Vama Veche

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

This article is about the village of Vama Veche. Vama Veche is also the name of a Romanian rock band.

Vama Veche is a commune in Romania on the Black Sea coast, near the border with Bulgaria, at 28.3 E longitude, 43.5 N latitude.

The name literally means "Old customs point", named after the Cadrilater was included in Romania in 1913. In 1940, however, that region was ceded to Bulgaria, and the village was once again near the border.

Even in Communist Romania, Vama Veche had a reputation as a non-mainstream tourist destination, which has only grown since the Romanian Revolution of 1989. Famous for its nude beach, as of 2005 it is experiencing development and gentrification, which has led to a "Save Vama Veche" campaign that is lobbying for the area's environmental conservation and a halt to development and mass tourism. A major part of the Save Vama Veche campaign is the 2003 founding of the Stufstock music festival. The August 2003 festival drew a crowd of about 10,000. The 2005 Stufstock drew a record 40,000 large crowd, formed by rockers, bohemians, punkers and goth . Many argue that it became too popular.

During the communist era, concern for border patrol sight lines spared Vama Veche the development that occurred in other Romanian Black Sea resorts. It became a hangout for intellectuals; for reasons that are not exactly clear, the generally repressive regime of Nicolae Ceauşescu chose to tolerate this countercultural oasis, as long as people had their identity papers with them. Accommodations consisted of tents or rooms rented from peasants or fishermen. [1]

After the Romanian Revolution, the village of Vama Veche began to develop into just another mainstream sea-side resort and a campaign "Save Vama Veche" was initiated by the Academia Caţavencu newspaper against this trend. They also organized each year starting 2003 a music festival, Stufstock, to protest against bad quality music (i.e. manele and Romanian pop music), but all these actually had the reverse effect: the village stopped being a small, clean and quiet place, as the festival and concerts attracted more than 40,000 people in the 2005 edition.

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