The „Golden Age” has left solid traces, from the endless worker's neighborhoods to the mentality they hosted. Individual histories bear these traces as well. That's where we're each free to be nostalgic or irritated, it's a personal choice. But this is not what this site is all about. This is a souvenir shop where you can find Communist symbols and messages that are already part of pop culture. This is something that's been going on for quite a while in Europe , in the former Communist countries, and „Mother Russia” has done the best job at exporting them into the capitalist world. In Romania, however, mentalities still carry around their open wounds: you will rarely see any young people wearing a T-shirt with a Ceausescu print on as lightheartedly as they would a Che Guevara classic. Here, Communism still hurts for some, whereas for others, especially the young, it's already gone. Here's my proposal: let's trade the symbols of our Communism in an attempt to inoculate ourselves against it, to have fun, to grow melancholic, to be cool . Our own Communist past is as good a tourist commodity as it is that of the Russians, the Czechs and of the Ukrainians.

Here's what you can find here: a whole bunch of T- shirts with Communist symbols and messages, de-contextualized, seen from an ironic perspective, transformed into nice, familiar objects, that swerve away from their initial meaning and purpose or which have been processed from an artistic angle, in a sort of „no strings attached” game. For those of you who are in for some thrills, there's a hard section as well: the Red Star District. Personal tip: the hammer & sickle duo... simply addictive.

The market gulps down any chapter in history, whatever political or social tragedy, and, in the end, it's a good thing because this is how we gain freedom from traumas, we neutralize them, turn them into esthetic objects and, in the end, into consumer goods. We can „eat up” our darkest ages, don't you think? That would already be a triumph in itself. Vasile Ernu hits the nail on the head: „What gets to me, it almost makes me furious, it's Romanian people's incapacity to turn their past, be it even a disastrous one, into a positive value. (...) The most substantial historical product (cultural, economic, political) of modern Romania is Communism. (...) This pile of garbage called Communism is, at the same time, a gold mine if we know how to re-value it”.