Volunteers battling to save Romania's cultural treasures

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Baile Herculane, Romania  — Graffiti covers the crumbling walls of the main thermal baths in one of Europe’s oldest spa towns.

But after decades of neglect, a group of young architects is working to restore the picturesque Romanian resort that once attracted emperors.

“Someone once said that if you drink water from the spring from Herculane, you never leave,” said 31-year-old architect Oana Chirila.

“I was struck by the beauty of the place,” she said of the town in the southwest of the country, surrounded by mountains and crossed by a river.

“And at the same time shocked by its condition,” she said of the decrepit state of the old thermal baths.

She first stumbled upon Baile Herculane eight years ago, purely by chance, she said.

Her group’s restoration efforts here are just one of several recent civil society initiatives launched to protect some of Romania’s historic monuments.

An estimated 800 of them are in an advanced state of decay or in danger of crumbling altogether. Some of those are already considered to represent a danger to the public.

The neglect is the result of Romania’s chaotic transition from Communism to democracy, which was marked by opaque privatizations, often resulting in interminable legal battles and investigations by anti-corruption prosecutors.

Imperial history

Built in 1886, the Neptune Imperial Baths attracted illustrious clients in its heyday, with its warm sulphur treatments.

They included Austria’s Emperor Franz Joseph and his wife Elisabeth, popularly known as Sisi. Franz Joseph described the town as Europe’s “most beautiful spa resort”.

Now the baths are closed, their interior walls covered in graffiti, rubble on the floor and rain leaking in.

Despite the decay, tourists still frequently stop to marvel at and photograph the long, rusty facade, some trying to peek inside through the broken windows.

For the moment, Chirila and her team of volunteers are confined to doing conservation work on the baths’ outer structure.

They could not restore the building until legal disputes between the authorities and the private owners are solved, she explained, adding: “There’s always this fear that it might collapse.”

“Most of the historical monuments are in their current state –- meaning constant decay –- because they are legally blocked,” preventing any use of public or European funds for their restoration.

For the moment then, along one side of the riverbank, people take dips in three basins with sulphur water — dubbed “little bathtubs” by Chirila.

It was her team that refurbished the basins and built the changing booths and wooden pavilions, one of a number of projects they have undertaken in the town.

When AFP met her, about a dozen students were helping out with the renovation of a path through the woods.

Vital intervention

In recent years,

Baile Herculane, a town of 3,800, has seen a steady rise in tourists, say local officials.

Some 160,000 tourists came in 2024 — up from 90,000 in 2020 — many for spa treatments, but also for the hiking and climbing.

“The resort has changed,” Aura Zidarita, 50, a doctor, told AFP. She remained hopeful it could once again become a “pearl of Europe”.

Initiatives such as Chirila’s have multiplied in recent years, according to Stefan Balici, president of the Romanian Order of Architects.

They represent “a lesson in how citizens’ initiatives can intervene in heritage preservation”, in a country with little record of investing in the restoration of its monuments.

In 2019, young architects got involved in another spa resort, Baile Govora.

Chirila admitted she sometimes feared her work on the Imperial Baths is like “putting a bandage on a patient in sepsis”.

But Balici had no doubt of its value. Without her intervention, he said, the building would be “a pile of rubble” by now.

Chirila said she also drew hope from those like herself who believed in investing in the country’s heritage.

“Herculane ended up like this because of corruption,” she said.

“But we hope that thanks to good people it will heal.”