Postcards as Communist Insta in Socialist Romania: between official rhetoric and personal experience

In the 1960s, with the growth of international tourism, postcards became a way to promote Romania as a tourist destination abroad and a means of communication across the Iron Curtain. Images from abroad, personalized with messages from the dear ones, adorned the living rooms of communist apartments as a reminder of a world inaccessible to most Romanians who could hardly travel to capitalist countries. This event will examine postcards from communist Romania from both a political and personal perspective. Based on oral interviews and documents from the Communist Party archives, Adelina Stefan’s talk will discuss the role of postcards in tourism in socialist Romania, while Ramona Gonczol will draw on her personal memories about postcards as a teenager living under communism. The event will show that, while at the political level, postcards were intended to visually portray socialism as a modern and viable political regime, at the personal level, they helped strengthen social and family networks against the backdrop of increased censorship.  

Speaker:

Adelina Stefan is a researcher at the University of Ostrava in the Czech Republic and a fellow at New Europe College in Bucharest, Romania. She holds a PhD in History from the University of Pittsburgh and is the author of Vacationing in Dictatorships: International Tourism in Socialist Romania and Franco’s Spain (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2024). In 2026, the book was awarded the Eighth Biennial Society of Romanian Studies’ Book Prize.

Chair:

Ramona Gonczol is Associate Professor in Romanian language studies at SSEES, UCL. She convenes the PROLang group and is an academic coordinator for the Language Short Courses programme at SSEES. She is the (co)author of Romanian an Essential Grammar (2nd edition, 2020) and Colloquial Romanian (4th edition,2014). Her research interests lie in the area of language acquisition, heritage speakers, cultural identities, language policy, multilingualism and ethnographic pedagogy. Ramona is a fellow of the HEA and the recipient for the Order for Cultural Merit in Promoting Romanian Culture and Language Abroad (2018).

Image credit: Personal collection