In late March 1989, nine months before Ceausescu and his wife were summarily shot, I travelled to Romania on an abortive mission to photograph the tomb of the great-great-grandmother of Queen Elizabeth II.



Queen Elizabeth II and Sir Nicolae Ceausescu, London 1978. He was stripped of his knighthood on 24th December 1989, the day before he was executed.


In the last year of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu’s murderous reign, the village of Sangeorgiu de Padure in northern Romania was waiting to be demolished. It was just one of 7000 villages scheduled for obliteration, with their inhabitants, including the smaller livestock, to be re-housed in concrete high-rises.

But Sangeorgiu de Padure was (and still is, thank God) exceptional in at least one respect: The remains of the great-great-grandmother of Queen Elizabeth II are buried in the crypt of the village’s Reformed church.

Jessica Douglas-Home, the driving force behind efforts by a dozen or so British academics and journalists to publicise the horrors being committed by Ceausescu, is a friend of the queen’s eldest son, Prince Charles. The prince was eager to help Douglas-Home, but the problem was how, given the political constraints imposed upon the heir to the British throne.

In Once Upon Another Time*, an account of her experiences in Romania in the late 1980s, Douglas-Home reveals how frustrated Prince Charles had become by the reluctance of the British government to take a stronger stand against Ceausescu’s destruction of rural Romania. Her determined campaign, which received not a farthing of government funding, was as much about saving lives as it was about saving a way of life expressed in the country’s built heritage.

One bold idea, for the prince himself to visit Romania, with the ancestral tomb serving as a pretext, was ruled out as too political by the Foreign Office. Instead, he was permitted to give a speech on the subject.

Douglas-Home and others had made several visits to Romania in 1987-8, establishing contact with the tiny handful of people willing to speak openly about the regime. My chance came in March 1989. She asked me to visit three of her contacts in Bucharest: An historian called Andrei Plesu; a poet called Mircea Dinescu; and an architect called Mariana Celac; and to travel up to Sangeorgiu de Padure in Mures county, to photograph the Reformed church and the tomb of Countess Claudine Rhedey.

I saw Mariana Celac first. She was working hard to conserve as much original architectural detail of Bucharest’s buildings before they were razed to the ground. She needed litres of fixer for her charcoal sketches of these details, which I delivered, together with some simple provisions such as aspirin and grapefruit.

In early 1989, the latest edition of the official History of Bucharest showed for the first time a great white blob on the city map. This was where the mediaeval heart of the city had stood six years earlier. Between 1983 and 1989, almost one quarter of Bucharest was razed. It is not known how many of the estimated 20 000 slave workers died while realizing Ceausescu’s harrowing architectural schemes inspired by North Korea. 22 Christian churches, 6 synagogues and 30 000 homes disappeared. And millions still live with the deadening results.

In the north-west of the city, near Piata Victorei, I walked into a residential street being bulldozed. Before I left the country five days later, I revisited the street and it had vanished.

There was an old couple standing at the end of their garden, watching a neighbour’s house being demolished; they were waiting their turn. Across the street piled high with rubble and broken furniture, a family stood silently in front of their home, surrounded by their possessions – a bedstead, a cupboard, table and chairs. Towering over this pathetic scene were the pitted concrete high-rises into which these people would be removed. They would have had to sign the standard request that their own house be knocked down and that they be re-housed in a modern apartment. The state charged a fee for the cost of the demolition work.

I then went to Andrei Plesu’s house. I knocked on the door and a lady leant out of a window above and asked who I was: “A friend from England”, I replied. The door was opened and she demanded to see my passport. “I’m sorry. I’m like a customs official” and explained that I had not looked English. Her eyes were weeping from an infection caused by the dust from the demolition going on all around her. I handed over some provisions.

Plesu’s wife was alone. Their apartment was filled with books and furniture obviously gathered over generations. The whole house had been theirs once, she explained, but it had been taken from them. For a time, even the apartment they had had to share with two other families. She had a grubby paper which declared her to be the owner of the house. It is worth as much or as little as the authorities wish: “They could throw us out or demolish the whole street next week if they wanted to.”

After passing on the messages I had from England, she said her husband was expected shortly with a university colleague. My presence would compromise the colleague. So I left quickly. It was a crime to speak with foreigners and all conversations had to be reported to the police: “It would terrify my husband’s colleague to find you here.”

