COURAGE

povezivanje zbirki

On 30 May 1990, just a few months after Ceausescu’s tyranny was overthrown by desperate street fights, a severe earthquake hit the counties of Vrancea and Covasna (Háromszék) in central Romania. Among the losses were fifty heavily-damaged, older church buildings (many built before AD 1300) in Háromszék, the easternmost region of Transylvania with an 80% Hungarian majority. A group of volunteers formed among the activists of the relief organization, ETE-Transcar, and the architects of the National Historical Monuments Protection Authority. They made an overall survey of the damaged churches in order to inform the wider public and acquire the help needed for repairs. An international relief campaign was launched, and detailed documentation of the damages was published as “Pro Domo Dei”. It was edited by Budapest-based monument architect István Varga, with the collaboration of Hungarian co-authors and specialists: János Gyurkó, József Sebestyén, Béla Nóvé, László Nagy and others. The illustrated report contained a number of case studies, lists, maps and photo documentation of the damages, together with English and French summaries.

The aims and spirit of the relief campaign were much the same as those of Deadline Diaries – Transylvanian Monitor, ETE-Transcar, S.O.S Transylvania, and Hopes and Doubts by Bálint Homoród (Béla Nóvé); helping people in need and helping traditional cultural values survive. This profoundly humanitarian and democratic spirit is reflected in the forward to Pro Domo Dei:

Pro Domo Dei is a neutral project from the point of view of religious and ethnic groups. TRANSCAR relief organization will help both the Hungarian Catholic and Protestant parishes, in their grave situation, as well as the Orthodox Romanian parishes in Covasna (Háromszék) County. […] The ‘Pro Domo Dei’ project is organized first and foremost for monument protection. Our main focus of support is for the historical value; among the heavily damaged churches in the county there are some which are more than 700 years old. […] In addition to financial assistance, it is also important that, after the failure of communism, this region in Europe that has suffered so much has some moral support from the international community and readiness to help.

JANA ŽELIBSKÁ (*1941, Olomouc) Immediately upon entering the visual art scene at the end of the 1960s, Jana Želibská boldly rejected the limits of usual media.  Her new imagery of a “different” art disturbed the conventional world of ideas as it related to the traditional role of women.  Her work grew from inspirations from the Pop Art environment and the action synthesis of art and life; in the 1970s she participated in creating collective festivities and individual performances. Later she used various technical devices such as video, photography, and sound to develop her post-conceptual work, particularly in the area of installations and video-art. She explored themes close to feminist art such as carnality, erotica, the myth related to female beauty, and relations between men and women, to underline not only their spiritual and physical aspects, but also their natural, social, and civil dimensions. Ironic discourse is a characteristic feature of her work: she de-patheticises the traditional assignment of the life and social roles of men and women and their related false myths and pseudo-romantic fictions.
Jana ŽELIBSKÁ: Venus. 1967, Wood, mirror, plastic, golden pigment, 120x360cm.

At the Memorial to the Revolution in Timişoara may be seen Lorenţ Fecioru’s vest with the holes made by the bullets that killed him and the traces left by their victim’s blood. This object with a profound emotional charge was donated in 1999 by the mother of the hero-martyr. The material traces of the violent death of this young man are symbolic for all the young people who, with the recklessness and courage of youth, took part in the Revolution of 1989. At the same time, the manner in which he met his death is illustrative of the repression that followed in the days immediately after the outbreak of the popular revolt in Timişoara. Along with over 1,000 others, Lorenţ Fecioru is a martyr of the bloody events that led to the change of regime in 1989 and one of those to whom all Romanians are indebted for the freedom that they enjoy today. It is a civic duty of all Romanian citizens to preserve their memory, a duty that the Memorial has taken upon itself to pass on to generations who did not experience the Revolution of 1989.

Lorenţ Fecioru was one of those who, alongside the poet Ion Monoran, took part in the stopping of trams in Maria Square on 16 December. He died in the night of 17–18 December from the effects of a bullet fired by a sniper straight into his heart. In the public documents issued after the Revolution of 1989, it was initially stated that Lorenţ Fecioru was shot on the steps of the Cathedral of Timişoara. The facts, however, are otherwise, albeit equally tragic. Two decades after the tragedy played out, Lorenţ Fecioru’s youngest son related for a national newspaper what actually happened to his father: “My father was shot by a sniper in the night of 17–18 December. In the Securitate files photographs have been found that were taken during the day, when my father and some of his colleagues from work went out into the street and climbed onto tramcars, onto buses. I understand that in the file is written ‘mission accomplished.’ He was on the balcony with his friends that evening, telling them that he had seen when the photographer took pictures of them and that he was afraid to go out onto the balcony. The moment he went out onto the balcony he was shot. I saw the bullet that killed him, because he was shot in the heart and the bullet came out through his back and ricocheted off two walls in the house. His friends took him to the morgue, and by ‘good fortune’ they found a coffin, otherwise he would have been incinerated like the others.” This version is confirmed by researchers at the Memorial to the Revolution. Gino Rado, the vice-president of the Memorial, mentions that Lorenţ Fecioru was on the balcony at his home on Calea Şagului in Timişoara when he was fatally shot. The vest donated by the family of the hero-martyr Lorenţ Fecioru is on the same ground-floor level of the building of the Memorial to the Revolution in Timişoara, very close to the corner dedicated to the child-martyr Cristina Lungu.

Video interview with Embiya Çavuş, an artist working with ceramics, painter and Bulgarian dissident. Now he lives in Izmir.

Embiya Çavuş was born in 1926 in the village Todor Ikonomovо (former name Mahmuzlii, Turkish Mahmuzlu), Shumen district in Bulgaria. He and five of his friends established the secret “Organisation of Defending Turkish Existence and Personality”. Accused of creating a secret Turkish organization and espionage in favor of Turkey, Çavuş was sentenced to life imprisonment and spent sixteen years, from 1947 to 1961, in different prisons and in the forced labor camp in Belene (1949–1956). However, in 1961 he was conditionally released. In 1964, after an amnesty law was passed, Çavuş was granted amnesty. In 1965 Çavuş began to work as a porcelain expert in a porcelain factory in the small town of Novi Pazar, Bulgaria. As a porcelain artist, he visited Poland in 1974 and the USSR in the years of 1976, 1977. In 1978, in the framework of an emigration agreement between Bulgaria and Turkey, Embiya Çavuş moved to Turkey and settled in Izmir.

Embiya Çavuş has double citizenship, Bulgarian and Turkish.