Sunday,
December 30, 2007
Unusual Cultural Exchange Between
The
ANNOTICO Report
This
article focuses on
The twilight of
2007 finds the city embedded in the European empire. There are very few Jews
left and the number of Hungarians is dwindling but the Italians have
arrived in force.
Marco Petriccione, country manager of the Banko
Italo Romena, has been here
for five years. His was the first Italian bank to set up here, to absorb the business
demands of 6,000 Italians.
Romanians go
to Italy to work, usually in menial jobs, but the Italians come here as employers
attracted by low Romanian wages - still under an average of #300 (406 euros) a
month.
At first they
manufactured shoes and textiles. Look out for the "designed in
Big Italian
electricity companies like Enel and Ansaldo are arriving to fill the growing demand for energy
and infrastructure.
Growth of a Revolutionary Boomtown
BBC
News
Saturday,
29 December 2007
The
train to
The single track
runs straight as a Turkish arrow through the frozen marshes of western
The Banat region
is not rich in stone so the medieval builders of
Turkish
chronicler, Evliya Celebi,
describes the majestic castle walls as 50ft thick, made of oak trunks and tough
as ebony.
The local forests
felled for its construction have never recovered. There is still barely a tree
to be seen between
But there are
reeds, great expanses of them, standing yellow-grey and stiff as the lances of
a motionless army in the December frost.
The Austrians
replaced the Turks and, tucked away in the south-eastern corner of the
Austro-Hungarian empire,
Ten years ago, there was
12% unemployment here, now there's less than 2%
Georghe Ciuhandu, Mayor of
The railway was
established in 1857 and, by the mid 1880s, the town boasted the first electric
street lighting in
Romanians rubbed
shoulders with Hungarians, Serbs, Jews and Germans.
It was that
tradition of tolerance which prepared the ground for the revolution to break
out here in 1989.
When the secret
police came to arrest a Hungarian priest, Laszlo Tokes, they had to contend
with a rare outbreak of Romanian-Hungarian solidarity, as crowds gathered in
front of his house to defend him.
Their resistance
spread to
Made in
The twilight
of 2007 finds the city embedded in the European empire.
There are very
few Jews left and the number of Hungarians is dwindling but the Italians have
arrived in force.
Marco Petriccione, country manager of the Banko
Italo Romena, has been here
for five years.
His was the
first Italian bank to set up here, to absorb the business demands of 6,000
Italians.
Romanians go
to Italy to work, usually in menial jobs, but the Italians come here as
employers attracted by low Romanian wages - still under an average of #300 (406
euros) a month.
At first they
manufactured shoes and textiles.
Look out for
the "designed in
But as wages
rise here, those companies are going further east, to the
Energy demand
In their place,
big Italian electricity companies like Enel and Ansaldo are arriving to fill the growing demand for energy
and infrastructure.
In St George's
Cathedral, on Piata Unirii,
I once watched a nun mopping the floor early in the morning, the splash of her
bucket mingling with the prayers of the faithful.
This time, there
are no candles but, in the dim electric light, the huge gilded figures of
angels seem to soar out of the shadows, chastising the congregation for their
latest sin - shopping.
"Whenever I
ring my friends, they tell me they're shopping," my colleague Mircea complains.
"It's the
national sport now in
Bankers like
Marco worry that people may now find it hard to settle their debts.
Big shopping
malls have sprung up beyond the pretty city centre to service tombstone
residential blocks - a Communist legacy.
On the Liviu Rebreanu boulevard,
work starts early.
They are building
new mains water supplies beneath the roads and repairing the sewage system of a
city that cannot stop growing.
Urban
prosperity
"Ten years
ago, there was 12% unemployment here,"' says the mayor, Georghe Ciuhandu. "Now
there's less than 2%."
He is just back
from a trip to
For his city to
continue to attract investment it needs a new workforce.
He also speaks
hopefully about persuading some of those who now work abroad to come home.
I ask him what
level wages would need to reach. He suggests #500 (677 euros) a month, nearly
double the present average.
The small farmers here are
not organised. They have no representatives, to talk
to investors and government
Count Andreas von Bardeau, landowner
If the urban
dwellers are prospering in the European Union, the peasants are suffering.
Among great
drawings of buildings and farms, I find Count Andreas von Bardeau
- he can use the von on his name card in
There he owns
what he describes as "a small forest and castle".
Here, in western
"For 200
years this region belonged to
But he laments
the chaos in the countryside.
"The small
farmers here are not organised. They have no
representatives to talk to investors and government."
Heart-breaking
As we meet, he is
organising a conference of foreign bankers, to try to
attract money to agriculture.
"As a
farmer, it breaks my heart to see so much land lying fallow."
And he sketches a
vision of a
But for the time
being, big modern coaches bring the mountain people all the way to work in
They disembark at
the crumbling bus station, next to the Edefsin market
where gypsies sell second-hand clothes and a low, wintry sun turns even red
apples to gold.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/7161730.stm
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