REMEMBRANCE IN TIME - Index of

Rozalinda POSEA: The Memorial Museums Situation after the 1990’s In Romania … 419
In Odorheiul Secuiesc, there’s another memorial house dedicated to the poet, translator
and redactor Tompa László, the exhibition presenting dates about his life and activities.
We exposed some of remarkable memorial museums existing on the Romania’s
territory. Many of the memorial houses existing weren’t include in this study, but this
thing doesn’t mean that they are less important for illustrating the past and the activity of
the remarked personalities along the history, through their own worth. We tried only to
underline the existence of these culture places after the 1990-s, many of them because of
their cultural and educative activities.
The museum dedicated to „Memorial Pain” from Sighet is organised by the Civic
Society. For the opening and sustaining such institutions dedicated to the collective
memory, there were made a lot of trying (to Pitesti, Fagaras, in the old communist
prisons) not materialized until the present
The Civic Academy Foundation was born in 21st of April 1994. Through its main
purposes, there’s also the civic education, teenagers education, a better knowledge of the
country’s past and, in this sense, the restitution of the contemporary history of Romania,
falsified in the years of the communism dictatorship. The main project is called The
Memorial of th Victims of Communism and of the Sighet Resistance.
The Memorial of the Victims of Communism and the Resistance was thought and
initiated starting with the year 1992 by the president of the Civic Aliance, Ana Blandiana,
realised together with Romulus Rusan and an important group of historians, architects
and designers. At 21 April 1994, the author of the project, Ana Blandiana, and a number
of 175 of personalities gave life to the Civic Academy Foundation, having as general
purpose the civic education at his „Memorial”.
Through a competition, the composition of the rehabilitation project was given to a
company called UMROL from Cluj, and the self execution from Baia Mare. The work
lasted until the year of 2000. Because the building, old as a Century, was ruined and full
of dampness, it was necessarily the restoring of the foundations, of the isolations and of
the roof, and the inside walls, which were anyway repainted and they didn’t remind of the
50’s period, were painted in white. Each cell became a museum room, in which, firstly in
a temporary form and then final, following now an chronological order, were attached
objects, photos, documents, creating in this way the ambiance and the documentation of a
hall of a museum. In one of the courtyards of the past prison, after a contest of projects in
which participated 50 architects and artists, was built in 1997 a Space of Silence and
Prayer, after the project made by the architect Radu Mihăilescu, which combines the
ancient style (the suggestion of the Greek tholos and the Christian catacomb) with a
modern vision. On the descending ramp walls in the underground space were engraved
the name of almost eight thousands of death people in the prisons, camps and the
deportation places of Romania. Extremely meticulous, raising the names of all the deaths
was really difficult and it needed ten years of work in the International Centre of Studies
about Communism, and the number is pretty far to discover the real amplitude of the
repression. The majority of the names were established by Cicerone IoniŃoiu and the
regretted Eugen Şahan, both historians and ex-political prisoners. Regarding the costs for
this project, they were paid by the regretted sponsor Mişu Cârciog from London, which
rests until now the principal donator of the Memorial.