Women in Romania

Yesterday’s visit to the “Equal - Art and Feminism” gave us access to some wonderful paintings from some 20 of Romania’s women artists of the early part of the past century,

1916 is selected as the starting point since that was the date of the formation of the first woman artists' association in Romania - instigated by Olga Grecianu on her return from Brussels. The paintings on display cover the free period until King Carol established  in 1938 what was to be the first of the dictatorships which so disfigured the country for the next 50 years ...
I was well aware of Elena Popa, Cecilia Cuţescu-Storck (see side pic) and Rodica Maniu – the last being a particular favourite. But I had not seen the works of artists such as Olga Grecianu, Nina Arbore, Nadia Bulighin, Maria Ciurdea Steurer, Irina Codreanu, Milita Petraşcu, Merica Râmniceanu, Magdalena Radulescu and Mina Byck Wepper.
I will now add some of these painters to my Introducing the Romanian Realists of the 19^th and early 20^th Centuries

I assume the exhibition's title is ironic since it would be difficult to argue that this 20 year period of this misogynist Latin country was characterised by respect for women's rights (however much Queen Marie may have made up for her husband's fickleness) A better title might have been that of an important essay of the 1970s - Why have there been no great women artists? 

Fascinating though the paintings were, they mostly displayed the society women or domestic scenes – hardly signs of liberation. Elena’s Popa’s market scenes were the only exception – with Rodica Maniu (who is reputed to have painted many of husband Sam Mutzner’s works) celebrating Breton peasants at work in the fields with somewhat romanticising colours..

The gallery's walls contain some extended text, presumably to explain the "thinking" behind the selection but it's only in Romanian. What does it take to produce one page in at least English for the foreign visitor? The failure to do that simple thing shows the sheer arrogance of this genre of people....

National galleries in this part of the world suffer from being part of the political spoils system. They are “managed” by their respective Ministries of Culture whose Ministers (having so little else to do) obviously take full advantage of the power of appointment (and sacking) which goes with the job.

I have to admit, however, that the National Gallery apparatniks here do occasionally mount an interesting exhibition – I remember one at the National Gallery a few years back which actually brought together Bulgarian, Greek and Romanian painters (sadly their website has no archives - although it now boasts a lovely virtual tour of each of its rooms) – but it missed the opportunity to challenge the indifference these nations now display to one another…..

I have two other complaints about the management of Bucharest's National Gallery -

- Although a catalogue (172pp) is available, it is entirely (as always) in Romanian  

- They also try to charge 30 euros for taking photographs 

Hardly surprising therefore that Romanian art remains unknown. I have referred before to the greater accessibility in Bulgaria to works of the early 20th century. Romanian "Collectors" - generally the dubious family members of old communists - have successfully squirrelled away most of the Romanian painting tradition in their large houses. 

Artmark is Romania's auction house has become almost the only way to see this work - as it is transferred from one rich owner to another (the prices are ten times more than in Bulgaria!). See for yourself in their glossy catalogues - which can be sent to you on request eg this one from September 

This, of course, makes the task of art curators all the more critical - and raises the larger question of how creatively art curators understand and practice their function – those at The Netherlands came in for some criticism recently for hiring philosophy-populising Alain de Boton to write some provocative tags/slogans….

ps interesting that the renaming of the title of this post seems to have attracted more viewers....I wonder why???? 

The book of the year!!

And here it is - the long-anticipated book - In Praise of Doubt!!

Weighing in at 250 pages – the book of last year’s posts…..
A trailer for its contents can be read here

Feast on it while you can…..

It joins Bulgarian Realists – updated edition and another couple of E-books (which can be accessed at the top right corner of my blog).

Sunday saw the temperatures here drop by 30 degree - from plus 15 to minus 15!! The snow started slowly but soon had a grip....So my run down to Sofia is pushed back until Friday which looks a lovely day for the route from Bucharest through Russe and Pleven to Sofia......

The Collected Edition

Some bloggers take Montaigne as their patron saint but John Updike deserves a place in that Parthenon. Updike was such a prolific writer that he inspired envy – “a penis with a thesaurus” was one cruel comment. Not for nothing perhaps was the male hero in his long-running series of novels about small-town America named “Rabbit”!

