Ion Monoran

Close to Maria Square in Timișoara you come across a bust of the poet and dissident Ion Monoran. On 16 December 1989, Monoran urged a small, unorganised demonstration in that square to halt the trams. Hundreds came, then thousands, shouting for freedom and for basic necessities. The uprising that caught fire there set off the revolution that toppled Nicolae Ceaușescu. He was born in Ciacova, in Timiș County, in 1953.

His quarrel with the authorities began early: a failed attempt to cross the border got him expelled from high school in 1971. He worked as an unskilled labourer while writing ironic, critical verse that saw print only rarely before communism fell. His allies were the cultural bohemians of the Banat, writers such as Traian Dorgoșan, Valeriu Drumeș and Daniel Vighi. They met in informal places, among them literary circles and the basement boiler room where he worked.

Posthumously, Timișoara made him an honorary citizen, and a street and a reading room at the Revolution Memorial carry his name. He died in December 1993, at forty, with much of his poetry still unpublished.