Bucharest International Jazz Competition sees bands, instrumentalists, and vocalists from all over the world visiting the city to compete for total prizes worth €7000. Participants must be under thirty-five to enter. Concerts are held mainly in the Hard Rock Cafe and Auditorium Hall.

In May Bucharest will step back in time for the Bucharest of Old festival, celebrating the city as it was 200 years ago. The festivities include parades of 19th-century costumes, rides in horse-drawn carriages, traditional food and musical performances.

First held in 2005, Bucharest’s International Film Festival, or B-EST IFF, opens the city’s Cultural Spring celebrations. Partnered by the Romanian Ministry of Culture, it offers a busy week of screenings, masterclasses and retrospectives.

In addition to the three competitions – for features, fictional shorts and documentaries – there are various other sections to Bucharest’s International Film Festival. Each year these include a survey of award winners from other big festivals like Cannes, Venice and Berlin, and a similar selection from American independent festivals such as Sundance, New York and Toronto.

Valentines Day is celebrated all over the world on the 14th February. Although in recent years Romanians have begun to adopt this date, instead they traditionally celebrate Dragobete on the 24th February. Dragobete is a character from Romanian folklore, the son of Baba Dochia.

The day is known as “the day when the birds are betrothed”. It is around this time that the birds begin to build their nests and mate. On this day, considered locally the first day of spring, boys and girls gather vernal flowers and sing together. Maidens used to collect the snow that still lies on the ground in many villages and then melt it, using the water in magic potions throughout the rest of the year. Those who take part in Dragobete customs are supposed to be protected from illness, especially fevers, for the rest of the year. If the weather allows, girls and boys pick snowdrops or other early spring plants (e.g. Lăcrămioară or Lily Of The Valley) for the person they are courting. In Romania, Dragobete is known as a day for lovers, rather like Valentine’s Day.

It is a common belief in some parts of Romania that, during this celebration, if you step over your partner’s foot, you will have the dominant role in your relationship. Dragobete customs vary from region to region.

The most celebrated or, rather, notorious ruler of Wallachia is Vlad Dracula the Impaler (Vlad Țepeș). Like his contemporary Stephen the Great, he fought against the Turks to keep Wallachia independent. Contemporaries wrote of his extreme cruelty towards prisoners, whom he punished by impaling them on wooden stakes. His notoriety led the nineteenth-century novelist Bram Stoker to borrow the name of Dracula for the principal charachter in his horror story of the same name.

In June 1940 the Soviet Union seized Besserabia and two months later Romania lost more territory, this time to Hungary, when, under pressure from Germany, she was forced to give away the northern part of Transylvania. At the end of the Second World War in 1945 Soviet troops occupied Romania and the first steps were taken to communize the country. This involved the abolition of all institutions and the creation of new ones, and the imprisonment of all those who opposed this process. The complete subjugation (subjugare) of Romania to the Soviet Union was marked by King Michael’s forced abdication (abdicare) in December 1947 and the proclomation (proclamare) of the Romanian People’s Republic.

A notable feature is the ‘request a picture’ page.

The site can be found here.

For me each journey to Romania is also a journey into another time, in which I never knew which events in my life were coincidence and which were staged. This is why I have, in each and every public statement I have made, demanded access to the secret files kept on me which, under various pretexts, has invariably been denied me. Instead, each time there was signs that I was once again, that is to say, still under observation.

Read More: http://www.signandsight.com/features/1910.html

http://www.britishpathe.com/record.php?id=700

Thanks to http://www.bucharestlife.net/2009/10/07/bucharest-old-chap/ for finding this one!