LETTERS Nice tower blocks
Sir: I have been reading your 17 September issue containing Doina Cornea's letter to Ceausescu whilst driving myself about the Caucasus, and, having noted the high-rise blocks ringing every city I came to in Russia, I asked a guide whom I took one day from Kutaisi, whether the moun- taineers did not prefer their old stone huts in the hills to these monstrous contri- vances? She shook her head — shook it sadly, perhaps, but nonetheless firmly. And isn't she right? Isn't every country in the world which has a peasantry seeing a voluntary flight from the villages into city blocks? The quays of Istanbul are packed with Anatolian villagers determined to migrate to high-rise blocks in Germany: cross a bog in Mayo to that pretty white cabin, and you will discover a family packing for a Boston tenement.
My point is this: who, just, is protesting at Ceausescu's action? Is it the villagers of Rumania themselves, or is it bourgeois romantics reading the villagers' minds from Bucharest?
I should add that I was in Rumania fairly recently, and was much struck by the unreformed and more or less mediaeval life of the Transylvanian villages (though taking rather against the villagers, as it happens). More interesting and instruc- tive, though, was the Village Museum by the Herastraw lake in Bucharest where the history and architecture of Rumanian vil- lages was splendidly displayed. We may be sure that it is to such a museum as this that most villagers would like to see village life consigned.
Of course Ceausescu is doing dreadful things. The question is whether his destruc- tion of the villages is the issue to fight him on.
Philip Glazebrook
Orient Hotel, Tiflis, Georgia
PS. Having finished The Spectator in Ordzkoni- kidze, I placed it on display on the hotel news-stand, between Star and limonite.
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