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Bucharest, Romania
Population:
2 Million
Worst Features:
Corruption and Street Crime
Best Feature:
Close to Transylvania so there's a chance of seeing those flying bloodsuckers
Like many Eastern European capitals, Bucharest is a show place of corruption,
filthy streets and organized crime.
Years of an urbanization program called
“systematization” under the communists has lead to the creation of some of the most
loathsome buildings in existence.
The streets are dark, dank, and filled with
garbage - the domain of the homeless and wretched street children.
Sadly begging is a national pasttime
in cities like Bucharest.
Most Romanians feel passionate about their
heritage and get very angry with outsiders who hold the belief that they are
associated with Gypsies. (In a similar way that Scottish people hate that
they are constantly called English.)
Wikipedia gives this account of the
Romanians - (though even this is disputed):
The Romanians
(also sometimes referred to along with other Balkan Latin peoples as Vlachs)
are a people speaking Romanian, a Romance language, and living in Central
and Eastern Europe. The Origin of the Romanians has been for a long time
disputed and there are two basic theories:
Daco-Romanian continuity in Dacia, Moesia and some adjacent regions.
Migration of Romanic peoples from former Roman provinces south of the Danube
in the Balkans (The Rösler Theory).
The exact region where the Romanian language and people formed is not only a
scientific puzzle, but also a heated political controversy. 19th-century
Hungarian historians largely supported the migration theory, which
maintained that Transylvania was not inhabited by Romanians at the time of
the Magyar conquests in central Europe during the 10th century. Most
Romanian historians support the theory of Daco-Romanian continuity and
maintain that Transylvania was continuously inhabited by the ancestors of
Romanians. The debate was politically charged in the 19th-20th centuries
because of territorial conflicts concerning Transylvania between Romania and
Hungary.
More recently, as former axioms of ethnogenesis have shifted, the historian
Walter Pohl noted that "centuries after the fall of the Balkan provinces, a
pastoral Latin-Roman tradition served as the point of departure for a
Valachian-Roman ethnogenesis. This kind of virtuality — ethnicity as hidden
potential that comes to the fore under certain historical circumstances — is
indicative of our new understanding of ethnic processes. In this light, the
passionate discussion for or against Roman-Romanian continuity has been
misled by a conception of ethnicity that is far too inflexible."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_the_Romanians
www.eliznik.org.uk
gives this account of Gypsies From the time
of their arrival in Romania Gypsies were the slaves of the landowners, only
to be emancipated in 1851. While in Romania some of the Gypsies took to
speaking a version of Romanian called Bayesh which can be heard in some of
the songs of Gypsy groups recorded in Hungary. Nowadays about 40% of the
Gypsies still speak Romany and many can still be seen travelling in lines of
carts along the roads of Romania. The majority live in the towns and
villages, some fully integrated into villages, some in large ornate houses
standing out from the Romanians, but others in small buildings on scraps of
lands on the villages edges.
http://www.eliznik.org.uk/RomaniaHistory/minority-gypsies.htm |
