The Memorial to the Revolution of 16–22 December in Timişoara was founded on 26 April 1990, only a few months after the Romanian Revolution of December 1989. According to its statutes, the declared purpose of this civic initiative, initially made concrete in the form of an association, is “to honour the memory of the victims of the repression of December 1989.” Timişoara, which was accorded the status of “martyr city” of the 1989 Revolution, is the place where the popular revolt against the communist dictatorship in Romania began. The congregation gathered already in the evening of 15 December 1989 in Maria Square to prevent the transfer of their pastor László Tőkés to another parish outside the city were gradually joined by more and more people, until the amorphous and heterogenous crowd was transformed into a demonstration of solidarity against the regime. The key moment was during the evening of 16 December, when the poet Ion Monoran, a member of Timişoara’s Bohemian circles who worked as a plumber due to the fact that an arrest when he was at high school had prevented him from pursuing a normal career as a writer, had the bright idea of stopping trams that were passing nearby. The number of those gathered in the square thus grew rapidly, and the demonstrators began to shout slogans against communism and the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceauşescu. The following day, 17 December, saw the beginning of repression against the anticommunist demonstrators and the appearance of the first victims. Among these was Traian Orban, the current president of the Memorial to the Revolution. The city of Timişoara stood alone against the dictatorship of Ceauşescu, who at a meeting of the Political Executive Committee on 17 December had taken the firm decision to repress the Timişoara demonstration with violence. Only on 21 December 1989 did the revolt break out in Bucharest too, following the mass meeting called by Ceauşescu to condemn the actions of the “hooligans” of Timişoara, which, in the General Secretary’s opinion, had been instigated from outside Romania by foreign “agencies” in the West and the East. Although bloodily repressed in Bucharest too, the revolt continued until, on 22 December, Ceauşescu fled from the central headquarters of the Party. He was later captured on his way to Târgovişte, where he was subjected to a simulacrum of a trial and executed on 25 December 1989. The change of regime had, however, taken place in the evening of 22 December, when the power vacuum was filled by the self-proclaimed National Salvation Front, which immediately abolished the leading role that the Communist Party had held in society according to the constitution and re-legalized political pluralism (D. Petrescu 2010). In contrast to other countries, the regime change of 1989 was a violent one in Romania. The victims of repression during those days numbered over 1,000 dead and over 3,000 wounded. To this day it is not known exactly who was to blame. The role of guardians of memory, explicitly taken up by a number of organizations, is all the more important inasmuch as the commemoration of these victims, to whom the Romanian are indebted for their freedom, is a fundamental component of consolidation of democracy (C. Petrescu & D. Petrescu 2010).
The Memorial to the Revolution of 16–22 December in Timişoara is probably the most important of these vectors of collective memory. Traian Orban, the president of the Association, recalls the beginnings of this Memorial: “It was set up on 26 April 1990 by architects, engineers, writers, artists, the Metropolitan of the Banat, but also by ordinary people. All of them interested in creating a Memorial in Timişoara, the city that started the Revolution of December 1989. They didn’t have much idea of what this Memorial was going to be like. They were thinking of a commemorative monument, but they didn’t succeed that year. In 1991, at the end of the year, I took over the leadership of the Memorial. Initially I was part of the 17 December 1989 Association, but its aims had already been diverted, and I and others who belonged to the Truth and Justice Committee soon withdrew. […] Right from the first year after I got there,” he explains, “we set about making the memorial complex in the Heroes’ Cemetery – the monument, the chapel, and the symbolic tombs. That was the first objective to be achieved.” From the very beginning, the initiative was seen as a site of memory, and the creation of this collection with the value of a historical and ethical heritage took place by stages. In a first phase, documents connected to the Revolution were gathered, under the supervision and thanks to the efforts of the people who made up the Association. This impressive documentary resource regarding what happened in the first days of the revolutionary movements of December 1989 in Romania has been enriched since then, year by year. The acquisition and organization of the documents, whether of a civil or official, including military, nature, is a continuous process that even today has not come to an end.
From 1990 to 1999, in parallel with this activity of creating and consolidating the stock of documents, an extensive project of marking important sites of the memory of the Revolution was carried out. More precisely, in this period a memorial complex was established in the Heroes’ Cemetery of Timişoara and twelve other monuments were positioned in areas of significance for the memory of the repression in December 1989. From the very beginning, the initiative enjoyed widespread approval in Timişoara. Traian Orban remembers how such a large-scale project was set in motion, to be brought to completion almost a decade later: “We set out, and we received the approval of the local council, to position twelve monuments in the city. It was actually very interesting: we met artists, people from the Timişoara Union of Visual Artists, and they circulated an announcement among sculptors. We made a list of about fifteen names of prominent artists and proposed this project to them. We went round the city with them and told them approximately where we wanted the monuments to be positioned, in the areas where people had died – not just in the centre of Timişoara but in other districts too. Twelve of them stayed! After holding the initial symposium with visual artists at which we announced the project, we started to wonder, and we went to the Metropolitan of the Banat, to Nicolae Corneanu: how do we do it? We’ve got the idea, we’ve got photographs of the areas, we’ve got sketches of possible monuments. And the Metropolitan answered me, I remember perfectly, with a gentle voice: ‘There are twelve, right? Well, in that case make the first one!’ The first was the monument at the House of Youth, the work of Ingo Glass, a sculptor with a considerable reputation in the West, originally from Timişoara. It’s dedicated to those who were incinerated at the crematorium; it’s our first monument, with the names of those who died and were incinerated at the crematorium inscribed on the vertical surface. In 1992 it was started, and in 1993 it was finished. In 1999 the last one, the twelfth was put up.”
