Romania

Tunisia, January 2011. Romania, December 1989. The similarities are eerie. Each country was governed for 21/2 decades by an autocrat. In both countries, the people, not the elite, launch the revolution. Soldiers allied with competing factions are shooting at each other. Common people are outraged to see the palaces of the dictator's family. French is the second language of the elite. Democrats around the world are cheering the revolution while security professionals in Western governments fret about stability.

TARGU JIU, Romania -- When Constantin Brancusi departed this city after completing a sculptural ensemble, he announced, rather prophetically, "You don't know what I'm leaving here."True enough. For more than 60 years four works by the father of contemporary sculpture have stood here, and Romania truly didn't know what her native son had left behind, nor how to take care of the sculptures, nor how to let others know they existed.Quietly, the pieces weathered the decades until one recent day someone noticed they were falling apart and that Brancusi deserved better, as did Romania.

PIANU DE JOS, Romania -- Holding a 7-iron on a pretty hilltop in a remote part of Transylvania, Paul Tomita takes a couple of easy practice swings.Eighty yards away stands a rippling flag. Fifty yards away stand some grazing sheep. "They're here to cut the grass," explains Tomita. "And to provide the fertilizer."Golf in Romania may sound a bit like polo in Rwanda. Even Tomita, a stout 84-year-old Romanian, with a white mustache and a black pipe stuck in his mouth, acknowledges the incongruity.

BOTOSANI, Romania -- Mitica Gavriliuc sinks into his leather armchair, checks the gold antique pocket watch he picked up on a recent vacation in London, and fires up a well-earned Marlboro. "I'll give you half an hour," he purrs, exhaling contentedly. "I'm feeling generous this evening."And so he should be. Thanks to him, the town of Botosani -- a standard Romanian provincial sprawl of crumbling high-rises and decrepit heavy industry -- now has a private medical clinic, staffed by specialist doctors moonlighting from the municipal hospital.

TICHILESTI, Romania -- No signpost marks the narrow side road off the Black Sea coastal highway. The tiny commune doesn't even appear on official Romanian maps. Centuries seem to roll away as the 2-mile dirt track leads toward whitewashed huts and stone cottages at the head of a steep valley.Tawny, gnarled figures crouch to toast their corn bread supper over an open fire beneath an ancient willow.Some have cauliflower ears. Many are missing noses, or have only moist lesions where their eyes once were.

Princess Margarita of Romania is on the phone, giving a bit of insight into how royalty works away from the pop and flash of the paparazzi cameras in Monaco, Cannes, Nice and all those other Euro-playgrounds along the Mediterranean."

BUCHAREST, Romania -- At the old Communist Party Central Committee building, on the snowy nights of December, the ghost of the late dictator is almost palpable.The large, stolid building remains much as it was on Dec. 21, 1989, the day a bewildered Nicolae Ceausescu spoke from a balcony and was shouted down by the crowd filling Palace Square. The Romanian revolution had thus begun. Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, would be executed on Christmas Day. Another 1,200 people would die in a week of street battles with the Securitate, the secret police.

BUCHAREST, Romania -- Dan lives in a tunnel beneath a manhole cover on the edge of Bucharest's Gara de Nord railway station. It's a hellish, stifling and dirty space where warm pipes hiss and rats scuttle by. The stench is overwhelming.He shares the space with three other ragged boys, all in their mid-teens. They have spread torn cardboard boxes on the floor. They are grateful to have this warm place for the coming winter. In other tunnels, children have even managed to rig up electricity for makeshift lights.

Which landlocked country is surrounded by Romania and Ukraine? Answer on Page 5:

ATLANTA -- Octavian Belu says there is no magic, no mystery and no mercy about his Romanian women's gymnastics team."The secret is to work seven hours a day, seven days a week," he said. "We must stay in the training all the time. Be a family. We want to replace the family, mothers and fathers. The gymnasts make some sacrifice. They accept rules."And they win.This may make American television executives nervous, but it's the Romanians, not the Americans, who are the favorites to take the women's team gold and dominate the first week of the 1996 Summer Olympics.