Natalism

Two months had then passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Central and Eastern Europe had started to enjoy the long-awaited freedoms they were denied for half a century by their Soviet masters.

But as that part of the continent was festively breaking free from its shackles, Romania remained untouched by the winds of change under the monolithic rule of a recalcitrant megalomaniac.

Romania was the only country facing wide spread violence during the 1989 revolutions; officially, 1,104 people died and 3,300 were injured. Nicolae Ceausescu's dictatorship, believed to be the most brutal and repressive in Eastern Europe, was without doubt one of the main reasons for such a tragic end - as the work ''The 1989 Revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe.

Thousands of people toured the former building of the Central Committee (CC) of the Romanian Communist Party (PCR) on Sunday, the current headquarters of the Interior Ministry (MAI), with people having access to spaces that were never open to the public - such as the arrest of the former Securitate, located in the basement of the CC, or the balcony from the first floor, where Nicolae Ceausescu

The central events took place in the capital, Bucharest, where revolutionaries, authorities and ordinary citizens remembered the dead on Sunday, with an honour guard paying their respects to the victims of the uprising at the monument dedicated to them in Revolution Square.

It was mid-December 1989 when hundreds of thousands of people in Timisoara, Bucharest and other Romanian towns and cities defied Nicolae Ceausescu's reign of fear and took to the streets to free themselves from over four decades of Communist dictatorship. 

President Klaus Iohannis said, in his speech delivered at the Romanian National Opera of Timisoara, that denying the existence of an anti-communist revolution in Romania of 1989 represents "a shameful act of denying the huge human sacrifice." He brought to mind that, 30 years ago, in Timisoara, the communist regime was defeated for the first time and "the first sign of liberty was given." He in

The year 1989 meant the end of the communist regime in the Central and Eastern European countries. Romania was the only ex-communist country in the case of which the switch to democracy was violent, involving protests and street fights, and the only country where the leaders of the former regime got executed.

President Klaus Iohannis stated on Monday that the state has "delayed for far too long" the discovery of the truth about the Revolution in 1989 and emphasized that justice must hold those guilty accountable. "After 1990, there were different initiatives through which the memory of those who gave their lives in December 1989 was honored.

The first exhibition by Enver Hoxha, a medical doctor, plastic surgeon and amateur photographer, which is showing at the National Museum of Kosovo in Pristina until Sunday, documents the journeys of several groups of fleeing refugees across Kosovo from March to June 1999.

Photo: BIRN.

As the giant digital clock strikes 9 p.m., bursts of water surge from the fountains, lit up in colour and dancing to the music of Johann Strauss, Pharrell Williams and sprightly Romanian songs.