With regard to the funds that supported this large-scale project, and the materials in which the twelve monuments were finally cast, the account given by Traian Orban, who coordinated the whole programme, is suggestive and precious because he underlines the wide popularity of this project locally: ‘To a significant extent, in the beginning, the financing of these monuments came from donations. We went with special urns to various institutions and factories, and we collected donations. With these donations we paid for the materials in which the maquettes for the monuments were made – full-scale models. The amounts people put in weren’t large – one leu, two lei. But the large number of donors meant that the final amount was a significant one. And this showed – and we were very happy about it – the support of the people of Timişoara for this project. Then we transported the maquettes to Combinatul Fondului Plastic [the Artists’ Union workshops] in Bucharest and there they were cast in bronze, in the final material. In parallel, we went to factories and gathered non-ferrous materials – bronze, copper, and in fact even reusable iron. We put them on a trailer, took them somewhere in Oltenia to a company, and they cast them in the form of ingots. We lost about 30% in the casting – the materials we brought were pretty dirty, and a lot of slag was produced. But there was still enough left to take the ingots to Bucharest and, by 1999, to have these twelve monuments. The ingots weighed eight or nine tonnes; I know that because the materials we took to be melted down weighed about twelve tonnes. At a certain point we received financial support from the Libertatea Fund, and with it we bought a few more bronze ingots. With the same money we also bought large stone blocks from the Simeria quarry and brought them to Timişoara.”
Simultaneous with the project of erecting monuments of artistic and symbolic value to mark important sites of memory in Timişoara, sites where there had been victims of repression in December 1989, the Memorial of the Revolution was also concerned with the judicial dimension to the evaluation of the events of December 1989. Traian Orban summarizes the Association’s efforts to help the Romanian justice system with regard to what has been called the “Revolution file,” with reference to the extensive but fruitless activity of identifying those guilty of the death or wounding of the revolutionaries of December: “In parallel with this project with the artists, at the Memorial we also dealt with the Trial of the Revolution. We supported various court actions; we collaborated with the people from the prosecution service; we gave them documents about the victims of the revolution, various declarations, hospital records, coroners’ reports; they got photographs from us. Until 1996 [i.e. while the party dominated by former communist bureaucrats was in power], the decision in all the cases was ‘no criminal pursuit.’ In 1996, some files were opened; we found out about the incinerated bodies of Timişoara, and where the ashes went. [Military prosecutor] General Voinea declared to us that he had found the testimonies of those who worked at the crematorium at the time. He also told us about the minibus in which they came with rubbish bins in which they had put the ashes of those who had been incinerated, whose traces they wanted to wipe away, and took them to Popeşti-Leordeni [near Bucharest]. Out of all that happened then, there, it was something utterly sinister. I was very, very affected by these facts. On that occasion forty-three people were incinerated. And if that transport was so well organized, might there not have been other transports? Because there are still a lot of people seeking the disappeared, their bodies, which they say they haven’t seen. There are a lot of people, relatives who didn’t have documents about the disappeared, who were told that the disappeared went over the border...”
The year 2000 was an inaugural moment for the scholarly dimension of this collection connected to the historical heritage of Romania: it was then that the National Centre for Documentation, Research, and Public Information Regarding the Romanian Revolution of 1989 was founded. As is explained in the official documents of this department: “The declared purpose of the Centre is to become an operative source of information referring to the events that led to the fall of the communist regime in Romania, setting out to valorize Romanian historical information relating to the events of 1989 in Central and South-Eastern Europe. Because these moments cannot be fully understood without a knowledge of the communist system as a whole, the Centre is concerned also with the study of the communist period in Romania.” Above all, this centre systematizes the knowledge produced in the process of historical reconstruction of the popular revolt, both at local level in Timişoara and at the level of the whole country in order to put into practice public representations of this very controversial period in the recent history of Romania. In short, the Timişoara Memorial is one of the few places in Romania in which the new disciplinary field of public history has been developed as a particular priority. This calls for the involvement of specialists in the field of history and of adjacent disciplines in the interpretation of the past in a way that can be understood by the broader community of non-specialists.
The first premises in which the Memorial to the Revolution of 16–22 December 1989 in Timişoara collection was kept were at 8 Str. Emanoil Ungureanu. These premises were in a nationalized building, in a state of ruin in 1990 when it was assigned by decision to the Memorial to the Revolution of 16–22 December 1989 in Timişoara Association, giving the Association right of use for a period of ninety-nine years. Thanks to massive subsidies from the state, the building was renovated and became useable. Following a number of retrocession trials, however, it was restored to its rightful owners, with the result that in 2011 the whole collection had to be moved to Pavilion M of Barracks 1079 Timişoara. The new building, situated at 2/B Str. Oituz, is on two levels and is much more spacious than the original premises, making possible an arrangement corresponding to the requirements of a Memorial and a Documentation Centre.
Although the new premises still require considerable work, exhibition halls have been set up within the building, with themes principally relating to the events of 1989 in Romania, but also dealing with those in the other former communist countries. The same building also houses the National Centre for Documentation, Research, and Public Information Regarding the Romanian Revolution of 1989. As a result of the activity of this centre, the collection of the Memorial to the Revolution of 16–22 December 1989 in Timişoara is presented in schools, especially in Timişoara but also elsewhere in the Banat region, through interactive methods developed as part of educational programmes. The Memorial is visited annually by some tens of thousands of people, most of them pupils and foreign tourists. For tourists visiting the Memorial, guiding is provided in various languages: Romanian, English, German, French, Italian, Hungarian, and Serbian. Asked about the typical reactions of visitors to this institution of memory, its president, Traian Orban, says that “they are all very attentive. Some ask about details. Others are silent. Silent for a long time. And some weep. Many weep, in fact. Because the way we present what we have here is, somehow, how should I say, from the soul…”
