Watching brief - Frank McNally on the Eyes of Sibiu

Strolling around the medieval streets of Sibiu, a Unesco-listed city in Transylvania, you might be forgiven for feeling paranoid.

Everywhere you go, there seem to be eyes looking at you: hooded eyes, peering down from the tall red roofs that crown most buildings in the old town.

The “Eyes of Sibiu” – dormer windows with curved slate brows – could have been a symbol for life here under communism, when the Securitate had spies everywhere. But in fact, they long predate the 20th century, stretching back at least to the 15th.

And although their slightly sinister appearance spawned legends even then, the windows had a purely practical function, as had the tall attics from which they looked out. They were designed to cool and ventilate the rooms below.

General selection – Frank McNally on national stereotypes, Greek (and table quiz) heroes, and a stamp of greatness

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Blood brothers – Frank McNally on the deaths of two young men, one Irish, in the Korean War

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Hard Border – Frank McNally on a visit to the Korean Demilitarised Zone

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Transmigration of Seoul – Frank McNally on a long-awaited trip to South Korea

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In any case, symbolic of his rule or not, medieval Sibiu and its eyes survive today despite, rather than because of, Nicolae Ceausescu. Had he had his way, they might have suffered the fate of much of the rest of old Romania: obliterated in his architectural pogroms to make way for such monstrosities as Bucharest’s Palace of the Parliament.

Sibiu’s unlikely saviour was his son, Nicu, an otherwise terrible human being whose other main gift to Romania was drinking himself to an early death at 45.

As heir apparent, the younger Ceausescu lived the life of a playboy prince in the regime’s last years: gambling fortunes, drink-driving to homicidal effect, and raping with impunity.

His many victims are said to have included the gymnast Nadia Comeneci, whose perfect 10 at the 1976 Olympics propelled her to global fame but also ensured that her every movement thereafter was watched by the Securitate, fearful she would defect.

In the meantime, as part of his apprenticeship for ultimate power, the younger Ceausescu was made governor of Sibiu in the mid-1980s and his fondness for the place saved it from Ceausescu snr’s demented modernisation.

Whatever about the people they ruled, the communist government of Romania was certainly paranoid.

For her 2012 memoir, Burying the Typewriter, Carmen Bugan based the title on a precaution her father – a minor political dissident – used to have to take to hide his pamphleteering.

Typewriters were considered weapons by the Ceausescu regime. Ownership was restricted but, where allowed, they had to be registered with police, and their “fingerprints” – the identifying characteristics that pre-computer keyboard characters all had – recorded.

Bugan’s father took to burying his typewriter in the back garden every night, although that didn’t stop him being arrested in the end.

There are windows in her memoir too: not for looking out, primarily, but – in a country where it was thought that one in every neighbour was an informer – allowing others to look in, with dangerous effect.

Hence Bugan’s childhood in a house where street-facing windows were covered with towels and blankets.

Wide as it was, like the Eyes of Sibiu, the secret police’s scope may have been exaggerated by popular perception. At the height of its reign of terror, it had about 11,000 agents, and half a million informers.

In proportion to Romania’s 22 million population, this meant one in every 43 citizens was a spy. But in East Germany, thanks to the Stasi and its network, the figure has been put at one in every six or seven. The Securitate’s achievements included convincing people there were eyes everywhere, even if there weren’t.

Another book about the Ceausescu era, Patrick McGuinness’s novel The Last Hundred Days, takes a charitable – or at least ambivalent – view on those who co-operated with the regime. Inspired by his years as a teacher in late-1980s Romania, McGuinness’s narrator recalls: “The first thing I learned... was to separate people from what they did. People existed in a realm apart from their actions: this was the only way to maintain friendships in a police state. When... the faculty secretary opened our offices for the police to search our things and copy our papers, or the landlady let them into my flat, I said nothing. I knew they knew I knew, and it changed nothing.”

Today, the Securitate files are open to the public, for anyone who wants to read. Not everyone sees the point. One woman I spoke to last week, who fled Romania in the 1980s to great success abroad, had no desire to delve into the archives. Having escaped the hell of the Ceausescu years, she said: “Why would I want to go back there?”

Like her, Sibiu survived communism in good shape. Among its recent triumphs was a year as European Capital of Culture in 2007. And as creepy as they can still appear, the dormer windows have also successfully reinvented themselves.

When in 2017, a new government proposed laws that would weaken the judiciary and undermine inquiries into political graft, Romanians took to the streets in protest. In Sibiu, campaigners adopted the architectural eyes as an anti-corruption logo. The slogan was Va vedem: “We see you.”