I went into a shop and was sickened by the scene of weary people peering into big metal buckets of animal entrails, the only meat available outside Party shops. In a covered market place, peasants stood behind tables on which they had spread little piles of nettles, sunflower seeds and a few bruised apples.

I was alright. That evening, I had dinner in the hotel. The dining room was a cross between a night club and a school canteen. To accompany the meal, there was a floor show - two half dressed women on rope swings and a man that looked like Gary Glitter prancing around to ‘Ra Ra Rasputin, Lover of the Russian Queen’.

The next morning I went to the British embassy on Jules Michelet to tell them I had arrived. The ambassador took me to the safe room in the embassy where we could talk freely, and I told him that I was hoping to get up to Sangeorgiu de Padure. He was sympathetic but hardly encouraging. A few weeks earlier, the ambassador had himself attempted to visit the country’s best known dissident, the French language professor, Doina Cornea, at her home in Cluj. He had been physically barred from entering her house by the police.

The Romanian authorities had been aware of my visit from the day I had applied for a visa. And if they hadn’t actually been following me from the moment the Tarom ROMBAC 1-11 aircraft touched down at Otopeni Airport, they certainly were after I had called in to see the ambassador. This was no reason to abandon my visit to Mircea Dinescu, the last of my contacts. Plesu, Celac and Dinescu welcomed visitors from abroad. It showed the authorities that they had not been forgotten. I left Dinescu to last because he had been put under house arrest only a few days earlier (he had criticised the regime in an interview in a French newspaper), and any visitors were sure to be picked up soon after seeing him.


Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher with Elena and Nicolae Ceausescu in London 1981. Thatcher spoke of Britain's pride in its "contribution to the Romanian aircraft industry", a reference to the fact that in May 1977, British Aerospace (BAE Systems today) agreed to transfer its One-Eleven commercial aircraft technology to Romania. Licensed production under the ROMBAC 1-11 name followed in 1979. The programme, though a great diplomatic coup for Ceausescu, was a commercial flop, with just nine aircraft completed in the ten year life of the programme.

In the late afternoon of my second day, I called on Dinescu. I spent a couple of hours with him and his family, and left in the dark, passing the Securitate guards watching the house. I walked back to the hotel.

An hour later, the telephone rang in my room. I was summoned down to the reception, and ushered into a backroom where two men, still in their long black leather coats, were sitting and smoking.

They told me to leave on the morning plane and to tell ‘my master’ to stop sending people to Romania: “Your activities are incompatible with your status as a tourist”.

The following day, a Sunday, I took a taxi to the airport. There was a long queue of British tourists checking-in for the flight home after a week of cut-price skiing in Brasov. There were two flights a week, and this one was full. So I went back into town and straight to the Anglican Church in time for the Morning Service. The congregation was made up of diplomats and elderly Romanians. The reading was from Exodus, Chapter 3: “I have surely seen the affliction of my people which are in Egypt...I know their sorrow.”

After the service, I spoke to Father Ian Sherwood. He told me how young Romanians had come in the past but that they were photographed leaving the church and later beaten up. Father Ian distributed food from the vestry door. He described how he had come back from abroad recently to discover his supply of frozen meat rotting on the floor and his crucifix beside it.

From the moment I left the church, I was accompanied by the Securitate. They never spoke to me and kept their distance, just close enough to make me aware that they were there. Their faces and habits became familiar to me over the next four days and nights. One of them chain smoked and dressed in black. Concealed in a bag under his arm was a walkie-talkie into which he would speak by inclining his head and lifting his shoulder. He was suffering from a wry neck as a result of this frequent contortion. Another was short and fat, and wore a leatherette trilby –there were thousands like him.

I made my way directly to the city’s main railway station, the Gare de Nord, where I caught a train up north. My minders placed themselves one at each end of the carriage and one outside my compartment door. My fellow travellers avoided eye contact, with me and with each other.

I got off at Brasov for the night. Here my Bucharest minders handed me over to the locals. I found a tiny pension with one wooden staircase that went straight past the reception desk behind which sat an old man. My room was under the roof. I went out in search of food. I sat down in a crowded, murky place full of smoke, took my jacket off – and then all the lights went out. When the lights came back on, I found that the key to my room had gone. When I got back, the old man at the reception said no one had been in, but when I got to my room, I discovered that my bag had been stolen –money, passport and air ticket were all gone.

