Romania Lewis H. Mates DRAFT VERSION: The final version of this was published in Douglas Davies with Lewis H. Mates, The Encyclopedia of Cremation (Ashgate, 2005), pp.364-366 At the 1936 International Cremation Congress in Prague the Romanians were regarded as the pioneers of cremation in south-eastern Europe. Romania’s status was secured by virtue of the fact that it possessed a crematorium, unlike Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Hungary or Greece. But cremation was still only in its early infancy in Romania. In 1935, Bucharest crematorium was responsible for the disposal of 0.19 percent of the country’s dead, placing it just behind France (0.2 percent) and Luxembourg (0.64 percent) at the bottom of the European league table of cremating countries. Bucharest crematorium, built at the expense of the Romanian Cremation Society (called ‘Cenusa’; literally ‘ashes, cinders, mortal/earthly remains’), did not begin operating until February 1928, a year when it cremated a total of 262 corpses. This figure rose to 602 in 1934. The ‘Cenusa’ Society itself had only been in existence since 1923. Though the Yugoslavs appeared to contribute more to the 1936 Cremation Congress, the Romanians were evident too, when M. Popovici of ‘Cenusa’ spoke on ‘The Duty of the Municipalities to Assist Cremation Societies’. Popovici outlined problems that were hindering the Romanian cremationists’ work. Firstly, there were popular misconceptions about the society. When the ‘Cenusa’ Society was first established, the idea inexplicably spread that it wanted to ‘buy’ people still living who intended to be cremated, and that it would pay them varying amounts commensurate with their social status. Apparently, ‘Cenusa’ had received many enquiries from people of different social classes attempting to sell their corpses! A more widely held belief was that ‘Cenusa’ was a charity and that therefore all its services were free. The truth was that the society was a non-profit making organisation. Though it charged for cremations, its directors were not paid and all income went back into maintaining, improving and expanding the cremation facilities that it had established. The main and most worrying problem for Popovici, however, was the sluggishness of the society’s growth. After fourteen years of existence the membership had barely reached 1,000. This was despite the facts that ‘Cenusa’ was ‘recognised as one of the most humanitarian institutions, of immeasurable social, hygienic and economic advantage to the municipality of Bucharest’, that membership fees were low and that the practical benefits of membership were considerable. A member of one year’s standing or more who died had most of their funeral expenses met by ‘Cenusa’ (these included the costs of the coffin, hearse, chapel, mortuary and cremation itself, but not the clergyman’s fee nor the cost of a columbarium niche). Even for non-members, a cremation was far cheaper than the most modest of burials. According to Popovici, the ‘Cenusa’ Society offered other ‘advantages of an economic, hygienic, and social character’, which involved ‘unexcelled cleanliness’ in a crematorium that was staffed by people distinguished by their ‘humane and civilised behaviour’. Given all this, Popovici was at a loss to explain why the society had only made ‘quite minimal’ progress. In reality, Popovici, though understandably frustrated by the lack of tangible signs of the success of ‘Cenusa’ Society’s efforts, was understating the real progress that Romanian cremationists had achieved. In comparison with other Balkan states, Romania at least had a functioning crematorium, and this had been achieved only five years after the foundation of the ‘Cenusa’ Society. Most remarkably, the crematorium had been built by the society itself rather than by the municipality, as happened elsewhere. The Serbian Cremation Society ‘Oganj’, in contrast, had been sporadically active since 1904 and yet was, in 1936, still almost thirty years away from achieving its goal of a crematorium in Belgrade. In addition, Bucharest 1 crematorium was the first to be built in south-eastern Europe by four years and the first to be operational in the region by twenty-four years (until the opening in 1951 of Debrecen crematorium, Hungary, which had been built in 1932). As already noted, the cremation rate in Romania in 1935 compared favourably with countries like France despite the seemingly more congenial conditions in the latter: France had six crematoria by 1936 all of which had been open for some time. Some, indeed, had been constructed in the nineteenth century and Père-Lachaise was one of the first crematoria in Europe. France also had the benefit of a federation of cremation societies containing some of the most influential cremationists in Europe. Similar points can be made about Argentina, which had a crematorium from 1886 and an active cremation society and yet, even in 1935, was not cremating significantly more of its dead than Romania. In these terms, the progress of cremation in Romania was quite exceptional. It was the only eastern European country bar Russia that had a crematorium before the Second World War. In terms of membership figures too, the situation was not as bleak as Popovici painted it. The ‘Cenusa’ Society’s membership compared well with the aforementioned countries: it was on a par with that of the combined Yugoslav cremation societies, of which Belgrade’s had been in existence for a lot longer. The Argentine cremation society’s membership peaked in the late 1920s at less than 500 and Hungary did not even have a cremation society. Only the French Federation’s membership was superior, more than three times greater, in fact, but, given the long tradition of cremation advocacy in that country, and the larger population, this was to be expected. Of course, there was a long way to go for cremation in Romania, but this should not obscure the achievements of the ‘Cenusa’ Society in a relatively short space of time. Another mitigating circumstance for Romanian cremationists, reading between the lines of Popovici’s speech, was that they had not gained significant support from the municipality for their project. The municipality’s avoidance of the issue was for ‘political-religious reasons’, but it remained, argued Popovici, their ‘moral duty’ to support