeakable method of impaling his victims on pikes. And yes alas much better and erroneously known to a wider world as Dracula. If we put aside Bucur, the improbable shepherd of legend (his name means joy) who is said to have founded Bucharest, even Bucharest’s very germ is dark, morbid, unwholesome.

“From the distinctly inadequate material at our disposal it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that Vlad was a man of diseased and abnormal tendencies, the victim of acute moral insanity.” 

This was the judgment of R.W Seton-Watson the great English historian of Romania writing in 1934 when it was still possible to believe in progress and enlightenment values. In fact Vlad did not invent this horrible method of killing his victims by insertion of a pike in and out of orifices. A wooden stake was carefully driven through the victim’s anus, to emerge from the body just below the shoulder in such a way as to not pierce any vital organs. This ensured at least 48 hours of unimaginable suffering before death. King Stephen the Great of Moldavia for example also impaled Ottoman prisoners, was acclaimed by Pope Sixtus IV as the athlete of Christ and was canonized several years ago by the Romanian Orthodox Church. (St. Stephen is also said to have fathered an illegitimate child at every town to which he lay siege). Impalement was used in Scotland and the Turks made more use of it than any other army. Nevertheless the history relates that the sight of an Ottoman army defeated by Vlad the previous year impaled on pikes in concentric circles, their leader’s modesty protected by his ceremonial robes and turban, moved to tears even Sultan Mahmud II the conqueror of Constantinople he who had lived all his life among abstruse and elaborate methods of killing.

Many brave men lived before Agamemnon; but all are overwhelmed in eternal night, unwept. What Homer accomplished for Agamemnon Gutenberg did for Vlad Tepes whose deeds were saved from oblivion by a squib printed there several years after his death.

It was Vlad who a few hundred dingy yards from my flat built the Old Court whose ground floor was brought to light in the 1950s, the only building in Bucharest old enough for an Englishman to consider truly old. The Impaler was a Wallachian ruler who swore allegiance but then fought against the Turk in the period immediately after the fall of Constantinople. A distant parallel can be drawn with Artorius a millennium earlier fighting English pagan invaders after the Roman legions left Britain. Both men obscure enough and scarcely recoverable for history became important myths: the one King Arthur and the Matter of Britain, the essence of chivalry which inspired Malory, the other by the grace of an Irish hack writer and the silent films Dracula.

Footnote stuff. American historian Kurt Treptow was sentenced to prison for much graver offences but his coining ‘Vlad III Dracula’ is also difficult to forgive. Patrick Leigh Fermor was stretching things as far as they could be stretched when he opined that Draculea was just allowable. (The Impaler’s father was Vlad Drac, Vlad the Dragon, and Dracul could be a diminutive, the little dragon).

That there is no link between Vlad and Dracula has finally been put beyond all doubt by the publication of the wretched Stoker’s notes. But in any case, Dracula is a fictional character in a cheap horror story who is a Szeckler (cousins to the Hungarians) vampire and resembles if any historical figure Elizabeth Báthory the beautiful Hungarian countess who bathed in the blood of the village virgins she sadistically murdered. (Another digression: the Countess Bathory always puts me in mind of a beautiful Romanian lady I once knew.) The Impaler was indeed born in Transylvania but he ruled Wallachia and waged war against the Ottoman Empire and Islam. He was a cruel and perverted killer of a very different kind. But the times were brutal. His father was assassinated on the orders of his uncle John Hunyadi, his elder brother, Mircea, was buried alive by the Saxons after they gouged out his eyes with red hot pokers. His wife (or mistress) committed suicide by defenestrating herself when she learnt that the Turks had surrounded his castle in Tirgoviste. Vlad had his illegitimate half–brother, Vlad the Monk, killed after he tried to seize the throne.

Tepes's ruined palace in the Old Town in Bucharest

What to make of the Impaler this bizarre if not very momentous figure of whom only a few facts are known, an exotic and terrifying figure to begin the line of rulers whose capital was Bucharest that leads through Greeks, Russians, fascists and communists to Mr Ion Iliescu and Mr Traian Basescu? He was considered a great man, a progressive force and national hero, in Communist Romania. (I recall my surprise in 1990 to find myself walking down Vlad Tepes Street in Brasov but I should not have been surprised. I already knew Attila the Hun was a Hungarian hero though he was not a Hungarian.) And indeed Romanian history is full of curious parallels. Legend says that Vlad forced the members of boyar (noble) families who were implicated in the deaths of his father and brother to build a castle for him with their bare hands a project in which many died. Four centuries later the new rulers in Bucharest in the early 1950s - the young Ion Iliescu the leader of the Communist students’ association among them? -sent many thousands of enemies of the people to build the never completed Danube-Black Sea canal, the canal of death. To admire murderers like the Impaler and Attila is shocking but then in what does greatness consist? And what was St. Constantine or Napoleon? Or Stalin?

King Stephen the Great also impaled many infidels and he is the greatest Romanian hero. Pope Sixtus IV called him 'the athlete of Christ' - popes in those days were less bothered about interfaith dialogue. Stephen was canonised a few years back by the Romanian Orthodox Church despite having been said to have fathered an illegitimate child in every town to which he laid siege. I mentioned this to an extremely, in fact passionately devout Romanian lady I know and she replied 'Well, he was  a man.' As Eugene Ionescu said, 

'Religion in Romania means something completely different from what it means in Catholic or Protestant countries'.

I picked up a couple of years ago in a second hand bookshop an essay by Mircea Eliade and idly opening it I had an odd experience. As I read Eliade say the historical destiny of Romanians, Serbs and Bulgarians was to spill their blood to protect an ignorant and ungrateful Europe from the danger of Muslims I recognised that I had heard similar ideas many times in guide books and inscriptions in places as far apart as Poland and Greece. They were the kind of local patriotic white noise one shut out but now the words had a chilling clarity. The war that the Impaler fought for the religion of Jesus of Nazareth with a perverse savagery which moved even the infidel army to grudging respect is one that was fought by Charles Martel at Tours, by the Impaler’s patron John Hunyadi at Belgrade, by Jan Sobiesky at Vienna, by John Buchan and his colleagues in Milner’s kindergarten during the Great War and in Afghanistan today.

Adolf Hitler holding forth in Berlin as recorded by Martin Borman said: 

“Had Charles Martel not been victorious at Poitiers — already, you see, the world had fallen into the hands of the Jews, so gutless a thing is Christianity! — then we should in all probability have been converted to Mohammedanism, that cult which glorifies the heroism and which opens up the Seventh Heaven to the bold warrior alone. Then the Germanic races would have conquered the world. Christianity alone prevented them from doing so.”

And Gibbon in a simpler age in which Anglican divines knew nothing of comparative religion mused that had Martel lost, 

“Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mohammed.”