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🇷🇴 Romania /Culture & Society

How Amara went from a resort with 1,100 hotel beds to a forgotten ruin

From Adevărul · () Romanian

Translated from Romanian and summarized by DistantNews. Read the original for the full story.

At a glance

Interview Named sources Context piece
  • Four young researchers studied Amara’s architecture, local memories and decline in a project titled “Greetings from Amara.”
  • The resort grew during socialism around two major accommodation complexes and attracted visitors who also rented rooms from local residents.
  • Researcher Iuliana Dumitru says Amara’s spa tradition began with landowner Dumitru Seceleanu, who established a treatment centre after recovering from paralysis through mud therapy.

Amara, once celebrated as the “Pearl of the Bărăgan,” has been revisited through the memories and architecture of a resort that flourished during communist Romania and later fell into ruin.

Four young women, anthropologists Romelia Călin and Iuliana Dumitru, historian Adelina Ștefan and architect Ștefania Tîrcă, followed the resort’s past in a study called “Greetings from Amara.” They hope young people from the town will continue the project and organise cultural events there.

Dumitru told Weekend Adevărul that the research began with Călin’s personal connection to the place. As a child in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Călin spent summers with her maternal grandparents in nearby Slobozia. After household chores, they went to the lake, where swimming and covering themselves in mud felt more enjoyable than going to the seaside. Years later, she returned and saw what remained of the former resort, prompting the research project.

The team first conducted fieldwork in 2023, interviewing residents, tourists and administrators at the Lebăda and Ialomița hotels. During the socialist period, the resort was built around these two large accommodation structures, formerly associated with the General Union of Trade Unions of Romania and the National Union of Agricultural Production Cooperatives.

One former waitress at the trade union hotel also rented rooms privately. She recalled that the resort’s development did not reduce private lodging. Instead, it brought more visitors, and she sometimes housed 48 people in her eight-room home, which had only one bathroom.

Amara’s history predates the communist period. Dumitru Seceleanu, described as one of the Bărăgan’s wealthiest landowners, laid the foundation for one of Romania’s most important treatment centres after recovering from paralysis through mud therapy. The excerpt ends as the interview turns to the resort’s earliest land concession holders.

The world does not understand how necessary these treatment centres are.

· Iuliana DumitruThe article’s headline highlights Dumitru’s view of the continuing importance of spa treatment facilities.
About this summary

Originally published by Adevărul in Romanian. Translated, summarized, and contextualized automatically by DistantNews, with a note on how the source frames the story. Not individually reviewed before publishing. How this works.

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