Romanian Army tanks stand idly by. Bucharest December 1989. Nicholas Mellor

It is time to end the Paddy blog posting drought and recommence activities. I have had another busy year and occasionally one needs a break. I am indebted to Nicholas Mellor for writing a fascinating account of his December 1989 aid journey to Bucharest whilst Romania was in the midst of its bloody revolution. Read on to find out how an Iranian watermelon played a key part in Ceaușescu’s downfall.

The Beryl Necklace and the Watermelon by Nicholas Mellor

Romania, December 1989

Some journeys, as Patrick Leigh Fermor knew, begin with a casual invitation and end somewhere unimaginable. December 1989: whilst families across Europe were enjoying reunions and Christmas celebrations, I found myself driving eastward across a snow-covered continent in a blue Transit van—bound for Bucharest, capital of a country reeling from the bloodiest of the year’s revolutions.

It had been an extraordinary autumn. In June, Poland’s Solidarity had won their impossible election. By August, Hungary was cutting the wire on its Austrian border. On 9th November, the Berlin Wall fell—not through war but through the sheer weight of people demanding freedom. Prague followed with its Velvet Revolution, so called because not a window was broken, not a shot fired. By early December, five Soviet satellites had thrown off their chains. Only Romania remained.

And whilst I drove, Nicolae Ceaușescu—the most isolated of Eastern Europe’s dictators—was making his final moves. On 16th December, his forces had opened fire on protesters in Timișoara. Two days later, even as bodies were being counted, he flew to Tehran for a state visit, becoming the only head of state to pay homage at Ayatollah Khomeini’s tomb. President Rafsanjani gave him several gifts, including a watermelon. By 20th December, Ceaușescu was back in Bucharest giving televised addresses about foreign interference. On 21st December, he appeared on the balcony of the Central Committee building for a rally meant to demonstrate his continued authority. One minute into his speech, the crowd began to shout. ‘Ti-mi-șoa-ra!’ The chant grew louder. For the first time in twenty-four years, Ceaușescu’s face registered something close to panic. That was the last time he would be seen in public as leader of Romania.

The journey had been funded by a beryl necklace—itself a relic of an earlier separation. In the 1930s, Patrick Leigh Fermor had lived amongst the Cantacuzinos, Romanian aristocratic nobility of Greek-Phanariot origin who traced their lineage to Byzantine emperors. He fell in love with Princess Bălaşa Cantacuzino; they lived together until the war separated them in 1939. Another branch of the family, Prince George Matei Cantacuzino, sent his wife Princess Sanda and their children to England that same year, intending to follow in two or three years. The war lasted six, and when it ended, Romania fell under Soviet control. George Matei, forbidden to leave, was sentenced in 1948 to five years hard labour.

In 1946, recognising a rare opportunity, George Matei befriended a French pianist named Monique de la Bruchollerie who was visiting Bucharest for a series of concerts. He entrusted her with a ring and a beryl necklace to deliver to his refugee wife. Monique returned to Paris and sent the ring on to London. The necklace she kept. For eighteen years it remained lost to the Cantacuzino family until, in 1964, Princess Sanda’s sister finally tracked down Monique and recovered it.

Twenty-five years later, as Romania erupted, the Cantacuzino family—now living in London—sent me a faxed list of urgently needed medicines. Marie-Lyse, George Matei’s daughter, made an extraordinary offer: her family would sell the beryl necklace to help fund a humanitarian mission. This family heirloom, smuggled out during one dark chapter, would now return in spirit during another.

The Journey

Three of us left London on Boxing Day: myself, Peter Tweedie—a complete stranger whose business had loaned him a van and whose Romanian wife gave us contacts in Bucharest—and Christopher Besse, a doctor who could verify our cargo and distribute it properly. We’d loaded the van the night before: box after box of medical supplies, close to 20 kilograms of controlled drugs alone. We created a sign for the sides of the van which read: ‘Medical Aid for Romania’.

Through France, Belgium, and Germany, the familiar world slipped past—neat villages, motorways, petrol stations whose attendants mostly understood a little English. At every border crossing, guards saw our makeshift sign and waved us through. Sometimes they saluted. We kept the radio on whenever we could pick up a signal. The news was fragmentary: the revolutionary government was in control but there were also reports the Securitate was mounting counterattacks. Casualty figures ranged from hundreds to thousands. On Christmas Day, the Ceaușescus had been executed. A hasty trial, the firing squad, pictures of the bodies had been shown on the broadcast media to prove they were really dead.

Yugoslavia was different. This was where Eastern Europe properly began. The border guards examined our papers more carefully before waving us through. One young guard told us we were brave. Or perhaps foolish. His smile suggested he wasn’t sure which.

Darkness fell as we approached the Bulgarian border. And with darkness came snow. Within an hour it was a blizzard. The roads were terrible—cracked, potholed, evidently neglected for years, and now covered in a blanket of snow. We didn’t dare stop. We swapped seats whilst still moving, the passenger climbing over whilst the driver squeezed across, awkward and slightly dangerous but stopping seemed worse. Hour after hour through the endless swirl of snow in the headlights and the occasional flash of Cyrillic signs we couldn’t read.

