"Wolne przestrzenie" litoralu rumuńskiego 1960-1980

The article is devoted to the development of foreign tourism on the Black Sea coast in Romania. After the introduction of the communist regime the local tourist infrastructure, developing since the early 1920s, was taken over by the state and designated to serve the purposes of the so-called workers’ holidays. The coast was a strongly militarised zone and as such was not easily accessible. However, from around 1960 Romania began to open itself to international tourism, a process coinciding with a degree of liberalisation of the regime and its emancipation from the USSR. Foreign tourists co-created a “space of freedom” in which cultural rules were different from those at play until then. Their freedom of movement across the country was tolerated, as were contacts with the local population and forms of culture (music or fashion) directly inspired by Western culture. These phenomena reached their peak around 1968. Yet gradually, afraid of undesired influences, the government increased police surveillance of tourist destinations and from 1971 restricted personal contacts between Romanian citizens and foreigners. In the following decade, as a result of a gradual decline of political and economic life in the country as well as changes in the international situation, foreign tourism gradually became less important and the “space of freedom” was markedly reduced. After 1989 it would become an element of nostalgia for the “sunny” stage of postwar life in Romania.