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A casual look at the date on the calendar – June 14, 2025 – brought it all back in an instant. Thirty-five years ago this week, in 1990, my girlfriend at the time, Delia Meth-Cohn, and I had just touched down at Bucharest Airport and unwittingly walked straight into the worst wave of political violence the two of us had ever seen in our lives: what Romanians refer to as the “Mineriadă,” a violent government-led crackdown in the middle of the capital on students and pro-democracy protesters.
Looking back all these year later I still find relevance in that shameful crackdown (and not only for Romania). Authoritarian governments everywhere (including now in the U.S.) still threaten violence to restrict peaceful protest and democracy itself, incredibly, still feels endangered.
Last week, in Part 1 of this post, I wrote how it was that Delia and I happened to be in Bucharest at that time, and what we both witnessed. This week, in the concluding post, I write about how the hell we got ourselves out of there … and what I learned from what I saw. If you’ve just landed on this story, go back to Part 1 so that it makes more sense. Inexplicably, at the time, I didn’t take any of my own photos, and so I’m indebted to Romanian photographer Andrei Iliescu for his permission to use his incredible images of what happened.
