This essay, the third in a marvellously well researched series by Nicholas Mellor, serves as a coda to his first post ‘A Time of Gifts: the Beryl Necklace and the Watermelon’, and looks beyond the immediate experience of revolution to examine how diaspora communities contribute to post-conflict peacebuilding; a subject that has real currency at the moment. It draws on Marina Cantacuzino’s account of her father (all being distant cousins of Balasha and Pomme) and obituaries by Dan Teodorovici and the Royal Institute of British Architects.

 

 

 

By Nicholas Mellor

The fall of Ceaușescu on Christmas Day 1989 did not simply end a dictatorship—it broke down a dam. In the months and years that followed, something remarkable began to happen: those who had fled decades earlier started returning, not as tourists nostalgically revisiting childhood haunts, but as builders bringing back what they had learned in exile. The revolution created space for a particular kind of peacebuilding, one that would rely on the gifts of the diaspora to help Romania reconnect with its interrupted past and build a richer and more resilient future.

The Boy Who Left, The Architect Who Returned

Sherban Cantacuzino was eleven years old when his mother took him from Romania to England in 1939. It was meant to be temporary—a brief sojourn until the political storms passed. His father, George Matei Cantacuzino, a renowned architect and polymath whom Marina describes as the ‘Ruskin of Romania’, stayed behind. The family would be reunited, they believed, once the madness ended.

But history had other plans. First came the war, then the Iron Curtain. George Matei Cantacuzino was imprisoned by the communists from 1948 to 1953, deemed a ‘person of unclean origin’. He was forbidden to leave Romania, forbidden to see his wife and children again. For thirty-two years, father and son lived parallel lives—both architects, both scholars, both guardians of culture—separated by ideology and barbed wire. During this time George Matei  wrote 63 letters that reached his refugee family, and these provided the roots for a film made about his life. The film provides a glimpse of the Romania that Patrick Leigh Fermor would have known.

When George Matei died in 1960, Sherban was still in London, still waiting. It is said that absence makes the heart grow fonder, but for the Romanian diaspora, it did something more profound: it transformed nostalgia into mission. Sherban Cantacuzino built a distinguished career in Britain—Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, editor of the Architectural Review, secretary of the Royal Fine Arts Commission. He wrote seminal books on heritage conservation: Saving Old Buildings, New Uses for Old Buildings, Architecture in Continuity. His influential work What Makes a Good Building helped establish design quality guidance in the UK planning system. He was awarded a CBE in 1988.

Yet through it all, Romania remained. Not just as memory, but as calling.

When the Fountain Began to Flow Again

On Christmas Day 1989, when Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu were executed, Sherban’s mother—the Princess, as she was known in her Kentish village—lit a candle in her window and prayed for her country’s deliverance. Marina writes that her grandmother would never have cheered such an execution, but there was no question that the dictator whose brutal rule had condemned millions deserved his fate. The prayers were not just for an ending, but for a beginning.

Sherban Cantacuzino had briefly returned to Romania in 1971, navigating the grey world of Ceaușescu’s surveillance state. But after 1989, everything changed. The Iron Curtain had fallen. The fountain was flowing again. And like myself toasting Romania’s uncertain rebirth with watermelon and țuică, Sherban could return not as a visitor under suspicion, but as a bearer of gifts of heritage stewardship.

He devoted the remainder of his life to Romania’s cultural restoration. He led private tours for family and friends, sharing the painted monasteries of Moldavia, the wooden churches of Maramureș, the Saxon villages of Transylvania—the same treasures he had shown Marina and her sister Ilinca in 1976. But now he could do more than show. He could help preserve.

Building Romania’s National Trust

In 2000, Sherban Cantacuzino founded Pro Patrimonio, effectively creating Romania’s National Trust. It was an extraordinary act of cultural repatriation—not of objects, but of expertise, passion, and institutional knowledge. Everything he had learned during decades in Britain about heritage conservation, about engaging the public, about making the case for preservation, he now channelled into his homeland.

The work was vital. Communist rule had been devastating not just economically but culturally. Historic buildings had been demolished or left to decay. The systematic campaign to erase Romania’s architectural heritage—most notoriously Ceaușescu’s destruction of Bucharest’s historic centre to build the monstrous Palace of the Parliament—had left deep scars. Pro Patrimonio became a voice for continuity, for the idea that Romania’s future depended on honouring its past.

Sherban’s influence extended far beyond one organisation. He served as rapporteur general for UNESCO, helping to secure World Heritage status for eight vernacular wooden churches in Maramureș and for Auguste Perret’s reconstruction of Le Havre. He worked tirelessly—and courageously—to prevent the destruction of Roșia Montană Mountain by gold mining operations. He became trustee of the International Trust for Croatian Monuments. He was elected Honorary Member of the Union of Romanian Architects and Honorary Professor at the Ion Mincu University.

Whenever he visited Romania in the post-communist era, he was revered—treated like a prince because he was indeed a prince, descended from the great Cantacuzino and Bibescu families. But the reverence was not just for lineage. It was for his dedication. Dan Teodorovici, who wrote his doctoral thesis on Sherban’s father, describes him as ‘one of the finest, uncontested and most influential unofficial cultural ambassadors of Romanian culture during the last three decades’. Based in London, Sherban became a bridge between two worlds, a living link between Romania’s interrupted past and its emerging future.

