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(Photo source) I think I'm hallucinating. As you may know from reading my last blog update, Roxana Dascalu contacted the BOR spokesman this morning to tell him about our experience at Snagov Monastery yesterday. He was appalled, told her that there is NO charge to enter a church and neither is there a tax for photography. Please bear in mind the following facts: a) There was no sign either outside the monastery nor outside the church stating payment was required. b) The sum of 20 euros (90 lei on today's exchange rate) as a camera... [Lire la suite]

EXCELLENT news this morning on the corruption scam I wrote about yesterday following a visit to Snagov Monastery with Roxana Dascalu and Emil Berdeli (both Romanian journalists). Roxana has refused point blank to rest on her laurels and called the spokesman of the BOR, Parintele Stoica, earlier today. She explained what had happened and spared him no details as to the whole sorry turn of events along with her humiliation a) for having to pay to enter her OWN church and b) for having her English friend who loves Romania so much... [Lire la suite]

Today found me in Snagov, about 30km from Bucharest. I have never been to the monastery, though goodness knows I've tried to find it twice to no avail. Today, however, my friend Roxana, her friend Emil and I came up trumps. It was an experience on oh so many levels and I'm still livid. Please make yourselves comfortable and I'll tell you the tale... First, a little background on this monastery snuggled on a remote island in the middle of a lake. Founded in the early XIVc by Mircea cel Batran and refounded by Vladislav II and Vlad... [Lire la suite]

On the top of a hill overlooking the Sinoe Lake near the mouths of the Danube on the western coast of the Black Sea, the ancient city of Histria - Istria in Greek - stands proud and nostalgic but distressfully neglected. If you know your history and/or have an active imagination however, the atmosphere of Histria cannot fail to evoke visions of an ancient era. Who walked on the stones upon which you walk? Who stood in that doorway? Who sat sewing at that window? I felt myself transported to a time of leather sandals and white togas,... [Lire la suite]

(Photo source) sorin oprescu, Bucharest's grotesquely corrupt and incompetent mayor, ploughs on in his frenzied, hell-bent determination to destroy the city's patrimony where Ceausescu left off. Those who care and grieve these losses at his hands are a tragic, shameful minority seen as nutty eccentrics standing against progress and modernity. Doubtless, if there were to be an election tomorrow, oprescu and all those others intent on eradicating the Bucharest we know and love would win again. And again. And again and again and again.... [Lire la suite]

(Photo source) Oprescu's 'pasaj rutier' destined for Piata Presei Libere has been deemed useless by the OAB in an open letter, and rightly so. It does not take the traffic coming from the Bucharest-Ploiesti motorway into any consideration whatsoever, and, apart from that rather erroneous oversight, it will destroy the beautiful zone of Kiseleff itself - one of the very few left in the capital today. It is nothing more than another example of megalomanic emperor oprescu's hell-bent determination to mutilate and slaughter what remains... [Lire la suite]

(Photo source) Over? Finished? You're kidding. We truly believed this had been put to bed, and that Florentina would be left alone to put her life back together again after it was destroyed by the tragedy which took the lives of six babies, injured five, and left her the scapegoat and whipping boy of a disaster that was neither her fault nor her responsibility. But no.  Today, Florentina was condemned to two years and two months in jail. The technical service chief, Gigel Oprea, was sentenced to two years (is that ALL?!?) and... [Lire la suite]

(Photo source) Today sees the 66th anniversary (and a nice Google doodle) of the Roswell Affair.  Roswell, New Mexico sprang to international fame on July 8th, 1947, when local news reported the capture of a flying saucer by government officials in the town. Since the discovery, conspiracy theorists continue to insist that the debris found came from an alien spacecraft and that the fact was covered up by the military. The persistent belief of alien activity around Roswell triggered the Air Force to launch an investigation into... [Lire la suite]

This afternoon, I received this very moving and superbly written note on FB by my friend, journalist Roxana Dascalu, in response to my post HERE yesterday (which, I'm ashamed to say, reads like a cold list of distant events rather than something emotional by comparison). She has given me permission to share her text with you here and so I beg you to read it and then circulate it far and wide. It should be published in the Romanian national press for these are memories that make blood run cold and hair stand on end - and it is REAL,... [Lire la suite]

(Photo source) Today is the twenty-third anniversary of the 13-15 June 1990 coal miners' massacre ('mineriada') when an estimated 10,000 miners from the Jiu Valley invaded Bucharest at the behest of Ion Iliescu (to help 'suppress' student protests) and rampaged their way through the capital indiscriminately killing, maiming, beating up innocent people, vandalising both the Liberal Party and the National Peasant Party HQs, newspaper offices and private houses as they went. Carnage. Pure and gratuitous carnage. Only a few weeks after... [Lire la suite]