Fighting the Cold War on the beach: East–West encounters on the Romanian Black Sea Riviera between the 1960s and the 1980s

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines how starting in the 1960s and with the peak in the 1970s and into the early 1980s, the Romanian Black Sea Coast became a hotbed of European tourism with visitors not just from Romania and the neighbouring socialist countries, but also from western capitalist countries. Following the model of more developed tourist countries and lured by the possibility of gaining hard currencies, socialist Romania sought to develop beach tourism so as to attract Western tourists seeking seaside vacations. But, as this article shows, the socialist state was not the only one to benefit from the arrival of Western tourists. The presence of foreign tourists, especially of those from capitalist countries who were in stark majority on the seaside, offered the Romanian citizens the opportunity to mingle and to establish economic and personal relationships that helped them to acquire goods unavailable in ordinary shops, while enabling them to adopt a more cosmopolitan way of life. This article shows that from the mid-1960s until the early 1980s, on the Romanian Black Sea Coast, with the tacit acceptance of local officials, became a space that mingled socialist landscape and values with capitalist material culture.