Like a blogger, everything he did seemed to turn into published prose – or verse.

And, in a typical pre-emptive strike on biographers, he actually published an autobiography “Self-Consciousness” so frank about, for example, his ailments that, as he put it, “it was criticised as a parading of my wounds”. But, as the first of the book reviews which formed his 2007 collection “Due Considerations” puts it, “the wounds were mine to parade and not some callow inquisitor’s”.

I know all this because I have just brought home from Bucharest’s English bookshop a lovely hardback edition of that collection - coming in at 700 pages.  

My blog’s masthead has a ringing statement that a post of several years back is as good as yesterday’s. But the architecture of blogs honours only the most recent.

In a spirit of defiance I have therefore, in the past few months, been preparing a book version of the last year’s posts – with a preface and introduction which celebrate blogging as a modern version

It will be available here in a day or so…….I thought of calling it “Chairman Ron’s Collected Thoughts” (as my own preemptive strike on sarcastic friends) – but settled instead on “In Praise of Doubt”. Of course such an endeavour smacks of egocentricity – but bear in mind that one of the purposes of the blog is to give (posterity?) a sense of what it was like to be in the skin of an engaged man of second half of the 20^th century….. 

Rereading one’s posts of the past year or so is a salutary experience – the book’s Introduction gives an overview of the subjects treated over the period so I thought it would be useful here to identify the books which had engaged my interest sufficiently for me to devote a post to them during the year. I was fairly critical of five -

Why Nations Fail – by a couple of American academics 

Stand and Deliver – a rather superficial and angry analysis of how the British system of public management could be improved. In a long line of such critiques….

The Tyranny of Experts – by a World Banker who’s had enough…

Amateus Etzioni’s autobiography “My Brother’s Keeper”

How Good Can We Be? By a well-read British journalist - Will Hutton

But very positive about the others which, now that I see them listed, form a fairly formidable list -

The Capitalism Papers by Jerry Mander

Democracy Incorporated by Sheldon Wolin

Buying Time – the delayed crisis of democratic capitalism; by Wolfgang Streeck

Death of a Nation; a new History of Germany

Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness by Frederic Laloux

The Puritan Gift – a lovely book by a couple of octogenarians about the fall of American capitalism

Cooperatives – a post about a couple of books

Our Carbon Democracy – a very thoughtful book by an anthropologist

The Confidence Trap by David Runciman

Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything about how to avoid the doomsday scenario

Some light relief was brought by -

The Scots’ Crisis of Confidence Carol Craig

What you really need to know about the internet by John Naughton

Peeling the Onion Guenther Grass’ so poetic autobiography

Being Mortal – illness, medicine and what matters in the end

The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig

The Hidden Pleasures of Life by Theodor Zeldin

Key Books of the Century was an important series in which I tried to identify texts which had made an impact on our thinking – many of which have echoes today….

In Praise of Scepticism

The last week of the year is the time when we are reminded of the year’s key events and invited to think about how we might improve our behaviour….A regularly updated blog allows you to recall what was the focus of your attention at any given moment in time – in my case books, artefacts and places – with wars, refugees, election campaigns and results being noises off……  

The year began with an attempt to silence satire - so let us end it not merely with a celebration of satire but of the wider spirit of scepticism.

It’s a basic human foible to enjoy seeing the pretensions of the powerful being punctured – but the sad fact is that most of us fall prey to the illusions conjured up by rhetoricians and their masters. The agnosticism which got into my bloodstream in my teens seems to have inoculated me against all false gods…..and indeed against the “suspension of disbelief” to which drama and novels invite us…..That’s perhaps why only essays, satire and realistic art and poetry (eg Brecht, Bukowski, McCaig) have attracted me.   

Once we stop thinking about the words we use, what exactly they mean and whether they fit our purpose, the words and metaphors (and the interests behind them) take over and reduce our powers of critical thinking. One of the best essays on this topic is George Orwell’s “Politics and the English language”  Written in 1947, it exposes the way certain clichés and rhetoric stifle our thinking capacity – for example how the use of the passive tense undermines the notion that it is people who take decisions and should be held accountable for them.