I found the police station next morning, followed as always by my secret policemen. They remained outside while I reported the theft to their conventional colleagues, who gave me my rail fare back to Bucharest. With no money and passport, I thought it wiser not to continue my journey north. I returned to the capital, my mission to photograph Countess Rhedey’s tomb abandoned.

I went at once to the embassy, where the ambassador handed me over to the care of a junior diplomat who fixed me up with an emergency passport. We then set off together to Tarom’s offices to try to get a new air ticket. The telex machine was working luckily and after a couple of hours, Tarom’s London office confirmed my reservation and I was issued with a new ticket minutes before the office closed. The diplomat then took me out to dinner at Hanul Manuc, a magnificent nineteenth century galleried inn. I was grateful for her company after two days alone with my silent minders.

I had a day to fill until my scheduled flight home for which I now had a ticket again. I marched up the two hundred steps to the Patriarchal Cathedral, and then down again, and then all the way up again, all the time followed by my wheezing hunchback and his partners. By this time I had learnt to tease them. I tiptoed in and stood for some time wondering at the beauty of the place and at the energy of the old women who sprang up and down, as if they were well-fed and half their age. The priests, in contrast, looked more as if they were under the horrors of digestion than of starvation. Their shiny black limousines were parked outside the cathedral.

I then took my minders to Bucharest’s National History Museum to look at the permanent exhibition paying homage to Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu. I wandered around room after room covered in pictures of the ruling couple opening factories and surveying fields of wheat. There was a photographic record of them together with the world’s leaders. In 1978, they had quite a time, visiting Queen Elizabeth II, Mrs Thatcher, then leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition, the prime minister of Canada, the presidents of the United States and France, and the King of Spain. Ten years later, the international appeal of the Ceausescus had diminished somewhat. By 1988, the couple had to make do with Colonel Gaddafi and Yasser Arafat.

The centrepiece of the homage exhibition was a giant map of the world, with Romania in the middle. From it beams of light shot along tubes of glass to every country the couple had visited. There were two rooms full of birthday baubles offered by the couple’s terrorised subjects. There were dozens of crappy paintings of the diminutive pair - waving, smiling, kissing and embracing, many with a flight of doves springing from Elena’s hair bun. The last room displayed the medals and trophies, the robes and certificates given to the couple by foreign governments and institutions. Here I saw Elena’s Honorary Doctorate from the Polytechnic of Central London.

By now it was dusk, and I walked the full length of the Boulevard to the Victory of Socialism. The facade of Ceausescu’s spreading palace was nearly complete in March 1989. It looked down onto identical concrete blocks stretching far into the distance. Millions of coloured paving stones had been laid and were already breaking. Trees had been planted and the water pipes in the many fountains were being concealed in concrete fish. 500 lei fines, a week’s wages back then, were imposed for walking across the grass –or where the grass should have been. The whole place was deserted.

I flew home the next morning, my nerves in tatters and without the photograph of the countess’s tomb. A month later, on 27 April 1989, Prince Charles delivered a speech at the Civic Trust in London in which he spoke of the destruction of Romania’s villages. He told his audience that the tomb of his great-great-great-grandmother was to be demolished along with the church in which it lay. The speech received lots of media coverage in Europe and encouraged the nascent spoken opposition to the regime inside the country.

Next spring, I hope finally to get up to Sangeorgiu de Padure, twenty five years after my first attempt was foiled by Ceausescu's thugs: better late than never.


* Once Upon Another Time is Jessica Douglas-Home’s account of her ventures in Romania and Czechoslovakia in the late 1980s, published in 2000 by Michael Russell. ISBN 0 85955 259 4

If you would like to know how Bucharest felt and appeared to a foreigner actually living there in 1989, I recommend you read Patrick McGuinness’s novel, The Last Hundred Days, published in 2011. ISBN 978 1 85411 541 6 www.serenbooks.com

William Blacker's account of the eight years he lived in northern Romania (1996-2004) is a wonderful story of rural life and architecture. Along the Enchanted Way published by John Murray in 2009. ISNB 978 0 7195 9800 5