It occupies the third place in the list of localities in the country from which they depart. At lunchtime, the streets are deserted. The closed factories remained abandoned. Most of the houses are dilapidated. Stores went bankrupt here, leaving behind only the advertisements they promoted. Find out in the lines below which is the ghost town in Romania. Photo
Vasčeu, the ghost town in Romania
“He signed his own death sentence in the 90s. The closed factories never reopened. There is so much desolation here, that you can walk 2 kilometers without meeting a single person”, says teacher Doina Ilion, now retired, about the town of Vașcau, in Bihor county.
Located almost 100 kilometers from Oradea, the town of Vaşcau – with the villages of Câmp, Câmp-Moţi, Coleşti, Vărzarii de Jos and Vărzarii de Sus – seems to disappear from the county map. It is on the third place in the list of localities in the country from which they always leave.
Today, it has just over 2,000 inhabitants. In the last decade, 18.21% of residents left the region. Economically, Vasčeu no longer promises anything. Only advertisements remain from the “La doi pasì” store. There is only one pharmacy and one credit union operating in the commercial premises, which often no one enters.
During communism, the railway line that came from Oradea ended in Vașčau since 1916. Currently, only the dead end remains. The locals don’t even remember the last time they saw a train running in the area.
Accusations against Mayor Porge
“Vascaul was a charming, quiet and clean town. It had greenhouses, where we got seeds for the flowers we planted with the children, a marble factory, a forest bypass, a bakery, the OCL (Local Commercial Organization from Communism – no) to which all the county chiefs came for goods and all kinds of enterprises. Now he has nothing…”, said Doina Ilion, according to ebihoreanul.ro.
In the interwar period, there were a court, a commissariat, two banks, Albina and Şoimul, two houses of tolerance in Vașcau. In the years after the war, about 20,000 people lived in the area, according to the mayor of the region, Florin Porge. Now, ten times less people live in the area. And they are getting rarer by the day.
After the revolution, the economy of the town of Vașcau collapsed without ever recovering. Young people from here either migrate to bigger cities, such as Beiuș, Oradea, Cluj-Napoca, Timișoara, or go abroad. Even the children of mayor Florin Porge settled in Timișoara and Oradea. Migration has rapidly changed the average age.
Locals blame the mayor for the city’s dire situation. Romanians accuse that the local administration does nothing to attract population or companies to the area. Instead of facilities, the City Hall of Vașcau imposes a double tax on those who buy a house and do not live in the locality, accuse the locals.