Fifty years before Orwell, Ambrose Bierce was another (American) journalist whose pithy and tough definitions of everyday words, in his newspaper column, attracted sufficient attention to justify a book “The Devil’s Dictionary” whose fame continues unto this day. A dentist, for example, he defined as “a magician who puts metal into your mouth and pulls coins out of your pocket”. A robust scepticism about both business and politics infused his work – but it did not amount to a coherent statement about power.

Twenty years I started to develop a glossary of some 100 words and phrases used by officials, politicians, consultants and academics in the course of government reform. Its updated version - Just Words - offers some definitions which at least will get us thinking more critically about our vocabulary – if not actually taking political actions. While working on it I came across John Saul’s A Doubter’s Companion – a dictionary of aggressive common sense issued in 1994 which talks of the 

“humanist tradition of using alphabetical order as a tool of social analysis and the dictionary as a quest for understanding, a weapon against idée recues and the pretensions of power”.

Saul contrasts this approach with that “of the rationalists to the dictionary for whom it is a repository of truths and a tool to control communications”.

In 2008, I left behind a glossary in the Final Report of a project - Learning from experience; some reflections on how training can help develop administrative capacity which was fairly outrageous.

I should emphasise that Just Words is not a Cynic’s Dictionary – although I readily confess to the occasional lapse into self-indulgent delight in shocking eg my definition of “consultant” as “a con artist who behaves like a Sultan”. But the topic of politics, power and government reform is too important for cynicism. It does, however, require a strong dose of scepticism.  

Memory's Palace

A rolling stone, we are told, gathers no moss – but give a nomad a base and it is amazing what artefacts he’s able to produce from the folds of his traveller’s cloak to domesticate the place…It was 15 years ago, just after starting my years in central Asia, that I acquired the Carpathian mountain house now home to so many books, paintings and small objects (the rugs not so small). The tiny Bucharest flat had already taken the Uzbek painted lacquered cases, silk scarves and terra cotta figurines……but it took only a few months last year for the patina of the fading 1930s villa flat in Sofia to be complemented by paintings for its expansive walls, books for the bookcases which lined two walls - even sculptures and ceramics for its piano  

A few summers ago I looked round at the various artefacts in my mountain house and realized how many beautiful objects I seem to have collected – pottery, miniatures, carpets, Uzbek wall-hangings, Kyrgyz and Iranian table coverings, glassware, plates, Chinese screens, wooden carvings et al. Of very little - except sentimental - value I hasten to add!

Bookmarks – paper and silk - pens, pencils (they have to be soft!!) occupy pride of place on the desks.

At the time I had been musing about the various roles I had played in my life - Lecturer, politician, networker, maverick, leader, writer, explorer, consultant, resource person – and suddenly a new label came to me – “collector”!

All of this is by way of preface to a lovely book The memory Palace– a book of lost interiors (Edward Hollis 2014) which I came across this week at Bucharest’s superb English Bookshop – 

Taking his title from the Ciceronian rhetorical technique of memorising long speeches by means of an imaginary stroll through a series of grandiose palaces, and moving towards a depiction of the internet as a vast and ever-expanding memory palace, many of Hollis's potted histories establish a convincing relationship between the frailties of memory and the unavoidable solidity of material objects. As his grandmother’s mobility has declined, so the interior of the house has become a world in miniature…..

Another review gives a sense of the subjects covered - 

The book is organised around vignettes of his ailing grandmother, confined to her sitting room: her fireplace like an altar, her trinkets a cabinet of curiosities. The fireplace leads him back to the Roman hearth and myths about the origins of Rome: from the “Purple Room”, in which the Byzantine emperors were born, to the cave in which a she-wolf was purported to have suckled Romulus and Remus.Tea breaks with his granny aside,

Hollis proceeds chronologically, taking in the relationship between medieval furniture and British statecraft; the collector’s impulse; the commodity culture of Victorian England; and the screens and virtual rooms of the digital age.

It’s a vast span, which Hollis looks to condense thematically by dwelling on palaces. He yokes together actual historical palaces with the classical concept of memory as a type of palatial enfilade in which everything has its recorded place. It’s a tidy idea that feels tenuous by the time we enter the Big Brother house in the final section.

