OUR STORY
I'm Adrian Petri, your host, and here's a short history of the house where I was born and grew up, where I left and returned to turn it into what it is today.
OUR great grandparents ...
The great-grandparents caught the hard but somewhat good times in Rosia Montana, they came from the Tyrol region of Austria to work in the gold mining industry. The area was ruled by the Habsburg Empire from whom they bought the house and parts of the gold galleries of the Cârnic massif through which they received the right to exploit the gold. The house had been used as a bank headquarters or the place where the miners brought the mined gold to exchange it for money or dynamite. They worked and lived here, and the times were and were becoming more prosperous, in the market there were various clothes workshops with tailors trained in Vienna, brass band and summer garden, casino with dancing evenings and elbow-length silk gloves.
OUR GRANDPARENTS...
Everything seemed to be going well, but when nationalization came the locals were dispossessed of their properties, galleries and were made to tear down their gold processing facilities (stamps). The grandmother marries a Romanian, changes her name, transfers the house to him and manages to save the house, but the great-grandfather is deported to work in Siberia. Two tons of gold were found and forcibly taken from the homes of the locals during the nationalization, and during the communist period, large surface mining began where my father worked as a mining engineer.
our parents...
After the 1989 revolution, the mines were closed and concessioned to a Canadian company that was going to make major investments for the revitalization of mining. The company is starting to buy the properties in the village, every day I saw neighbors or friends selling and leaving, and then they suggested us to do the same, otherwise we will be left on a desert island and leave for less or no money. Although we have lived from mining, we cannot agree with the mining technology proposed today, which would mean the irrevocable destruction of the area, which is why we have decided not to sell. The grandmother passed away in 2009, and the house remained empty for about 5 years. The company buys heavily so that it ends up owning ~80% of the properties in the village. We offer the house and the grounds for the organization of the FânFest festival, where the first actions against the Canadian project appear and where the "Save Roșia Montană" campaign takes shape, leading to extensive street protests in the country's major cities.
NOW...
The Canadian project was stopped and the area proposed to become a Unesco site due to its cultural richness. In 2014 we decide to invest in tourism so we transform the house into a small accommodation space. We start with the "House of Books" where we work for almost 3 years, and then we invest the money made from the accommodations in the renovation of the other spaces. Tourists interested in the nature and history of the place arrive, so we involve as many of the neighbors as possible by organizing guided tours together, traditional meals or by lodging tourists with them, in the hope that they will also see a future in tourism and invest in this direction . The story goes on, we look forward to your visit!