Sighetu Prison Museum
The prison in Sighetu Marmaţiei was built in 1897. It looks like a good old fashioned scary prison with the heavy iron doors and center hallway for the guards to keep an eye on every one. It started out as just a normal for normal bad guy criminal offenders when the area was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
In August 1948, once communist power had been firmly established in Romania, Sighetu prison was reserved for political opponents of the regime, possible because it was as far as you could get from Bucharest in the country. At first, it held a group of students, pupils and peasants from the Maramureş region. Many of the surviving prisoners are still living in Sighet to this very day.
On May 5 1950, over one hundred former dignitaries from the whole country were brought to the Sighet penitentiary (former ministers and other politicians, as well as academics, economists, military officers, historians, and journalists), some of them sentenced to heavy punishments, and others held without any form of trial. The majority were over 60 years old. Many important figures of inter-war Romania died in custody, including the leader of the National Peasants’ Party and former Prime Minister of Romania, Iuliu Maniu. 180 prisoners were held in terrible conditions in 72 cells. There are pictures on the walls of some of the inmates and what their live was like inside the prison at this time and right up until 1977 when it was closed down. It reopened as a museum in 1997.
Each prison cell has a small exhibition on a different theme showing the numbers of political prisoners, why they where imprisoned and the life they led inside, always trying to keep fighting the regime until the very end. It’s a moving place and seeing the iron rings to clamp around peoples feet in the torture room where they made people stand in a meter of water is shocking. President George Bush thought he started waterboarding torture techniques… all been done before.