I love such types of books - which defy categorisation, A Scotsman review puts it nicely - 

All books have brief indicators of subject matter on the back. Hollis’s reads “History/Architecture”, to which could be added classical culture, popular culture, monarchy, politics, consumerism, memoir, art collecting and more. This is the kind of non-fiction – like the work of WG Sebald or Paul Collins or Rebecca Solnit – that makes fiction seem predictable, thin and uncurious.

The Independent also catches the atmosphere

Edward Hollis's The Memory Palace is ostensibly a selective and often forensic history of interiors. But it is, more tellingly, a kind of instruction manual about ways of thinking about these histories. It's less a descriptive route-march through physical interiors, more a treatise about the mysteries of time and place."The mind wanders from room to room," he writes, "from the cave in which we began to the [data] cloud we inherit today, each one of which represents a different mode of memory."

As I survey my various collections, it is inevitable that I wonder about its eventual break-up…..occasionally I come across a book which records the paintings collected by one person – a lovely idea which gave me the idea of adding the pics to the volume of 2015 posts. But more often artefacts are found in antique shops with no provenance….One has simply to fantasise about where they rested before – and with whom…. 

Some 30 years ago, when I was going through some difficult times, my sister-in-law tried to help me by encouraging me to explore the various roles I had – father, son, husband, politician, writer, activist etc. At the time I didn’t understand what she was driving at. Now I do! Makes me wonder what tombstone I should have carved for myself in the marvellous Sapanta cemetery in Maramures where people are remembered humourously in verse and pictures for their work or for the way they died!!

It was TS Eliot who wrote that “old men ought to be explorers” – perhaps the reason why my visiting card now says – “explorer and aesthete”!

55 years in a couple of pages

I always like a bit of intellectual history ….and last week I alighted on a conversation with Roger Scruton around a revamp of a book which this English Conservative philosopher first issued in 1985

We have been told for several decades that the left-right spectrum no longer has any basis in reality although it remains a label very much in evidence 

Now 71, Scruton has been the bête noire of British left intellectuals for more than 30 years, and gives them another beastly mauling in his new book “Fads, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left”. It is a tour de force that, the introduction concedes, is ‘not a word-mincing book’, but rather ‘a provocation’.

In just under 300 pages he Scruton-izes a collection of stars, past and present, of the radical Western intelligentsia – the likes of Eric Hobsbawm and EP Thompson in Britain, JK Galbraith and Ronald Dworkin in the US, Jurgen Habermas, Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze in Europe. An expanded and updated version of his controversial Thinkers of the New Left (1985), the book ends with a new chapter entitled ‘The kraken wakes’ dealing with the ‘mad incantations’ of Alan Badiou and the left’s marginally newer academic celebrity, the Slovenian Zizek.

A copy of the book was lying in Bucharest’s English bookshop when I popped in there on Sunday -  giving me the chance to read its opening pages which, I have to confess, made a great deal of sense even to an old lefty like me. 

“Why, he asks, use a single term to cover anarchists such as Foucault, Marxist dogmatists like Althusser, exuberant nihilists like Zizek and US liberals like Dworken, Galbraith and Rorty? Two reasons – they call themselves this and they all have an “enduring outlook” – some belonging to the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s and others to the post-war thinking according to which the state is or ought to be in charge of society and  empowered to distribute its goods…..”   

This - the dimension of economic ownership (monopoly through oligopoly to cooperatives/shared ownership to private owners) - is indeed one of the axis you need to make sense of world views. But it is not the only one – particularly these days when the social dimension has become so important. Class (rarely talked about now) is only one form of group identity – with race and sexuality being the new entrants. So an additional axis is needed for the strength of social norms - with totalitarianism being at one axis and anarchy at the other. There is a third – for the role of the state, for example, in welfare provision and general regulatory measures – but that’s a bit complicated for this blog.

So I will start with four quadrants which we can use, for example, to plot the old and new left and right-

- Old Left; supporting a strong state sector for infrastructure and health (inc insurance although the religious and cooperative sectors could equally have responsibility for this last)

- Old Right; recognizing the role of the state in sustaining property rights and traditional ways of doing things

- New Left; which has supported the liberation struggles of repressed groups and the onward march of post-modernism….

- New Right; which tends to divide strongly between the economic agenda of the Neo-liberals (whose eulogies for “the market” conceals support for oligopolistic licence and the spread of “commodification”) and the more traditional social agenda of the American Neo-Cons.  

