Banat

The historic region of Banat, a borderland that has always been a melting pot of peoples, is today divided between Serbia, Hungary and Romania. It was Romania that, after wars and the resulting peace treaties, got the largest part as well as the most important city, Timisoara. Today the Romanian Banat lives in symbiosis with its city, which seems to have swallowed up everything else. In fact, as soon as you leave Timisoara you encounter only stretches of fields, small villages and a few hills. I went to Timisoara a couple of times, 13 years apart — an eternity if you think that in that period both the government and the economy changed. In December 1988 I entered Romania for the first time from the border with Serbia near Moravita; the country was under a communist regime and Nicolae Ceausescu ruled undisturbed.

Crossing that border, despite carrying hard currency, was extremely complicated: hours of waiting, meticulous searches of the car and luggage, then, after giving coffee or cigarettes to the policeman on duty, you could continue your journey. The city was preceded by an unreal territory; it was the first time I had set foot beyond the Iron Curtain and what appeared before my eyes was entirely new to me. The uneven road ran through a desolate countryside, partly covered in snow; numerous black crows roamed the fields. Timisoara then appeared to me as an extremely sad city: very little traffic, streets walked by miserably dressed people, horse-drawn carts, dilapidated trolleybuses and groups of gypsies. I was approached by some people who offered me a very advantageous black-market currency exchange but ended up robbing me, fobbing me off with a wad of newspaper.

I left the city hastily by the road that, passing through Lugoj, enters Transylvania (see the relevant diary). A little over a year later, it was precisely from Timisoara that the spark was struck that gave rise to the revolution that toppled the communist regime. Returning to Timisoara in 2001, I found a completely transformed city: an elegant historic centre, beautiful squares, a majestic cathedral. I was surprised by this positive turn, an evolution better than many other places in the country.