The Rome of Moldova, the Venice of Făgăraş, the Bucharest of the West. Villages with resonant names and controversial histories

Several localities in Romania could be confused with big cities of the world. The Romanians have their own Rome, located on the hills around Botoșani, but also two Venices and a Bucharest hidden in the Apuseni. Settlements with resonant names have unusual stories.

Curechius. Bucharest. Photo: Daniel Guță. TRUTH

More than 3,500 people live in the commune of Roma, from Botoșani, also located on seven hills, just like the famous capital of Italy, which bears its name.

The village of Roma is located in the vicinity of the Botoşani municipality and was established after the First World War, when the families of several war veterans were appropriated here with agricultural land and house sites. In the following decades, Rome in Romania remained a patriarchal village, inhabited by families engaged in animal husbandry and agriculture. On its hills, archaeologists have discovered remains of the Cucuteni culture and tombs from the Dacian period.

The man who defied communism, hidden under the oven in Rome

In the middle of the 20th century, Rome was praised in the press of the time for the establishment of one of the first Collective Agricultural Farms (GAC), called “Ilie Pintilie”, after the railway worker who died in Doftana prison, who became a character – a symbol for the communist regime.

However, many locals opposed the collectivization, but their revolts were “rewarded” by the communist authorities with the confiscation of their wealth and years in prison. They were called “cheaps”, and their unmasking, as the culprits for the collectivization disaster, had become a priority activity in the Botošan commune. To prevent riots and keep the commune's population under control, Rome had been surrounded by a barbed wire fence, locals recalled.

Ilie Alexoaie, one of those targeted by the investigations of the communist authorities, managed to hide for 22 years, initially in a hole dug in the yard, then in a room dug under the stove of the house. He was 19 years old in 1949, when his father was arrested and sent to Gherla prison.

“When the kolkhoz had to be built, I didn't want to go. We opposed it. I thought that who could take away a right of ours? As young as I was, I didn't realize that the political regime at that time had the right of life and death over us, the peasants. They harassed us, some of them were arrested. They also took my father. I managed to run away and I escaped. I stayed there for a year in a hole. I swore to her that I would not leave until she died. And, seeing that my mother was not leaving, she dug a hole under the stove, and I stayed there for the rest of the day. for years. I haven't seen the light of day for twenty-two years.” this story in the early 90s.

In 1971, after his mother's death, Ilie came out of his hiding place to lead his mother on her last journey.

The Venices of Făgăraş

The Republic of Venice was one of the greatest naval powers of the medieval world, and today it is one of the most famous and visited cities in Italy. Romanians also have two Venices (Upper Venice and Lower Venice, from Părău commune), located near the city of Făgăraș in Brașov county.

The Venetians of Făgăraș have a mythical history, scientist Nicolae Densușianu showed in his controversial work “Prehistoric Dacia”, from the beginning of the 20th century. He wrote about three ancient peoples who would have lived at the foot of the legendary “Columne Boreale”, which, in his opinion, could only be raised somewhere in the Carpathians. These were the Celts, the Istrians and the Aenetians, and the latter, Densusianu asserted, would have left “indelible memories in the Romanian topography”. The scientist listed several localities with names left over from the legendary people, and among them were the two villages in Șara Făgăraşului. Densușianu also connected the Aenetians from the Carpathian and Danube areas with those who left Troy and those of Venice from the Adriatic Sea.

The theories of the scholar Nicolae Densușianu were viewed with suspicion, and the history proposed by him regarding the Venices of Făgăraş was not popular. The hypothesis presented by the linguist Alexandru Graur seems more plausible, that the names of the Romanian villages come from “vinețăă”, a blue powder that is added to the lime to paint the houses and that gives the walls a bluish color.

The town of Venetia de Jos became known at the beginning of the 20th century not only for its name, but also as a resort, through its salty baths and the ferruginous mud used in the treatments. The baths at Venetia Făgăraşului operated until the 1950s.

Currently, the two villages belong to the Părău commune and together have about 1,200 inhabitants.

What are the Bucharest people hiding from Apuseni

In the past, the commune of Bucureșci, located in the Metaliferi Mountains (Apuseni), was called Bucharest, but the local dialect also transformed the suffix “esti” into “eșci” in writing.

The people of the Bucureșci village in Hunedoara have been dealing with animal husbandry since ancient times, and in the last two centuries many of them have worked in the numerous metal mines that litter the Metaliferous Mountains.

The “Bucharests of Ardeal” remained, unlike the Capital of Romania, an isolated mountain area, located 15-20 kilometers from the municipality of Brad, where the villages of the commune still have a total of about 1,200 inhabitants.

The picturesque settlements of the commune of Bucureșci, however, hide a huge wealth of natural resources. In the mid-2000s, on the slope at the entrance to the village of Rovina, drilling revealed, for the first time, a “mountain” of copper, the core of which is located a few hundred meters from the village of a hundred inhabitants on the valley of the Rovina stream.

The Rovina mining project started here targets a production of over 42 tonnes of gold and over 200,000 tonnes of copper in the first 17 years from the start of mining, for two of its deposits, Rovina and Colnic, which are to be mined on the surface. Meanwhile, the third deposit, located at Cireșata, will be evaluated during the exploitation of the Rovina and Colnic quarries and could be exploited later, underground. The resources of the three deposits are estimated at about 217 tons of gold and 635,000 tons of copper, according to Euro Sun, which is developing the project, which is in its early stages but contested by environmental organizations.

Nearby, another village of Bucureșci commune preserves a disturbing history. The village of Curechiu was the place where, in the autumn of 1784, the uprising of the serfs led by Horea, Cloșca and Crișan broke out, one of the most famous revolts in Transylvania of the past centuries, considered a crucial event in Romanian history. The serfs' bloody revolts were provoked by the disastrous situation in which they found themselves, oppressed both by the Hungarian nobles who owned the estates and by the Austrian state.

The suppression of the uprising was equally terrible. Hundreds of rioters were killed by soldiers, and priests accused of supporting them were impaled, hanged or tortured to death. The leaders of the uprising, Horea and Cloșca, had the cruelest fate.

The people of Bucharest in Transylvania are far from knowing the popularity of the Capital of Romania, and its villages have dwindled their population, occupied in the past with mining and forestry work.