But how long can we keep using the term “new”? The UK “New Left” started all of 60 years ago – and the “New right” at Mont Pelerin a few years earlier..

We are surely, therefore, overdue another term…..and the one I suggest is “emergent”  (which Mintzberg, I think it was, first used to distinguish one meaning of strategy). And, as few people relish being labelled as either left or right, we need a mid-way point for them….

That then gives a 3x3 matrix and the question is what terms to use for the resultant combinations……??? This is what I’ve come up with as a first shot…..

key words/symbols for the various points of the political spectrum

	LEFT	CENTRE	RIGHT
OLD	Working class	Family, property	Tradition, duty
SOFT	Social democracy	liberalism	duty
NEW	Liberation struggle	consumerism	The individual
EMERGENT	The commons	identity	libertarian

 See also the Acorn Guide to Consumers

 You can actually read the entire “Thinkers of the New Left” here

 In Fools, Frauds and Firebrands Scruton attacks the left idea of thought for a cause, ‘politics with a GOAL’. 

‘Conservatives are by their nature people who are trying to defend and maintain existence without a cause’. Simply to keep things as they are? ‘We obviously all want to change things, but recognise that human life is an end in itself and not a means to replace itself with something else. And defending institutions and compromises is a very difficult and unexciting thing. But nevertheless it’s the truth.’

For Scruton, the left intellectuals’ apparent attachment to a higher cause only disguises what they really stand for: ‘Nothing.’ He writes that ‘when, in the works of Lacan, Deleuze and Althusser, the nonsense machine began to crank out its impenetrable sentences, of which nothing could be understood except that they all had “capitalism” as their target, it looked as though Nothing had at last found its voice’.

More recently, ‘the windbaggery of Zizek and the nonsemes of Badiou’ exist only ‘to espouse a single and absolute cause’, which ‘admits of no compromise’ and ‘offers redemption to all who espouse it’. The name of that cause? ‘The answer is there on every page of these fatuous writings: Nothing.

So, what is all this Nothing-ness about? ‘My view’, says Scruton, ‘is that what’s underlying all of this is a kind of nihilistic vision that masks itself as a moving toward the enlightened future, but never pauses to describe what that society will be like. It simply loses itself in negatives about the existing things – institutional relations like marriage, for instance – but never asks itself if those existing things are actually part of what human beings are. Always in Zizek there’s an assumption of the right to dismiss them as standing in the way of something else, but that something else turns out to be Nothing.’

Scruton’s is not the only book this year to explore “the culture wars”. A site I must consult more often is the Society for US Intellectual History which carried recently an interesting comparison of a couple of books which throw light on all this -

‘Ideas,’ Rodgers writes, ‘moved first in the arena of economic debate.’ Throughout the first half of the 20th century, the dominant tropes in economics had been institutional, even among conservatives. Right-wing critics of the welfare state and state-managed economies did not speak of the market; they spoke of corporations and banks and ‘championed the rights of management and the productive powers of the free enterprise “system”.’

The idea of the market that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s – ‘self-equilibrating, instantaneous in its sensitivities and global in its reach, gathering the wants of myriad individuals into its system of price signals in a perpetual plebiscite of desires’ – dispensed with these settings and constraints.
It also dismantled the ‘troubling collective presence and demands’ of social democracy, turning unions, workers and the unemployed ‘into an array of consenting, voluntarily acting individual pieces’.

Everyone became a buyer or seller, everything – kidneys, pollution – got bought and sold. The only thing holding it all together was the magnetic energy of these individual acts of exchange. Like most scholars of the free-market movement, Rodgers assigns great weight to Milton Friedman, ‘the University of Chicago’s most forceful politiciser’, and the right’s answer to J.K. Galbraith. He wrote columns for Newsweek, advised presidents (and dictators), and organised the ten-part PBS series Free to Choose as a counter to Galbraith’s 15-part BBC series on capitalism.

With his focus on the money supply as the source of economic well-being, Friedman helped popularise a ‘radically simplified model of aggregate economic behaviour’, in which ‘state, society and institutions all shrank into insignificance within a black box that translated money inputs directly into price outputs.’

