In 2013, the Civic Academy Foundation organised an impressive series of events to mark two decades of its activity, which began, practically speaking, in 1993, with the first symposium, entitled “The Sighet Memorial: From Historical Truth to the Judgement of History,” dedicated to the idea of constructing a site of memory of communist repression at the former Sighet prison. The events of the jubilee year were opened on 29 January, when the most important documents and traces of the founding moments were published on the Memorial’s website. On 5 and 23 April, the sixtieth anniversaries of the deaths of Iuliu Maniu and Gheorghe Brătianu were commemorated, two out of the fifty-four leading figures in precommunist political life who met their deaths at Sighet, and whose burial places remain unknown to this day. On 9 May of the same year, a gala concert was held at the Romanian Atheneum in Bucharest, featuring Mozart’s Requiem. On 13 June the Day of Memory was marked at Sighet, and then from 12 to 15 July the jubilee edition of the Sighet Summer School was held, and on 16 July a meeting of representatives of the Civic Academy Foundation in honour of the jubilee was held at the premises of the European Commission representation in Bucharest.
Throughout 2013, key works were published and republished, adding to the Foundation’s already impressive series of publications. 2013 was also the year in which the monumental Cartea Morților (Book of the Dead), a massive work of reference including the names of tens of thousands of people killed by the representatives of the communist regime in Romania, was published. In addition, one of the Sighet Memorial’s most popular exhibitions, “Black Whitsun,” toured various cities in Germany, with numerous echoes in the German press.
The actions that made up the programme of this jubilee year enjoyed very good press coverage. The twentieth anniversary of the first symposium dedicated to the Sighet Memorial closed, symbolically, on 4 December, at the Maison de l’Europe in Paris, headed by Catherine Lalumière, with a colloquium on the theme “Twenty Years of Memory, A Quarter Century of Transition: Towards What?”