Dawn came slowly on 27th December, grey and grudging. Through the murk we saw the bridge across the Danube. Behind us, Bulgaria—still communist in structure if not name. Ahead, Romania—in revolution, in chaos, possibly still in civil war. On the Romanian side, a few soldiers manned the border post. When they saw our sign, their faces changed. They smiled. One saluted. And we saw it: the Romanian flag with a hole cut in its centre where the dictator’s crest had been torn out.

The forty miles from the border to Bucharest took three hours. Villages with no lights, no sign of life. Soldiers at checkpoints waved us through. Civilians stood in small groups in the snow, talking urgently. Posters and painted slogans everywhere: ‘Libertate!’ Freedom! ‘Jos Ceaușescu!’ Down with Ceaușescu!

Arriving in Bucharest December 1989. Nicholas Mellor

Bucharest

Bucharest appeared through the snow like a city from a dream. Grand nineteenth-century boulevards, massive grey apartment blocks, and everywhere the signs of recent violence. We were guided to the main surgical hospital. Crowds gathered around the entrance. As we pulled up, someone must have read our sign because word spread quickly. ‘Medicamente!’ Medicine! ‘Din Anglia!’ From England!

The hospital director came out—a tired-looking man in a white coat stained with blood. He shook our hands with both of his, words pouring out in a mixture of Romanian, French, and broken English. Thank you. Thank God. You came. We need everything.

Hospital staff formed a human chain to pass the boxes inside. The director wanted to show us what we’d come to help with. The smell hit us immediately: blood, disinfectant, unwashed bodies. In one ward, a young man lay conscious on an operating table as a surgeon extracted a bullet from his arm with what looked like mediaeval instruments. There was no anaesthetic—they’d run out. Melting snow pooled on the floor from doors left open to the winter air.

Peter Tweedie’s parents-in-law insisted we stay with them—a small wooden house on the edge of the city, nothing like the grand estates where Fermor had stayed with the Cantacuzinos in the 1930s. They gave us their bed, filled a tin bath with water heated on the wood-burning stove, fed us soup that tasted like the best meal we’d ever eaten.

Bread queues Romania 1989. Nicholas Mellor

As we sat by the fire that evening, drinking țuică from small glass tumblers, we watched the television, they were broadcasting ‘Gone with the Wind with Romanian subtitles. It was constantly interrupted not with adverts but to show pictures of the executed dictator sprawled on the ground along with his wife. We reflected on those pivotal moments that determine the course of history. The crowds turning against Ceaușescu during his final speech. The dictator fleeing by helicopter. The trial on Christmas Day. ‘We still don’t believe it,’ our host said. ‘For forty years we lived under him. And now he is gone. Romania is free.’ He said the word—free—with something like wonder, as if testing whether it was real.

The blizzard that had followed us to Bucharest intensified. Reports came in that all routes in and out of the city were impassable. We were snowbound. The days passed. The old man would rise in the early hours to queue for bread. On New Year’s Eve, we went to their neighbours house where on the table was a feast.

In the centre of the table were slices of bright pink watermelon.

‘Where did you get this?’ I asked, astonished. Fresh fruit in midwinter Romania was impossible.

Peter’s father-in-law smiled. ‘When they took the palace, people took what they could. Ceaușescu never got to eat this. The Ayatollah’s gift.’ He raised his glass. ‘To the dictator’s last meal that he never ate. To freedom.

Epilogue

As midnight approached in that snow-bound house on the edge of Bucharest, our glasses raised in the wavering candlelight, I thought of Patrick Leigh Fermor. Not just because of the Cantacuzino connection, but because of what he understood about journeys: they are not measured in miles but in transformations. The beryl necklace had crossed Europe twice—once fleeing darkness, once rushing towards it. The watermelon had travelled from Tehran to Bucharest, meant for a dictator’s table, now shared amongst strangers celebrating uncertain freedom.

In the mountains of Crete in 1944, Fermor and his captive General Kreipe had gazed at Mount Ida at dawn. The general, despite his uniform, quietly began to recite Horace: Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte—’Do you see how Soracte stands white with deep snow.’ Fermor, recognising the Latin, continued the quotation. For a brief moment, captor and captive were united, ‘drinking from the same fountain’ of Western civilisation even as the war raged around them.

Here we drank from a different fountain—țuică and watermelon, sharing the taste of a dictator’s unfinished business. Different fountains, perhaps, but the same deep human need to make meaning from chaos through shared ritual.

We toasted Romania’s uncertain rebirth, the necklace that had funded our journey, and the peculiar convergence that had brought strangers together at this particular moment in this particular place. Fermor understood something essential: the real adventure lies not in witnessing extraordinary events, but in those fleeting moments when—through some alchemical combination of circumstance, courage and chance—one briefly becomes part of them.

History, as I discovered that New Year’s Eve, is best tasted rather than merely observed. And it tasted of watermelon—pink and sweet and impossibly incongruous in a snow-bound Bucharest as the clock struck midnight on 1990, the year Europe would be whole and free again.