Yet, as Rodgers points out, Friedman’s monetarism was also far more state-centric – the Federal Reserve played an almost heroic role in determining the direction of the economy – than most market theologians would have liked.What truly pushed the market into the culture – high and low – were the adjutants of Friedman’s revolution: the law professors and jurists, not just on the hard right (Richard Posner) but also on the squishy left (Stephen Breyer), who made economic efficiency the measure of all things and provided much of the rationale for deregulation; the second wave of free-market economists (Robert Lucas, for example, or Gary Becker), who took apart the field of macroeconomics in favour of game theory, behavioural economics, rational expectations and other individualist approaches; 

One recent analyst on the “ideological roots of populism” suggests that there are now 4 tribes – liberal and conservative centrists and left and right anarchists.

For more, read –

Spectrum – from left to right in the world of ideas Perry Anderson 2007

http://s-usih.org/2015/03/age-of-fracture-v-age-of-culture-wars.html

https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=44132

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n20/corey-robin/achieving-disunity

http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/the-eus-culture-war-against-the-people/15931#.VngkXfl97IU

http://chronicle.com/article/Why-I-Miss-the-Culture-Wars/151435

https://www.claremont.org/featured-article/that-new-time-religion/#.Ve8PdZd0c_g

http://www.claremont.org/download_pdf.php?file_name=1519Voegeli.pdf

ttp://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/260742/culture-wars-volume-v-black-book-american-left-david-horowitz

Artists' Haven on the Danube

I spurned the easy option of a fast exit from Sofia via the Balkan Highway which has me at the top of the mountain range within half an hour of leaving the flat and chose the direct route due north, over what I remembered as a hill. But memory was deficient and it proved to be a tortuous mountain route - but the sight of ice-tipped branches and remote villages more than compensated

There was a smattering of snow on the ground at the final metres…as I headed for Montana, realising that my road may have been 40-50 kms shorter than the main highway from Sofia but is about an hour longer! Berkovitsa offered a gallery which was closed for lunch but I did see some marvellous wood carving artefacts (eg the pulpit) in its 11^th century (?) church….Memorials to the 1923 communist uprising are still to be seen in this isolated area which I had visited in 2012 on my way to workshops for municipal officials in Vratsa and Belogradchik (site of two great wines)….

The new bridge over the Danube at Vidin is only the second such link between the 2 countries (the first was built in 1956) and the container traffic already making a nuisance of itself. Noone, it seems, thought to anticipate its effects – although a pathetically small stretch of bypass is being built around Montana….      

I had forgotten how fascinating the Belogradchik crags and Serbian (?) mountain ranges are in the far distance and had to be careful both photographing on the straight stretches and negotiating the tight bends – a lorry had already come to grief and was causing a tailback…..There are no signs for the bridge as you reach Vidin – only for Belgrade and “Calafat” (a village on the Romanian side) but just follow the container traffic and you are soon on the new approach (clearly not much used by local traffic) and then on the white snake that is the long bridge…..

The Russe-Giurgiu entry to Romania is the one I know from the countless Danube crossings I have made these past eight years – and a soul-destroying entry it is with its garbage and dogs….Exiting from the Vidin bridge, by contrast, is a delight – with the villages being tidy and compact and a charming self-build idiosyncratic house style from of 1930s and before. Nowadays the only traffic are the barges which play up and down – and the odd cruise ship (eg this one which starts at Bucharest and ends at Budapest with some fascinating destinations organised en route)

Port Cetate (Port Fort) was a customs point in earlier centuries when River traffic helped connect towns such as Russe, Svishtov and Vidin to their Romanian and other neighbours further upstream  

The photograph shows the core of the complex as it has been restored in the last decade as a Writer’s House by poet and TV star Mircea Dinescu.

A warm welcome was much appreciated after what had been a 6 hour drive (but less than 250 kms) from Sofia – all the warmer with a glass of the estate-made rakiya (which it’s actually called in Oltanea). A gloriously clear liquid, it was one of the best rakias I’ve ever tasted – and I am now a bit of an expert!!

That was the start to a glorious bean soup produced by the kitchen staff (who seem well-used to people dropping in at odd hours) great home-produced bread, sausages and pickles…all with one of the white estate wines (a Pinot Gris) and good conversation. The sun was setting as we ate and talked and was nicely captured on film.

