September 19, 2012
Flying the three colours: Calafat - Drobeta-Turnu-Severin
A BIT NORTH of here - it's on the signposts - is Timisoara. Unless things have changed since I was there a few years ago, you can still see the Romanian flag - vertical stripes of blue, yellow and red - with a hole cut in its middle. It flies outside one of the public buildings and it and the city have significance in Romanian history. They mark the end of communism and the Christmas day on which the the country's rulers, man and wife, were given a rudimentary trial and shot. The execution was shown on television for years afterwards.
Romania used to be a monarchy. With the start of war in 1939, the king decided to join the Germans. If that wasn't ideology then it was practicality, because Hungary to the west and Bulgaria to the south were pro-German and Russia to the north had a pact with Berlin.
The decision was never popular with the people, though, and after a while they deposed the king and changed sides. Come peace and Romania became a communist republic. It didn't become a Soviet satellite state, though, and its role as a thorn in the Russian side qualified it for subsidies from the USA. The collapse of Soviet communism meant that help was no longer useful and Romania slid into still greater poverty, the power of the state and the secret police unbearable.
Finally a priest in Timisoara preached against the regime and the people sheltered him when the police and army arrived for him. And so started the revolution which ended the reign and the lives of the dictators.
Why all this? And why the hole in the middle of the flag? Because communist Romania had a communist symbol on the central yellow stripe, which protesters hacked out. And because the flag strikes me as one of the world's prettiest.
I said as much to a group of Romanian riders coming the other way. They were heading for the Danube delta rather than Constanta to the south, where Steph and I had ridden a few years earlier, and their rule was to stay as close to the Danube as they could.
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I thought nothing of my comment about the flag but a moment later one of the group returned to give me one from his luggage. I was touched.
"Now you can fly the flag as well," he said. And I will. I will pin it to the wall at home and send them a photo.
All day today I have been riding through an agricultural plain like the Po valley in northern Italy but a lot less mechanised. Fields are still reaped by hand. Horses wait in the shafts of blue or green wooden carts as men make high piles of crops and foliage.
Those horses pull those carts, loaded not just with crops but with fieldworkers, at surprising speed. All I see from behind is the bottom of the wheels, a hint of cart beneath the overlapping load, and sometimes the hooves of the horse. The horse knows where it is going, which is why those in the cart sit and chat. And why they are so surprised when a loaded cyclist glides past at only a little greater speed.
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"Buna," I call, and I get a greeting back. From the corner of my eye I see the red plume on the horse's head which guards against the evil eye and also, incidentally, normally means a gypsy family in charge. Now and then the cart-driver shakes the reins for the horse to keep up. But the horse, in pursuit of me or not, accelerates for a dozen steps and then slows to its original pace.
"I know what I'm doing and I'm not going to be rushed just to amuse you," it seems to say. And the cart-driver gives up, recognising the horse as boss. I am allowed the right of passage.
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