The Memorial of Rebirth (Memorialul Renaşterii in Romanian

Romanian language

Romanian Romanian Romanian (or Daco-Romanian; obsolete spellings Rumanian, Roumanian; self-designation: română, limba română ("the Romanian language") or românește (lit. "in Romanian") is a Romance language spoken by around 24 to 28 million people, primarily in Romania and Moldova...

) is a memorial

Memorial

A memorial is an object which serves as a focus for memory of something, usually a person or an event. Popular forms of memorials include landmark objects or art objects such as sculptures, statues or fountains, and even entire parks....

 in Bucharest

Bucharest

Bucharest is the capital municipality, cultural, industrial, and financial centre of Romania. It is the largest city in Romania, located in the southeast of the country, at , and lies on the banks of the Dâmbovița River....

, Romania

Romania

Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea...

 that commemorates the struggles and victims of the Romanian Revolution of 1989

Romanian Revolution of 1989

The Romanian Revolution of 1989 was a series of riots and clashes in December 1989. These were part of the Revolutions of 1989 that occurred in several Warsaw Pact countries...

, which overthrew Communism

Communism

Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...

. The memorial complex was inaugurated in August 2005 in Revolution Square

Revolution Square, Bucharest

Revolution Square is a square in central Bucharest, on Calea Victoriei. Known as Piaţa Palatului until 1989, it was later renamed after the 1989 Romanian Revolution....

, where Romania's Communist-era

Communist Romania

Communist Romania was the period in Romanian history when that country was a Soviet-aligned communist state in the Eastern Bloc, with the dominant role of Romanian Communist Party enshrined in its successive constitutions...

 dictator, Nicolae Ceauşescu

Nicolae Ceausescu

Nicolae Ceaușescu was a Romanian Communist politician. He was General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party from 1965 to 1989, and as such was the country's second and last Communist leader...

, was publicly overthrown in December 1989.

The memorial, designed by Alexandru Ghilduş, features as its centrepiece a 25-metre-high marble pillar reaching up to the sky, upon which a metal "crown" is placed. The pillar is surrounded by a 600 m² plaza

Plaza

Plaza is a Spanish word related to "field" which describes an open urban public space, such as a city square. All through Spanish America, the plaza mayor of each center of administration held three closely related institutions: the cathedral, the cabildo or administrative center, which might be...

 covered by marble and granite

Granite

Granite is a common and widely occurring type of intrusive, felsic, igneous rock. Granite usually has a medium- to coarse-grained texture. Occasionally some individual crystals are larger than the groundmass, in which case the texture is known as porphyritic. A granitic rock with a porphyritic...

.

The memorial cost 5.6 million lei

Romanian leu

The leu is the currency of Romania. It is subdivided into 100 bani . The name of the currency means "lion". On 1 July 2005, Romania underwent a currency reform, switching from the previous leu to a new leu . 1 RON is equal to 10,000 ROL...

 (RON 5.6 million, ROL

ROL

Rol may refer to:* Henri Rol-Tanguy, French resistant, "Rol" used to be his nickname during WW2* Rol, village in Jayal tehsil, Nagaur district, in Rajasthan India* Rolleston railway station* Rol Cortishane, fictional character...

 56 billion, approximately €

Euro

The euro is the official currency of the eurozone: 17 of the 27 member states of the European Union. It is also the currency used by the Institutions of the European Union. The eurozone consists of Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg,...

1.5 million). Its initial name was "Eternal Glory to the Heroes and the Romanian Revolution of December 1989" (Glorie Eternă Eroilor şi Revoluţiei Române din Decembrie 1989). The memorial's name alludes to Romania's rebirth as a nation after the collapse of Communism.

Controversy

Despite a commonly-acknowledged need for a memorial commemorating Romania's 1989 revolution, the monument sparked a significant amount of controversy when it was inaugurated in 2005, mainly to do with its design. Many artists stated that the memorial, especially its central pillar, was devoid of any symbolism, being too abstract

Abstract art

Abstract art uses a visual language of form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world. Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an...

, and thus didn't adequately represent the suffering and magnitude of the 1989 revolution, which claimed around 1,500 lives.

Others stated that they personally didn't like the aesthetics of the design; the mayor of Bucharest, Adriean Videanu

Adriean Videanu

Adriean Videanu is a businessman and former mayor of Bucharest, Romania. He is also a vice president of the Democratic Liberal Party of Romania, which is led by Emil Boc and the Minister of Economy in the Boc Cabinet, from 22 December 2008.A businessman in the marble and granite industry, Videanu...

, stated, "It's a question of taste. I personally don't like it. I don't understand its symbolism." There was also controversy because the designer, Ghilduş, was an applied art

Applied art

Applied art is the application of design and aesthetics to objects of function and everyday use. Whereas fine arts serve as intellectual stimulation to the viewer or academic sensibilities, the applied arts incorporate design and creative ideals to objects of utility, such as a cup, magazine or...

ist, designing objects like chairs and lamps, rather than a sculptor.

The art critic Mihai Oroveanu said, "[Alexandru Ghilduş] doesn't have the qualifications to undertake such a work, since he is a designer, not a sculptor". The Memorial of Rebirth has been described as "a potato skewered on a stake", an "olive on a toothpick", "the potato of the revolution" and "the vector with the crown".

The placement of the memorial was also criticized and the Urbanism Committees of both the 3rd Sector and of Bucharest rejected the design, but their role is officially only as consultants and the memorial was erected anyway.

Owing to its relative unpopularity, the monument is guarded round-the-clock, but despite this, on the night of 12 May 2006, it was vandalized. A stencil

Stencil

A stencil is a thin sheet of material, such as paper, plastic, or metal, with letters or a design cut from it, used to produce the letters or design on an underlying surface by applying pigment through the cut-out holes in the material. The key advantage of a stencil is that it can be reused to...

 graffiti

Graffiti

Graffiti is the name for images or lettering scratched, scrawled, painted or marked in any manner on property....

 figure representing the fictional revolutionary character "V"

V for Vendetta

V for Vendetta is a ten-issue comic book series written by Alan Moore and illustrated mostly by David Lloyd, set in a dystopian future United Kingdom imagined from the 1980s to about the 1990s. A mysterious masked revolutionary who calls himself "V" works to destroy the totalitarian government,...

 was drawn on the side facing the National Museum of Art

National Museum of Art of Romania

The National Museum of Art of Romania is located in the former royal palace in Revolution Square, central Bucharest, Romania, completed in 1937...

.