An hour or so in my room gave me the time to think more about what seem to be 2 projects – a modest “micro” one running with the first idea of bringing some of my Bulgarian artist friends together with some Romanian painters; the second the more ambitious one I hinted at in the previous post…. 

A second bottle of estate wine graced our next conversation in which we were joined amazingly by Mircea Dinescu himself who emerged out of the darkness and plumped down beside me. After some initial reserve, he was soon in great form (thanks to Sergiu’s skilful translation) but perhaps helped by realising how well I knew some of the figures of Romania’s recent past such as Josef Sava and Marin Sorescu….

The next morning I had the time to look at the material I had collected on Bulgarian strategies and projects in this part of the world; summarise them and distribute it to various friends for comment. Apparently the deadline for the next wave of bids for this Interreg programme is March which gives time for the collection of the necessary support from beneficiaries…..I duly left Port Cetate at midday heading through Craiova for Bucharest – a journey of more than four hours…… 

Border-crossing at the Danube

Two tasks have occupied me these past few days. One of my daughters had come across some letters between her mother’s parents and it had led her to wonder about aspects of my own parents and family. I duly pulled out the pages I had written about some of this way back in 1995 and set to work…….over the weekend I had about 30 pages…

At the same time, my thoughts had been running with an idea for a project in the lower reaches of the River Danube - which I have been crossing every few months these past 8 years…at Russe in the east

Later this week I am scheduled to cross it for the first time in Bulgaria's north-west corner - thanks to the new EC-funded bridge at Vidin - also near the border with Serbia….And to stay overnight at the refurbished mansion – Port Cetate – now a cultural centre owned by one of Romania’s best known personalities, poet Mircea Dinescu whose satirical sketches I remember watching on Romanian television in the 1990s…

I had sent the centre the latest draft of my new book Bulgarian Realists – updated edition – as well as the E-book Mapping Romania - notes on an unfinished journey - and wondered whether they might not be one of the partners for a future bid for (cross-border) EC Structural Funds with a focus on art, culture and wine…

Alternating between Bulgaria and Romania has made me think a lot about cultural differences. 

Despite sharing the Danube as a border, the citizens of the two countries have (apart from the summer trips to the Bulgarian part of the Black Sea) little contact and know very little about each other. 

It probably hasn’t helped that the Dobrogea area at the Black Sea has changed hands several times in the past few centuries – nor that the Bulgarian alphabet is Cyrillic and the Romanians so proudly Latin  

Indeed it would not be exaggerating to suggest that relations are characterised by a “state of studied indifference”. This is confirmed by the common perception that the two nations turn their back on one another at the Danube ….

On Sunday I invited an old friend who is one of its most experienced consultants in cross-border work to my flat here in Sofia, replete with art and library, in order to brainstorm about a possible project. With a wine from the Rila Monastery - in his case a Mavrud; in mine a Chardonnay.

I’m glad to say that he too he was enthusiastic….Of course there have been previous projects such as TourNet – Promotion of cross-border networking for development of a common Bulgarian-Romanian tourist product (EC 2012 - see linked Photo library of the Danube Region); Impact Analysis of People-to-People project in Danube area (2013) an interesting pot-pourri of projects (covering, amonst other topics, dental treatment, chess, singing); and Rafting holidays
These are just some of the projects using EU and other funding to develop cultural trails in this part of the Danube but they seem to have had limited timescales or ambition. Supply-driven approaches always fail – as do good ideas which don’t take root for not trying to generate local understanding and commitment.

Cultural Routes in the Middle and Lower Danube Region - the Roman Emperors Route and the Danube Wine Route, for example, is a German/Serbian project for the development and marketing of transnational and cross-border routes in Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia and Croatia, launched in 2012 by the Danube Competence Center (DCC) and supported by the German consultancy GTZ.

The project runs another year and has issued a brochure and handbook - Managing visitor on thematic cultural routes

I have a deep interest in and knowledge of Bulgarian and Romanian painting (and wine) – as well as 20 years’ experience as a consultant in capacity building – and am trying to work out how I can give something to what I see as nothing less than a spirit of reconciliation which is needed between the two countries. A lot of consultancy companies have jumped into the vacuum but what is needed is something much deeper

The trick will be to find a powerful over-reaching theme….