Casa Doina

 We like to walk the streets of Bucharest and look in the windows. I was surprised to see this Toyota sewing machine. Inside the shop were many Jukis with tables and sewing notions.

The tulips around here are fantastic. I don't know if they're from Amsterdam, but they are gorgeous!

We enjoyed dessert at Casa Doina while welcoming a new missionary couple, the Schneiters, from Salt Lake. I remember the exhaustion that accompanies arriving at a new mission.

Papanași is a confectionary of donuts and sour cherries. This traditional Romanian dessert is usually served with sour cream as well. The chocolate lava cake is to die for. It's best with vanilla ice cream.

Village Museum and Tunari School

 We enjoyed a visit to the Tunari School to check on the laboratory room that we've helped remodel. This is quite the improvement.

Afterwards, we went to the Village Museum to tour the houses. This was our second time visiting, but we still haven't seen everything. The weather was incredible.

Spring Blossoms and Humanitarian Visits

 The hyacinths are blooming inside and the fruit trees are popping popcorn outside. This little flower smells so delicious. I hope the weather will warm up soon.

The Nelsons arrived from Frankfurt to visit our friends.

I love visiting Erika at Motivation Romania. This organization has a reputation for being the best-run in the Europe Central Area.

Jesuit Refugee Service has locations everywhere, but this one in Bucharest works most with Ukrainian refugees. They try to do a little bit of everything.

Working with great NGOs

 We have really enjoyed working with the organizations helping children here in Romania. They are local citizens who try to bring joy to children. On Friday we were able to work with young missionaries to make sewing kits for local schoolchildren. 

Eliza's big house is huge, but it is very cold. It's nice to sit in the sunshine. The sewing kits included age-appropriate sewing cards or fabric and thread or yarn.

We enjoyed chatting with Elder Johnson who is from Kentucky, near Cincinnati. And Eliza's husband is an ultra-marathoner so he likes to chat about running.

The Merry Cemetery

 The drive from Sighet to the Merry Cemetery was just 20 minutes along the border with Ukraine. At one point our phones pinged, "Welcome to Ukraine" as we were driving. Here is the map:

And here's where you can see the Ukrainian villages just across the river.

We arrived at the Merry Cemetery just before 5pm and were able to see many worshippers coming to the service. The artist who started making clever poems for those buried here in the 1930s is also buried here. 

I loved this woman at the loom. 

The painted church was incredibly detailed inside and out. 

https://youtube.com/shorts/HCdS8N_ACK0?feature=share

Across the street was an old wooden church in need of a little repair.

We drove back to Baia Mare through Negrești-Oaș and our hotel on the edges of the city. I loved the decorations and displays in the lobby. Since Transylvania was Hungarian for so long, many of the places here have Hungarian names and remnants.

The lobby had collected this Hungarian Tavasz T 4303 television. These televisions were made between 1960 and 1964. This TV was very widespread; in its time it was considered a "people's TV." The picture tube was explosive, so the plexiglass on the front did not serve only as decoration. The buttons of its control mechanism are on the side. 

The translation from the top left to right is Light/Power, Volume, Vertical, Horizontal, Fine Tuning, Contrast.

This book published in Budapest in 1977 is called My Mother's Chicken. It is full of little rhymes about people in the neighborhood. As much as I love my Hungarian roots, I'm grateful I don't have to learn this incredibly difficult language.

Finally, an antique I actually owned. Although the bobbin access door is missing, I checked and the bobbin is still there!

Trip to Sighetu Marmației

 After visiting an NGO, we headed north toward the Ukrainian border at the city of Sighetu Marmației, usually just called Sighet. It had two historical sites we wanted to visit: Elie Wiesel's childhood home and the Memorial of the Victims of Communism and of the Resistance.

Driving the 90 minutes up to Sighet was a delight. Wooden churches and gates, tall steeples and shepherds tending their sheep.

We learned a lot about the ghetto formed in Romania for the Jews in the country, then the eventual evacuation to Auschwitz.

