On a sunny but chilly morning in Bucharest, Ghencea Cemetery hummed with people, flower vendors, and beggars, as Christmas mass in a small church in the graveyard neared its end. Old women slowly made their way through the muddy alleyways carrying flowers and candles, as the priest said the closing prayers.
A handful of people played the old anthem of Communist Romania and posed for cameras around a red granite grave at the side of a small alley next to the church, the last resting place of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu, the former communist rulers of Romania.
Sentenced to death by a drumhead court martial in Targoviste, central Romania, in 1989, they were executed by firing squad on Christmas Day during the violent uprising that ended 42 years of communist rule.
The Ceausescus ruled Romania with an iron fist from 1965 until 1989, their regime deemed the harshest in Eastern Europe. They established a personality cult as “the mother and father of the nation”, and to some diehard supporters they remain so.
“They killed him the day our Lord Jesus Christ was born. The worst curse [on us]. What other leader was ever killed like Ceausescu?” said an 80-year old man who gave his name as Valentin and described himself as a former Communist party member.
A harsh regime with a violent end Ceausescu’s government closed borders and banned citizens from leaving the country, restricting contact with foreigners. Hundreds of Romanians drowned or were shot by border police while trying to escape to the former Yugoslavia by swimming across the Danube. Food supplies were rationed, contraception and abortion banned.
Churches and historical buildings were demolished in central Bucharest to make room for the couple’s dream residence, the House of the People – today’s Parliament – the second biggest administrative building in the world, surrounded by a neighborhood designed to accommodate ministries, state institutions and the residences of Communist Party apparatchiks.
But after protests erupted in Bucharest on December 22, the couple fled by helicopter. They were apprehended several hours later and jailed until their trial on December 25. The trial took roughly two hours and was broadcast on Romanian public television. So was the couple’s execution, carried out by three soldiers with their service rifles.
The “nostalgic”
But while, for the past 29 years, most Romanians remember the 1,104 victims of the fighting during the 1989 Revolution, a handful of “nostalgic” supporters of Ceausescu gather every Christmas to pay their respects to the former “beloved leader”. They also gather in the same place on January 26 every year to mark Nicolae Ceausescu’s birthday.
The ritual is more or less the same be it on the anniversary of his death or his birth: they play communist patriotic songs, lay flowers and wreaths on the grave, light candles and even give away the traditional Romanian Orthodox pomana – usually plates or small bags filled with food relatives give away to the poor to bring relief to the souls of the dead.
“For my mother Elena’s soul,” a woman says as she hands a boy a plastic glass filled with coliva – a traditional sweet porridge made of boiled wholewheat that relatives give away on funerals or when they mark the death of a family member – and a small plastic bag with fruits and candy.
“He left us a rich country, a respected country. When he went abroad he was respected!” an elderly man shouts, as he poses for a TV camera.
“If Romanians led such a good life after 1989, why did a quarter of the population leave the country?” shouts another man, wearing an old but well maintained black winter coat.
Valentin has his own theory about the trial and death of the Ceausescus and he is not shy to tell any interested journalists. He has spoken to many curious reporters over the years, both local and foreign. But not many bother to come to the grave anymore, he says.
“But we are still here for the next generations, for these young people to find out what really happened,” he explains. “He was betrayed by his [foreign] friends, because they didn’t like that he was proud and did not play the way they asked him to,” he said.
Ceausescu’s policy in the late 1980s was to pay off Romania’s entire foreign debt, rationing utilities such as electricity, water and heating and even food. “We did not depend on anyone, they could not pressure him into anything,” Valentin said.
A new red granite grave
The graves have not always been here. After their execution, the Ceausescus were buried in an unmarked grave in the military section of the Ghencea Cemetery. But in June 2010, after a 5-year legal battle by the couple’s three children – Nicu, Valentin and Zoia – over the location of the couple’s bodies, a Romanian court ordered forensic scientists to exhume the bodies and perform a DNA test. In the meantime, both Zoia and Nicu died, leaving the surviving brother, Valentin, and Zoia’s husband Mircea Oprean to identify the bodies.
The tests confirmed in November 2010 that the exhumed male body indeed belonged to Nicolae Ceausescu, although the female body found in the grave was never identified due to lack of proper samples from relatives.
The couple was reburied in the civilian part of the cemetery, in the current location, and besides “nostalgic” former Communist Party members, it also attracts many tourists choosing to tour “the dark side” of Bucharest.
“They’re here every year. I don’t know why they choose to do this, maybe they simply want attention,” Ioan, a 45-year-old security guard at the cemetery told BIRN. “They’re the same people, not many. They don’t look like they know what most Romanians went through, the hunger, the poverty, the terror. They probably did not have to face the cold in the winter standing in long lines to buy a bottle of milk and a piece of bread. Or maybe they forgot,” he shrugged.
By noon, as the Christmas mass ends in the cemetery church, the small group of elderly people disperses, vowing to meet again “if God allows it”.
“See you on January 26,” Valentin, the Communist Party member shouted as a few people headed towards the cemetery gate.