the ‘useful’ cremation societies ‘in every way and to do their best to popularise them’. Again, in contrast to Hungary and later Yugoslavia, Romanian cremationists had been forced to act independently and establish a crematorium with their own finances, an unusual and therefore considerable and noteworthy achievement. Recognition that cremation ‘causes a real revolution among the religious population’ implied that religious opposition had been strong in Romania, outside as well as inside the municipalities. There was another obstacle in the way of advancement of cremation in Romania in the interwar period, and it stemmed from the considerable financial demands that building and running the crematorium had placed on the ‘Cenusa’ Society. In order to maintain an income and keep the crematorium running, ‘Cenusa’ was somewhat reliant on doing the ‘administrative cremations’ of, for example, body parts from anatomical institutes, which paid well for the service. A Czech delegate at the 1936 Congress, Mencl, argued that these kind of cremations repelled others from using the crematorium as it was regarded as a service for the disposal of refuse rather than a place for respectable people to take their dead. Popovici said that the payments it received for the ‘administrative cremation’ service were vital to balancing the crematorium’s budget and that, at least for the foreseeable future, it was impossible to survive without it. One positive aspect for Mencl was that at least Bucharest crematorium performed far fewer such specialist cremations than did, for example, the Russian crematoria. A positive development in this period was the establishment by the society of a journal, Flacâra Sacra (Sacred Flame), in 1934. An eight-page monthly, Flacâra Sacra contained reports on the indigenous movement and a good deal of material on the cremation movements in Germany, Malaysia, Czechoslovakia, Britain, France, Yugoslavia, Austria and elsewhere. In 2 1937, though Popovici could not attend the London International Cremation Congress, the ‘Cenusa’ Society was apparently on an ‘upward grade’ and religious opposition to cremation and support for earth burial were gradually being overcome. That year had also seen 184 new members recruited: the society could now muster 1,006 members. Still, it appeared that international co-operation was not high on ‘Cenusa’s agenda since it was not a member of the ICF when it was established in 1938. As with most of the rest of continental Europe, the Second World War caused Romanian cremationists many problems. A cremator that had been ordered and paid for before the war was not delivered before its outbreak. Air raids did a considerable amount of damage to Bucharest crematorium and this placed the ‘Cenusa’ Society in financial difficulties in the immediate post-war period, making the later 1940s a ‘period of great difficulty’. The crematorium even more desperately required a new cremator now, and it still had not received the one it paid for in 1938. Though there remained much to be done from both ‘technical’ and ‘moral’ standpoints, conditions were at least improving. An important change was that the Orthodox Church was no longer quite so antagonistic towards cremation, though the tradition of burial, of course, remained strong. Hope was also drawn from the increase in cremations, which continued despite damage to the crematorium. In 1945 there were 600 cremations, almost three times as many as in 1944 (225), though this figure still had some way to go to surpass the highest pre-war figures. Another encouraging sign was that corpses for cremation were being brought from the provinces to the capital in increasing numbers. The contact established in late 1946 between the International Cremation Federation (ICF) and Romanian cremationists was the last to occur for many years. There was a lack of communication between the ICF and several eastern bloc countries in the post-war period, including Poland, East Germany and the USSR, though Romania seemed especially uncommunicative. The lack of communication was evident in 1983, when the Dutch cremationist J.J. Visman announced that he could not obtain cremation figures from Romania as well as from East Germany and the USSR. By late 1987 it was clear that the Ceausescu regime’s problems were doing considerable harm to the cause of cremation in Romania. A power crisis meant that low gas pressure was insufficient to allow the full cremation of corpses. Groups opposing the regime claimed that it was dealing with the problem by giving some ashes to relatives and secretly burying the rest of the half-cremated bodies in mass burials. This did not apply to the corpses of the wealthy and powerful, which the authorities retained until the gas pressure was high enough for a complete cremation. After the rapid inter-war advance, the progress of cremation in the post-war world appeared to have been very slow in Romania, in contrast to countries like Hungary and Yugoslavia that made more progress after 1945 than they had before. In fact, Romania did not get a second crematorium until after the fall of the Ceausescu regime and this, operating in Bucharest by 1993, did not seem to have much of an effect on cremation figures. In 1999, 1,172 cremations were performed in Romania, only approximately twelve percent of deaths in Bucharest. After being so advanced compared to other south-eastern European countries, Romania is now one of the least developed in terms of cremation. In contrast, Bulgaria, that only got its crematorium in 2001, performed almost five times as many cremations as Romania in 2002 (5,254, which was almost five percent of deaths). The position of leading the move towards cremation in the region had long been ceded by Romania. By the close of the twentieth century, in 1999, Hungary and Slovenia were cremating a third or more of their dead and had become the trailblazers in the former Eastern Bloc. References Flacâra Sacra (1937-1939), CRE/AO/RO. Pharos, 1934- present day, CRE/A/UK/19. 3 Report (1936), of the International Cremation Congress in Prague, CRE/D4/1936/3. Report (1937), of the International Cremation Congress in London, CRE/D4/1937/1. Report (1948), of the ICF Congress at The Hague, CRE/D4/1948/1. Visman, J.J. (1983), ‘Twenty-five Years of Cremation in Europe’, Pharos 49(1):36-8. 4