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updated:
Febr. 20, 2007
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Scrap metal
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Febr.
19, 2007
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Her
hobbyhorse! - will say those who have already heard me raging against
the metal thieves (like here
and here and here,
to name only pages on my site). On the mailing List of the dvhh there is a link to a romanian site, to a page saying that the cross from the church tower in Bruckenau has been stolen a while ago (see what cross it is about on the dvhh's Bruckenau site). I bet that nobody from the village has seen or heard anything. Then, on the Keglewitschhausen site, the cemetery bell is gone. I've heard that the same has happened to the cemetery bell in Lowrin. On protv.ro , the matter is getting really serious! On a distance of about 100 km through the Jiu Valley, the metal installations belonging to the national railway are getting systematically stolen, so that the lives of the passengers on this route are in real danger. itbox.ro anounces today that the railway circulation will get stopped on the above distance because the situation has gotten out of control. About a month ago, protv.ro showed a romanian gang stealing metal from the railway company in Belgium - about 180 km of cables used in the signal system. There
was another article on protv.ro,
saying that some 700 elevators get out of order per year because the
copper cables get systematically removed and sold as scrap metal. And so on... Here is
an extensive article on romanialibera.ro,
which says that the owners of the centers which buy the metal scrap
aren't better than the thieves because they act against the law when
buying stuff without proper papers. My comment: They buy church crosses,
bells... whatever. At the time I wrote about the theft of the iron chains on Kathi's gravesite I did not know about this phenomenon and I was taking it very personally. I'll have to remove my nasty last sentence there. But, you know, even my imagination has got its limits, I mean... what's going on? Are we lost? Is beatiful Europe getting dismatled? Somebody answered my question with the remark that the Chinese are paying very good money for scrap metal. Great! Do the Chinese know about the havoc this incentive causes to our culture? What will be left of it when the action is over? And what will their rich population visit in the future?
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Febr.
20, 2007
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This
is a delicious story you can read in an Aug. 2006 edition of the banateanul.ro.
In 2004, an ex town hall employee from Simand (near Arad) meets in the
cemetery of his village a three meters long snake, thick as a leg and
having the big head of an iguana. The animal was comming out from a grave
and the man later shows the hole it has left in the soil to other villagers.
Upon this, the mayor, helped by the local priest, locks the gate to the
cemetery and even hires some hunters, who are supposed to shoot down the
snake. Nobody is allowed to visit the cemetery till the beast is killed.
The locals are, of course, scared and avoid the place. For two years,
nobody tends his family gravesite - no flowers, no visits. The story gets to the media, to whom the mayor later confesses that the whole story has been made up in order to stop thefts in the cemetery. "The thieves from Simand do not fear the law but they are superstitious and are afraid of courses" - the mayor says. The thieves from Simand... So if the thefts are committed by locals, everybody must know them... but nobody stops them... Speaking about snakes: Last summer, when I was, at sunset, roaming over old gravesites, through the high grass in a corner of the cemetery in Triebswetter, a local woman pushing her bike told me to take care, there were snakes in the cemetery. I thanked her for the advice but I did not believe her, thinking that I knew the place well enough. Now I think that she has either seen at some point a harmless grass snake or that she thought, simpleminded, that it was her duty to scare away a stranger. What she did not know was that I only looked like a stranger... |
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