Letter from Romania Enda O'DohertySometimes you remember a place for the most trivial of reasons.
Arles: wasn't that where we had the chestnut puree dessert? Nancy: there were the splendid baroque palaces erected by some Polish prince of course, but will we ever forget the dog playing in the mechanical fountains?
Timisoara, in the western Romanian region of Banat, is where I had the worst meal I ever paid money for in my life.
In a dismal Chinese restaurant in a basement (recommended by the Lonely Planet guide) my own selection, a slightly curried duck mush, was pretty much inedible; my three fellow diners, who had made other choices, fared no better. The nervous and sullen waitress, noticing our still full plates and hearing our rude, superior western laughter, must have feared the worst.
But in a splendid gesture of easy condescension - after all it was not her fault - we tipped her anyway, a fairly paltry sum by our standards but, judging by the reaction it elicited, something like half a week's wages.
That was in May 2003. Apart from the ground duck, what else do I remember? That I was in a city with some fine buildings in an appalling state of repair; the tower block hotel, a recent job, with pretty much everything right except for the leather-jacketed pimps and thugs hanging out in the lobby; and yes, the early middle-aged man with mental health problems who took us on a tour of the historic sites and places of memory in the city where the revolution that toppled the megalomaniac dictator Nicolae Ceausescu suddenly sparked into life in December 1989.
Anyone old enough to remember Dublin in the 1980s should know that change happens, and can happen quickly. Timisoara in December 2006 is a thriving, vibrant regional capital, a centre for software development awash with Italian capital with an unemployment rate close enough to zero. The Romanians are a Latin people - "an island of Latinity in a sea of Slavdom" is the favoured cliché - and the Italians have in recent years adopted them with gusto, showering the Timisoarans with cheap jobs and buying up their best real estate.
In the long run this may cause some problems.
In the short run it works like a dream. The city's young folk chat about the latest and niftiest anti-spam software over perfect espressos while council workmen busy themselves applying spit and polish to this former Austro-Hungarian provincial capital's scores of fine baroque and Art Nouveau mansions and merchants' houses.
And the old remember the dead of December 1989 and the price they paid for what their children and grandchildren will very soon be taking for granted.
The "events" of December 1989 were sparked by the attempts of the authorities to discipline a "turbulent priest", the Protestant (and ethnic Hungarian) pastor László Tökés, who had spoken out against the communist regime's plans for the "systemisation" (which is to say destruction) of traditional Romanian villages.
Tökés was first supported by his own flock, who obstructed attempts to evict him from his church house, then by other Timisoarans, Orthodox Catholics and Roman Catholics. Over a number of days in mid-December tensions escalated; eventually the army fired on the peaceful protesters, killing an unknown number. Many bodies were taken away and burned.
Disorder and defiance then spread to the capital, Bucharest, leading quickly to a brief civil war (of sorts) and the execution, on Christmas Day, of Ceausescu and his wife, Elena.
Traian Orban, the director of the "Memorial of the Revolution" museum in Timisoara, speaks glowingly of his city, its bravery and its long-cherished traditions of liberalism and tolerance. In 1989, Timisoara led and Bucharest followed, he will tell you.
The capital of the Banat is roughly the same size as Cork, its buildings, if possible, even more beautiful and its people, if possible, even more proud.
Traian, a small, spare, neat man in his 50s but perhaps looking older, was shot in the leg during the days of Timisoara's greatness, and his best friend murdered by still unknown and unpunished assailants.
He, and his generation, have not benefited greatly from the democratic revolution, which was for many years "handled" (or stolen) by a new generation of corrupt neo-communist leaders. Now, with the largely beneficent influence of the drive to EU membership, that nomenklatura is gradually passing away.
Given what happened - and what did not happen - in Romania between 1989 and the early 2000s, Traian Orban would have every right to be bitter. But he seems not to have a bitter bone in his body. For him, memory is enough. It is to be hoped that his sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters will, in their new-found prosperity, also find time to remember the horror and the heroism of those who fought against Nicolae Ceausescu, the brutal and crazed self-styled "genius of the Carpathians".