București 1989

Between 1987 and 1992 I travelled to Eastern Europe as often as money allowed. During my first journeys to Bulgaria, Czecho-Slovakia and Romania the iron curtain was very much still in place. When I travelled to Romania for the first time Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife Elena had been executed only a few months before. On 17 December 1989 93 demonstrators were killed in Timișoara by military forces, police, and the Securitate. On 25 December the dictator was dead. The Revoluția Român only lasted 9 days.

In Bucharest the scars of Romanian Systematization were obvious. The program started in 1974 and reached the capital city in the 1980s. Historic neighbourhoods were simply wiped out. The House of the Republic was built. When Ceaușescu was killed the project in the capital was not yet finished. In the skeletons of half finished apartment blocks Roma families had moved in, living under a roof but without walls, water or electricity. I was 20 years old and traveling without money for hotels. I had to rely on strangers to sleep.