A picture is worth 1,000 words. It’s a cliché, yes, but it can’t be applied to every photo. In order to “speak” so much, an image must be captured at exactly the right moment, by a skilled photographer. The photos taken by Constantin Duma during the 1989 Revolution in Timișoara brilliantly fulfill all these conditions.
Constantin Duma is the photographer that everybody in Timisoara knows, whether they are aware of it or not. We know him because his photographs illustrate the life of our fortress for almost five decades now. He was there to capture, on film or digitally, all the important moments in the city’s recent history, and the Revolution of 1989 was certainly the most important.
He always had a passion for photography, and he published his first photo in the press in 1970, during high school, in his native Marghita, and by the time he left Bihor for Timișoara, in 1975, already had a sharp ”eye”. However, he continued to learn, publishing in the press of the time and collaborating with various institutions.
In the first days of the 1989 Revolution, he instinctively felt that these were events that must be immortalized for posterity. Accepting the danger, because a photographer risked being “spotted” by all the camps involved in the events, he took to the streets from the first days of the uprising. It captured tense and dramatic moments, then the euphoria of December 20, 1989, when Timișoara became the first communism-free city in Romania. The archive also contains harsh images of those who sacrificed themselves for the rest of us. Images of the pain of those who are left to mourn their sons or daughters, parents, brothers or friends that were killed for an ideal which must remain pure, despite the fog brought by the relentless passage of time: FREEDOM!
1989 Timișoara is now legendary, and “Costi” Duma also signed in the history book of our city.
Octavian Țintaru was born on September 13, 1968, graduating from the “Azur” Industrial Chemistry High School in 1988 and working as an electrician at the state-owned factory Spumotim at the time of the December 1989 Revolution. Octavian planned to attend the Faculty of Letters, because he thought that he could improve himself in the art of writing. He already had started writing poems and even a novel, but they remained unpublished.
You can find extras of his poems on the panels inside the photo exhibition, the English version of the stanzas are below. Many of the poems were written during 1989, so they catch a glimpse of the internal struggle and unfulfilled desires Octavian had, like every other citizen of Timisoara that was oppressed by the communist regime.
On December 17, 1989, Octavian was shot multiple times on Decebal Bridge, being alongside the revolutionaries who were heading to the Prefecture. Due to the explosive bullets, one kidney, half of his liver and femoral artery were destroyed. He did not survive because there were no blood reserves for transfusion. According to the doctor who took care of him, his last words were: “So what! This is not life!”.
”The Flight”
“The flight is enslaved in me / By my inability to rise / But I dream that in the clear horizons / I will have full control, someday.
And I hope and fight, each day or night / I have no rest when I look in the eagles’ eyes / With them I like to measure myself in deeds / In their flight I find my strength.”
”Sorrow”
“Our hearts are full of blood / Our souls are full of dreams / White butterflies on the green plains / And the blue horizons reddened by the bleeding orders / Of death, the death that is born with us…
We are eternal through death / And we wear our eternity with pride / In our cruel, harsh, serene looks…”
”Thoughts”
“My life goes by leaving me, sometimes / On a stone, in the middle of the fight, thinking…
It’s been a while since I’ve loved / I still have time left to learn to love / There’s so much peace in me and so many thoughts / Today – leaving for you – I’m leaving myself!”
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