When I was at home visiting my parents, we made a short trip to a neighboring town, called Kovászna (Rom: Covasna). This town is famous (at least in the country) for it’s mineral water and it’s beneficial mineral baths. In the neighborhood there is also a splendid valley, called the Fairies Valley, which offered a great location for one of our ‘great leaders’ Nicolae Ceausescu to build one of it’s villas.
The dictator used to visit this area to spend some time hunting and generally enjoying the beauty of the valley as well as the beneficial waters of the town. After the revolution (or even before?…) the villa has been open for the public for a while for the general public and people could get a glimpse of the dictator’s life through some videos presented in the lobby area of the building. Entry was prohibited in most areas of the villa, but even so it was a great tourist attraction I think.
Nowadays the gates of the villa are closed to the general public and people can only make paparazzi-like photos from behind the fences. Don’t get me wrong, the villa is not deserted. It is in a good condition, the grass and the alleys are in relatively good shape and the helipad is also functional. And who is using it? Well, it is actually being used by our current (suspended) president. It looks like the charm of the location still has some juice in it.
Having seen that even so (with no signs anywhere whatsoever) there were some tourists there (2-3 cars) with people making photos of the villa, I started thinking (… yes, I do that also from time to time 🙂 ): why is this great touristic opportunity not exploited? I think a great museum could be opened with even more access to the rest of the villa than before, showing items from the Ceausescu era for visitors. Even if the current president is using it: he should use 1-2 rooms at most and leave the rest of the villa open for tourists. It would certainly attract a lot of tourists even from foreign countries… I mean who has not heard of Ceausescu?
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