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is not remembered much outside Romania these days. Now 58 and the bishop of, in March 1989 he was a parish priest in Timosoara facing eviction from his church apartment. His crime was to have preached against the policy of "systemisation" - the restructuring of his country's towns and villages ordered by the authoritarian regime of Nicolae Ceausescu. Ethnically Hungarian, Tökés had a long history of criticising the regime and so when he refused to quit his home, it became a cause célèbre and drew the attention of Ceausescu's secret police, the notorious Securitate. By December 1989, it was not only his parishioners who were standing guard to protect his flat, linking hands around the property, but ethnic Romanians who swelled into a crowd that filled the surrounding streets. What followed over the next few days is better known than Tökés 's personal tale: the mass protests in Timosoara which led, in quick order, to the fall of the once-mighty Ceausescu regime. If this story of one man and his country sounds familiar, that is perhaps because it is. (en) |
