Romania & Moldova

Bucovina Monastery

The Bucovina Monasteries are a cluster of churches in the Eastern Carpathians, decorated inside & out with bright frescos. Overhanging roofs shelter the pigment against the Romanian weather. In the medieval era when literacy wasn’t widespread, the frescos acted as stark pictorial warnings for those who wavered from orthodoxy. I hired Gigi, a local guide, and we visited Humor, Voronet, Moldovita & Sucevita; each with its own biblical themes, & all beautiful.

I asked Gigi, about the Communist era. He was a teenager in the late eighties and the Ceaucescus were executed days before his enforced conscription. Widespread resentment was already in the air & he told me he would have been lining up against his friends, rifle in hand. He described his mother queuing endlessly for bread while he flicked between the two state televisions channels, hopping between propaganda, praying for an end to the old order.

Chisinau, Moldova

From Suceava in Romanian Bucovina, I headed to Chisinau in Moldova. The only bus of the week left Suceava at 6am. I walked through the dark to the small bus station only to find the minibus full-up. “But I’ve come all the way from England!” I said. Some shrugging was the only response. Hiding at the back of the bus station was another bus which went part of the way, leaving at 7. At 7.45 it broke down in a forest. At 8.30 another bus picked us up from the forest and drove to the next town. A further bus took me to Iasi near the border and from there I could connect to Chisinau.

As soon as we entered Moldova, everyone began bouncing up & down. We had now left the EU with its infrastructure grants & road maintenance. Moldova’s highways are domestically funded, bumpy & unsealed. As we approached Chisinau, the fertile fields were planted with rows of grapes, wrapping the capital in vines. We juddered into the bus station in late afternoon sunshine. One simple journey had become four and yet we arrived an hour ahead of the rammed 6am bus from Suceava!

Coffee & cake in Moldova

I checked into a Junior Suite at the Hotel Tourist, a centrally-planned slab of downtown accommodation. After the colour-rush of the Bucovina monasteries, it was a return to communist brown; all the shades from beige to taupe. On the surface, Chisinau was crumbling; all rain-stained estates & wrecked pavements. Anti-fascist memorials rose proudly from intersections. The familiar clenched fists & red stars of Eastern Bloc progress. There was a cheek-by-jowl clash of post-war brutalism and neon-strip casinos; a complete absence of architectural harmony. But secreted inside was a brighter story. Bleak facades hid cosy cafes, modern enotecas & amusingly, Malldova. Here lived the capital’s young, flash with iphones & tablets, served by waitresses in traditional dress, everyone fluent in Russian & English.


Timisoara

From Chisinau, I flew to Timisoara in Romania, where the revolution to overthrow the Ceaucescus begun. The light was fading as I arrived, but the city appeared tidy & prosperous and proud of its role in igniting the revolution. From Timisoara the dissent spread to Bucharest and gained enough momentum to topple one of the worst of the Soviet-endorsed regimes. Way up in Bucovina in the remote north, a teenager called Gigi, with a love of the local monasteries, was just relieved it all happened before he was called up to shoot his mates.

Minsk - Soviet Timewarp

Hotel Planeta

Belarus was a difficult country to visit. I was on nodding terms with the Embassy in London before they finally granted me a visa. Direct flights are expensive but there’s a cheap backdoor entrance via budget airlines & a bus trip over the border from Lithuania. Minsk was the grey city at Belarus’s heart, frozen in a Soviet timewarp & a fascinating experience. I stayed at the Hotel Planeta, a town-edge monolith. Prowling the lobby were ladies in short skirts & heavy make-up, eager for eye contact. I slalomed through, head-down and ran for the lift. Later my room-phone rang and a female voice whispered unknown Russian. “Sorry?” I said, at which point she switched to English and suggested a “private relaxing massage”. She was one of the few people in Minsk who spoke good English. I declined her offer.

Belarus was almost completely destroyed in the second-world war, the whole country transformed into a vast battlefield. Minsk’s large Jewish population was squeezed into ghettos and then annihilated. City monuments reflect the horror and sadness; a straggling Auschwitz-bound line clinging to small suitcases & maternal tears for those who fell later in Afghanistan.

Trinity Suburb

The post-war city was rebuilt from scratch on Stalin’s watch, with wide boulevards & blockend murals of muscle-honed patriots. Everywhere there is concrete, grey & stained. Functional architecture drains the place of colour & I never saw a blue sky in Minsk. Only Trinity Suburb was different, a 1980s rebuild of the medieval old town where pastel shutters and decorated brickwork added an organic respite to the monochrome of Soviet Minsk. The tight string of streets looked more like the Belarus of Marc Chagall with gabled roofs and uneven cobbles and Trinity looked across the river to ribbons of green parkland.

I found Minsk oppressive at first, but then began to notice the welcome intrusion of human nature; traditional dancers harmonising folk ballads by the theatre, quirky sculptures decked with flowers and a wedding party spilling onto the streets drinking straight from bottles of Champanska.

Metro artwork

Belarus is one of the last dictatorships in Europe; ruled by a president elected with improbable majorities. Lenin still stood proudly outside Parliament and the KGB HQ was on the main shopping street. Even Lee Harvey Oswald made Minsk his home. The KGB bugged his apartment but couldn’t work out his motives & were as surprised as anyone when he changed the course of history. Belarus still leans towards Russia and turns subsidized gas imports into lucrative export capital. Iconic skyline vanity projects litter the suburbs creating construction jobs. No real freedom, no dissent, but work & a monthly paycheque. By day I walked the city until my calves ached but in the evenings, I rode the rattling metro lines in & out of Minsk with their spacerace tiling and starlit stations, picking up bread, cheese & fruit from local supermarkets at the end of the line. Wine was cheap & I stocked up on chewy reds from Georgia and crispy whites from Moldova.

New Library

Re-entering Lithuania, itself a former Soviet republic, was like discovering a new world of colour; Baroque churches; golden spires and the return of blue skies. The border crossing was a test of patience. Long waits in no-mans-land are common along the EU frontier but decontamination channels are solely the legacy of Chernobyl. The Soviet reactor was just inside the Ukrainian republic but Minsk lay directly upwind. Another legacy of Belarus’s unfortunate geography; stomped over by fighting armies and then poisoned by radiation from within.