COURAGE

savienojot kolekcijas

The Lucian Ionică private collection is one of the few collections of snapshots taken during the tensest and most feverish days of the Romanian Revolution of December 1989 in the city of Timişoara, the place where the popular revolt against the communist dictatorship first broke out. The photographic documents in this collection preserve the memory both of the dramatic moments before the change of regime and of the days immediately after the fall of Nicolae Ceauşescu, when sudden freedom of expression produced moments no less significant for the recent history of Romania.

The collection reflects, on the one hand, the oppositional activity of the Romanian Greek Catholic (Uniate) Church towards the communist regime, and, on the other hand, the intense surveillance and harsh repression of this Church carried out by the repressive apparatus of the communist authorities. The Romanian Greek Catholic Church Ad-hoc Collection represents the most comprehensive collection of documents, which illustrates the multilayered resistance to dictatorship of one of the most repressed religious groups in communist Romania and its vivid underground religious activity from 1948 to 1989.

The personal collection of Croatian philosopher and sociologist Rudi Supek contains documents and photographs that testify to Supek's intellectual activity, which had been prevented in some phases of his life. Supek was the editor of two critically-oriented Marxist journals, Pogledi and Praxis, and as one of the main protagonists of the Korčula Summer School of Philosophy, he expressed views that did not align with those promoted by the Communist authorities. Supek's disagreement with the practices of the communist regime stemmed from his understanding of the position of intellectuals in society and his stance that there is no socialism without democracy. This collection also illustrates Supek's work as one of the pioneers of the environmental movement in Yugoslavia.