Romania Revisited: On The Trail Of English Travellers, 1602-1941

Alan Ogden

Editions

Review

When I drove round Romania in 1984, it was like going into a timewarp and finding myself in the Middle Ages: the peasants in the villages dressed, behaved and worked pretty much as their ancestors did.  The chief difference was the oppressive sense of fear.  For this was the height of Ceaucescu’s reign, and it was a scary place to be.  From subsequent reports of this beautiful, troubled country, I had understood that the way of life in these villages had been deliberately stamped out, and the villages themselves obliterated.

Opening this book was therefore a strange experience for me.  For here are the places and scenes that I visited, photographed and described in 1998, just as I recalled.  Nothing appeared to have changed...  And the account of the author’s travels is rich with references and quotations from earlier travellers here, so you have the sense that for hundreds of years nothing much has changed…

Of course this is not the case.  Ceaucescu’s damage was terrifying.  Yet it is salutary to learn from this book how much survived.  A Romania expert told me that it was a bit lightweight, but it seems a good book to me, and extremely valuable for anyone interested in Romania’s past, or intending to travel there.  Those with a particular interest in Transylvania will want to take Winds of Sorrow - review by Johnny de Falbe