Refugees as Peace-Builders

What Sherban Cantacuzino understood—what many returning refugees and exiles came to understand—was that post-revolutionary Romania needed more than economic restructuring. The country required reconnection to what had been systematically suppressed: cultural memory, architectural heritage, institutional knowledge about how civil society functions. The diaspora possessed exactly these things, preserved through decades of exile like seeds waiting for the right conditions to germinate.

This kind of peace-building is less dramatic than the revolution itself, but perhaps more essential. Pro Patrimonio didn’t just save buildings; it helped restore a sense of continuity and dignity. By arguing that Romania’s wooden churches and historic towns mattered, Sherban was making a deeper argument: that Romania’s identity wasn’t erased by decades of dictatorship, that the thread connecting past to future hadn’t been entirely severed.

The personal became political in a painful way. Marina writes that her father was ‘broken as much by Brexit as by leukaemia’—not simply because Britain was his adopted home, but because he had devoted his life to building bridges across Europe. He had lived through the aftermath of the Second World War’s vengeance, when the continent tore itself apart. He believed passionately that the European project, for all its flaws, was fundamentally about preventing such horrors from recurring.

Patrick Leigh Fermor’s own story began with a walk across Europe in the 1930s—a journey chronicled in A Time of Gifts, Between the Woods and the Water, and The Broken Road. Patrick Leigh Fermor walked from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople, discovering a Europe still intact before the wars would tear it apart. His writings became, in their own way, a form of heritage preservation—capturing a vanished world of Central European culture, aristocratic hospitality, and the intricate connections between peoples that nationalism and totalitarianism would nearly destroy. We can see echoes of that world in the film ‘Letters from George’. Brexit felt, to someone like Sherban who had dedicated his life to cultural bridge-building, like a rejection of everything that both he and Fermor had worked to preserve and celebrate: a connected Europe where heritage, ideas, and people could flow freely across borders.

Lessons for Post-Conflict Reconstruction

When Sherban Cantacuzino died in London in February 2018, he left behind not just two daughters and five grandchildren, but a blueprint for how diaspora communities can contribute to post-conflict reconstruction. Pro Patrimonio continues its work. The wooden churches of Maramureș stand protected. A generation of Romanian architects and conservationists has been trained in heritage preservation. The consciousness he helped cultivate has taken root.

The trajectory of his life offers lessons that extend far beyond Romania. In the aftermath of political upheaval, countries face a choice: they can treat their diaspora as abandoned expatriates, or they can recognise them as repositories of expertise and institutional memory. Sherban’s story demonstrates what becomes possible when exiles are welcomed back not just sentimentally but practically—when their knowledge is channelled into rebuilding institutions, when their international connections are leveraged for the country’s benefit.

This is particularly crucial in the first years after revolution or conflict, when countries are most vulnerable to repeating past mistakes or lurching into new forms of authoritarianism. The diaspora brings perspective—they have seen how other societies function, how civil society organisations operate, how heritage and culture can be protected whilst allowing for development. They can be, if properly engaged, a stabilising force during turbulent transitions.

But there’s a temporal urgency to this engagement. Sherban was in his early sixties when the Berlin Wall fell—old enough to have deep expertise, young enough to dedicate himself to Romania’s future for two more decades. The returning diaspora of 1990s Romania were the children who had left in the 1930s and 1940s. Had Romania’s transition been delayed another generation, this particular form of knowledge transfer would have been impossible. Those who remembered pre-communist Romania, who could serve as living links to an interrupted past, would have been gone.

The revolution created space for refugees to return and share their gifts, but what made that return transformative was the receptivity of post-revolutionary Romania to what they brought. Sherban wasn’t returning to a country that wanted to erase its past and start afresh—he was returning to a society hungry for reconnection, eager to reclaim what had been suppressed. That receptivity matters as much as the gifts themselves.

In the end, building peace after dictatorship requires more than political and economic reform. It requires cultural restoration, the rebuilding of institutions that give life meaning beyond mere survival. Heritage, memory, beauty, continuity—these are not luxuries but foundations. The diaspora who return bearing such gifts are not nostalgic sentimentalists but essential participants in post-conflict reconstruction.

Patrick Leigh Fermor walked across Europe in the 1930s with little more than curiosity and a gift for friendship, yet his journey became a testament to the power of cultural connection. His writings inspired generations to see Europe not as a collection of nation-states but as an interwoven tapestry of shared heritage, where a Horatian ode could unite captor and captive on a Cretan mountainside, where hospitality transcended borders, where history lived in landscapes and buildings and the memories of those who inhabited them. Sherban Cantacuzino, in his own way, embodied what Patrick Leigh Fermor celebrated: the conviction that heritage and culture are the sinews that bind societies together, that the exile who never forgets can become the bridge-builder who helps a nation remember—and in remembering, discover the continuity necessary not just to survive, but to flourish.