The film made by Romanian team
Exhibition about Velvet Revolution in Romania in the Romanian Library in Constanta
Every year in late December Romanians commemorate the victims of the December 1989 anti-Communist revolution. Some still recollect those events with grief and sorrow although 30 years have passed ever since.
On Thursday the city of Timisoara, in the west, marked Victory Day. On December 20th, 1989, after several days of repression by the Communist authorities, the people of Timisoara took to the streets in great numbers. The army withdrew to the barracks and from the balcony of the Opera House in Timisoara the people declared Timisoara the first city of Romania free of Communism.
To mark this moment, siren calls were heard in downtown Timisoara where the anti-Communist revolution sparked 30 years ago. It all started from a spontaneous protest against the authorities' attempt to evacuate reformist pastor Laszlo Tokes, as he had been critical of the Communist regime in the international press, which was interpreted, in the spirit of the epoch, as incitement to ethnic division.
On December 17th, the protest extended to the center of the city, which became the main stage for shouting anti-Communist slogans, which was literally inconceivable at the time. Faced with such an unprecedented situation, the authorities ordered the army to go to the streets that were already teeming with informers of the Securitate political police.
A brutal intervention followed and scores of people were shot. To wipe off the traces of the violent repression, the corpses were taken from the hospital morgue and transferred to Bucharest to be cremated, the ashes being thrown into the sewer system as part of the operation symbolically called the "Rose".
On December 21st, the anti-Communist revolution extended to Bucharest and culminated on December 22nd with dictators Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu fleeing Bucharest. Subsequently, they were caught and shot dead on the very Christmas Day after a brief trial. In December 1989 more than one thousand people died and at least three thousand were wounded. During the revolution, 32 dead and 116 wounded were killed in Constanta.