Elie Wiesel was happy that his childhood home would be used as a Holocaust Memorial. “I am honored and deeply moved that my cherished home in Sighet has become a place Romanians and others can learn about the crimes of the Holocaust, and how the Jewish community was wiped out,” Wiesel said.

After our visit we walked a few blocks to the Memorial of the Victim of Communism. Originally, this was a prison built in 1897 and over the years housed locals or prisoners of war during both World Wars. But after World War II the communists who took over Romania began putting political prisoners here.

Each room of the 3-story barracks is dedicated to a different aspect of prison life, the communist takeover, and the resistance up to December 1989.

This first room showed the locations of other political prisons throughout the country. Since Sighet is so far away from Bucharest, they sent the most "dangerous" thinkers here.

This room depicted the ballot box and how elections in 1946 were stolen. One of the means was by trick drawers in ballot boxes.

This cell was for Iuliu Maniu who served as Prime Minister of Romania for three terms during 1928–1933. Arrested by the ascendant communist authorities in 1947, he was convicted of treason in a show trial and sent to Sighet Prison, where he died six years later.

Officially established by decree in 1948, the Security Police, the number of positions was 4,641. By 1951, the staff had increased to 15,280. The Interior Ministry tried to liquidate all opponents of the regime. It was this way the "administrative arrest" came into being: arrest without warrant, investigation, or trial. Hundreds of thousands were arrested and sent to labor camps. In the 1980s the Securitate conceived a methodical program of mass indoctrination using rumors, frame-ups, public humiliations, censorship, and repression of the slightest gestures of independence.

Despite the fall of Ceausescu on Christmas Day, 1989, the traces of this violation of the national consciousness persist today in the mentality of the public.

This little notebook contained some English words that a prisoner was studying.

"Article 209" of the penal code was the black hole of the communist justice system. A third of political convictions after 1948 were handed down on the basis of this article, which defined with diabolical ambiguity like "machination against the socialist order" or "machination against state order." On this pretext one could be convicted for taking part in an anti-communist organization, for refusing to join a trade union or collective farm, for poking the eyes out of an official portrait, or quite simply for telling a joke.

On the other side of the window was the courtyard. It was a nice warm spring day, but desperately cold inside. Most who were brought here died here. Overall, more than 2 million people were persecuted politically using coercive methods in the People's Republic of Romania. Over 600,000 were arrested and sentenced to imprisonment between 1945-1989.

Trip to Baia Mare

Because of a project needed closing in Baia Mare, we set out on Tuesday for a long drive. It took about 9 hours to get there and arrived in the rain. I saw my first stork, sitting in his nest in the pouring rain. In the morning we set out to see the city before our appointment.

In 1469 King Matthias Corvin allowed the city of Baia Mare to build stone walls for defense purposes, walls that were guarded by seven towers. The Butchers' Bastion was part of this stone enclosure guarding the South Gate of the fortress, one of the four main entrance gates to the city. This bastion was built around 1547. The walls were built of stone and are one meter thick, circular in shape with two levels.

I would have loved to see these bells ring. The big bell in Stephen's Tower was ringing while we were there. To the right you see remnants of the old church and throughout the courtyard there are many windows on the ground to view the old foundations.

St. Stephen's Tower is 130 feet high and built in a neo-Gothic style. Eventually used for strategic observation and detecting fires, Stephen's Tower was initially a bell tower for Saint Stephen's church, built in 1347-76. The bell tower was added in 1446 on the church's southwest side.

If you look carefully you can see the foundations of the bell tower. We bought our tickets for a few dollars, but were delayed until the bell rang. It would have been deafening if we were inside.

Each step was carefully tread. This particular angular staircase was unique in the building, thank goodness.

The clock had rods protruding from the mechanism out to each face. It was fun to watch it work.

I loved walking around the ramparts, if you can call them that. It was a nice way to see the entire city. Baia Mare is much larger than I expected. We climbed as high as possible. The remainder of the tower can be seen through this piece of glass if you can avoid our reflections.