Romania

Welcome to South Fork Ranch, Romania! (1-7)

The faded sign on the decomposing building across this field of three-foot weeds reads "South Fork Ranch, Hermes-Land." What in Sam Hill is going on here?

Well, in the early 1990s a local cheese tycoon and all-around wheeler dealer named Ilie Alexandru came to be known as the "J.R. of Slobozia," due to his fondness for cowboy boots, ten-gallon hats, and the television show Dallas. You see, Dallas was broadcast in Ceausescu's Romania very soon after in debuted in the States, from 1979 to early 1981, and it quickly became the most popular TV show in Romanian history, before the dictator's TV-scrutinizing henchman, who was known as "the Cruel Genius," shut it down. After the 1989 Revolution, it became the first foreign show broadcast (by the late 1980s, the increasingly insane Ceausescu had choked off TV broadcasting to two hours a weekday), so Romanians flocked to see all the episodes and seasons they'd missed.

How did Dallas sneak behind the Iron Curtain? According to this 2001 Dallas Morning News story,

'Dallas' was one of the few American Television series broadcast during the communist regime of Nicolai Ceausecu. The dictator was a fan of the program, but broadcast it to show the evils of capitalism.

But after investigating the matter ourselves, we're not so sure. Basically, the evil madman allowed for a surprisingly open and high-quality television diet after he broke ranks with Moscow in 1968 by condemning the Warsaw Pact crushing of Prague Spring. This made him the new great pal of the anti-communist West -- Richard Nixon rewarded him with a state visit in 1969, the U.S. gave Romania most-favored nation trading status in 1975, and even the Queen of England named the murderous bastard an honorary knight in 1980. What's that old saying? The Stalinist half-hearted critic of my enemy is my friend?

Anyway, Ceausescu let the country breathe a little bit from 1968 to around 1980, boosting salaries (by running a big foreign deficit), partially emptying the jails and slave camps now and then, and letting the kids watch good British, American and Romanian stuff on the telly. UNESCO apparently named Romania's television the sixth-best in all of Europe in 1971, or something like that. We actually interviewed the Romanian Television acquisitions guy who made the decision and the deal to bring Dallas to his countrymen. It's a great and complicated story, which I will tell elsewhere, but in his version it was not at all Ceausescu's decision or intention to demonstrate the evil side of capitalism; in fact the show was cancelled after 18 months or so precisely because it glorified the petit bourgeois that the dictator was quite actively trying to erase from the collective memory of his subjects.

Long story short -- the show was huge during both its runs, and this crazy wheeler-dealer from a crappy highway town figured he'd cash in by launching "Hermes-Land," a vacation spot where you could see an exact replica of the South Fork house, ride horses, enjoy a zoo, take pictures next to guards dressed up in Buckingham Palace-style (!), and so on. Within a couple of years of its 1996 opening, Alexandru was hauled off to jail on a rich variety of frauds, forgeries, thefts, and so on; just this past November the Romanian high court upheld his prison sentence of 12 years, despite Alexandru's threats to "bring down the entire political system" by naming names about something or other. (Among his saucier claims is that he shares a close personal friendship with George W. Bush.) Ownership has since changed hands three or four times, and now the ranch is a sad little hotel complex, with half-constructed buildings, an employee-to-customer ratio of about 20 to 1 (at least when we visited on a Wednesday), and overgrown weeds everywhere.

My cam-phone pictures are pretty awful; I encourage you to look at Emmanuelle?s as well. This one is of what should be a handsome polo field or race track, but is instead an impassible thicket of brambles and green lizards. Not pictured on the right is a bleacher stand utterly devoured by rust and insects.