Some prefer admiring wondeful landscapes, some enjoy themselves on beaches or skiing, but there are some interested in visiting those places that have witnessed some of the great tragedies of the humankind.

The Sighet Prison is located in Sighetu Marmatiei,  Maramures County. It is the most notorious prison in Romania, because the Communist regime used it to annihilate its adversaries, mostly illustrious politicians and public figures from the pre-Communist era. This prison was not accidentally chosen by the Party officials, as it was only two km far from the Soviet border and the inmates had nowhere to run.

The prison was built in 1897 when Transylvania was a part of the Austria-Hungary Empire. The Communist era of the Sighet Prison began in August 1948, when 18 students that had protested against the regime were brought here. They were kept until May 1949, a pale foreshadowing of the great abuses yet to come. Between 1950 and 1955, over 200 politicians, intelectuals, priests, journalists or officers, many of them over 60 years old, were imprisoned here; some had been victims of fake trials, other hadn’t even had one (they were sent for ”administrative punishements”).

Iuliu Maniu (one of the greatest political figure of his time, several times Prime Minister of Romania), Constantin and Gheorghe Bratianu (descendants of a prestigious family, who had a vital role in the development of modern Romania), Constantin Argetoianu (a very shrewd politician, many times minister) are a just a few of those who suffered the inhumane conditions from Sighet.

In 1955, when Romania was admitted in the United Nations Organization, and after the Geneva Convention, Sighet ceased to be a political prison and became a common law prison until 1977, when it stopped functioning. In January 1993, Ana Blandiana, a Romanian poet known for her resistance against the Communist regime, presented the Council of Europe with a project that aimed at transforming the former prison in a museum. The Memorial of the Victims of Communism was inaugurated in 1997.

A small statuary group The Cortege of the Sacrificed, executed by the sculptor Aurel Vlad, is placed in the museum’s courtyard. The first room the visitors enter is the Map Room, where there is a presentation of the geography of the Communist prison system, which consisted in approximately 230 establishments, between 1945 and 1989. The place that was provided by prison like Sighet with forced laboreurs and that was equal to a death sentence was the Danube – Black Sea Channel, where the inmates had to work in miserable conditions, sometimes with their bare hands.

The Picture Corridor is situated on the ground floor and it has its walls covered with 3600 anonymous pictures of those who spent agonizing moments in the dark, small cells, which can be visited, too. The one where Iuliu Maniu died tries to recreate the dreadful conditions from that time: the windows had wooden planks to prevent the prisoners looking outside, the floor was wet and dirty and the bed was made in such a manner that it didn’t allow someone to sit, just to lay.

These torments and many other one can find out while visiting the museum were meant to destroy the opponents step by step, both physically and psychologically.

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