Whereas the Black Sea coast played a crucial part in the evolution of rock music in Socialist Romania, with its tourist resorts, the Carpathians were also a key element in the establishment of a rock music scene which did not depend on summer tourists, in order to survive and to flourish. Restaurants, tourist lodges, coupled with the official infrastructure of houses of culture and workers’ clubs led to the emergence of numerous local rock scenes, that either sparked new bands, or allowed established acts to have a musical activity when the seaside season was closed for the summer.

One such example is the town of Zărnești, a settlement of roughly 25,000 inhabitants, situated at the foot of the Piatra Craiului Mountain in the Southern Carpathians. Despite its limited infrastructure, Zărnești became home to a burgeoning music scene, during the 1980s, which would explode on a national level in the post 1989 period, especially during the 1990s, before fading away in the early 2000s.

Based on archival research, oral history interviews with musicians and fans, and personal accounts of  Zărnești’s music scene, this research investigates how the town’s process of industrial and cultural modernization provided local musicians with the infrastructure and the technological upgrade that was paramount for the establishment of rock bands. Furthermore, the project sheds light on how the town’s vicinity to an international tourist area provided the local scene with access to records and musical information that would have, otherwise, remained scarce. Last, but not least, the project construes how the town’s mountainous location brought together two incongruous everyday realities: the metallic monotony of the socialist industrial area and the romantic lifestyle of highland escapism and folk music.

The thesis examined the structure and functions of political festivals in communist Romania, between 1948 and 1989, having focused especially on their roles in mirroring the official communist ideology and its shifts between the Marxist-Leninist doctrine and nationalism, as well as in shaping a new type of culture for members of the working-class and peasantry. The analysis illustrated political festivals as instruments of institutional and mass control, and as means of self-representation for the communist regime, with the purpose of providing political legitimization. The research was developed on two levels: a chronological one – between youth and workers festivals in Romania, during the 1950s and 1960s, and the so-called National Festival of Socialist Education “Song to Romania”, during the 1970s and 1980s – and a structural comparison – between the official image of festivals in propaganda, at a general level, and that of festivals as perceived by ordinary people, at a case-study level.

A full-length study is available here.