Photo credit: (c) CRISTIAN NISTOR / AGERPRES ARCHIVE

It’s made exclusively of the Bistrita variety of plums — one of the most valued cultivars owing to its hard, sweet and scented pulp. Ripe plums are thoroughly washed; the pits are removed; the fruits are then boiled in brass pots, without prior crushing and without adding any sweeteners.

When it reaches the right consistency, the jam is poured either in clay pots or in jars. Housewives keep it unaltered in their pantries for a very long time. It is solid and it can be served for breakfast or used in cakes.

Povidla of Bargau has been certified as a traditional product in August 2013. It is prepared by the AFI ProFamilia Association of Bistrita in a social enterprise established on European funds in the commune of Bistrita Bargaului.

Since then, it has been promoted to traditional products fairs, and it began selling.

AFI ProFamilia chair Doina Monda says that the amounts produced sof ar are limited, because funds for purchasing the fruits are scarce. She hopes, however, this will change as a new project is implemented, securing jobs for more women of the Bargau Valley.AGERPRES

Photo credit: (c) Dorina MATIS / AGERPRES

Experts say the collection of Roman recipes attributed to gourmet Marcus Gavius Apicius was probably compiled under Emperor Tiberius in the 1st century AD.

‘There is only one cook book from ancient Rome; it’s called ‘De re coquinaria’, meaning ‘about food’ or ‘about cooking.’ I received it from my colleagues of the Mures County Museum, who organize the Roman Festival of Calugareni [central Romania], which has its third edition this year. (…) It’s not a recipe collection like those we’re familiar with nowadays; it’s rather a hodgepodge of Apicius’s ingredients. He was a big gourmet; he was ambitious; he had the money to prepare these dishes and he cooked for many of his friends. He had the ambition of knowing and cooking and creating food, and he wanted to prove cooking was something extraordinary, not a common thing like people considered it back then. In those times, cooking was considered easy and ordinary; I mean Romans thought anyone could do it. Apicius, however, tried to turn gastronomy into an art. The book itself does not include proper recipes, and the recipes we have used to cook at the Roman Festival were written and described using presentations of Apicius by the Hungarian translators of this work,’ Botond Gaspar told AGERPRES.

The journalist cook found there several recipes, like pork ham fried with acacia honey; Apicius-style meat roll; minced sausages; seared lamb; boiled veal; Matius-style mincemeat; broiled veal; broiled wild boar; game sauce; sausages; Vitellus-style piglet; pig liver; stuffed chicken; Cattabia Apiciana salad; Frontinus-style chicken. Unusual recipes were also find, using ostrich meat, tuna filet, quail, river clams, fried fish, fish soup, crayfish, octopus, boiled zander sauce, broiled mushrooms, asparagus, Vitellus-style peas, offal soup with apricots, pear soufflé, sweet omelette with milk, custard, dates with honey and jam.

In spite of these many specialties, the recipes used at the Roman Festival were intended to be more contemporary, so an attempt at ‘quick soup’ was made, although it used to be considered a poor people’s dish.

‘For instance, the ‘quick soup’ I prepared at the 2013 and 2014 editions, although not considered a proper dish in the Roman Empire because it was reserved to poor people, had a great success among the attending tourists. For the Roman quick soup, we need the following ingredients: chicken breast, carrots, parsley, onions, pepper, celery salt, crushed bay leaves, and eggs. The chicken breast is boiled with the vegetables and pepper, and when the meat is done, we take it out, debone it and cut it into small pieces. Bay leaves, oil and salt are added to the stock; the vegetables are pureed (now we can use a blender) and mixed in, and everything is boiled again. When the soup is ready, we add a yolk in the plate and pour the soup over it,’ the journalist-cook explained.

He said troops used to eat lentils or beans, chestnuts and various spices, a little meat if available — and obviously they drank wine.

The 3rd edition of the Roman Festival of Calugareni will be held in August. The journalist intends to prepare a new recipe of Apicius, ‘Baea-style bean salad,’ feasible at home. ‘We need a pound of green beans, celery, one leek, half a cup of white wine, 2-3 tablespoons of oil, lemon juice, garum [Roman fermented fish sauce used as a condiment] or sardine paste (we now have salt and we can use it), and a teaspoonful of cumin. Green beans are cut in inch-long pieces and simmered until soft. When they are done we let it cool and we pour on a dressing made of vinegar, lemon juice, oil, white wine and salt, with small pieces of leek and celery. We pour it on the beans. The salad can be eaten cold or warm,’ he detailed.

He added that modern gastronomy was unknown to Romans, and food was usually prepared on an open fire outdoors, on a plate or grill, or in a cauldron.

‘Basic food consisted of ?puls’ or ?polenta’ as they called it [porridge] and ?pulmentum’ [a kind of vegetable mush]. Meat was eaten only at meetings, the so-called epulum sau convivium, where they served fowl, pork, and river and sea fish. Bread was leavened with sourdough and eventually it replaced polenta. Commoners used to eat unleavened bread made with husks, or cheap cake. The most widespread cereals were wheat, rye, millet, barley and oats; the most common vegetables — cabbage, carrots, lettuce, beet, onions, cucumbers, pumpkins, asparagus. Potatoes and maize were still unknown, and rice was a very expensive and rare delicacy. The most common fruits were walnuts, peaches, grapes and chestnuts. Antique Roman cuisine is not the same as present day Italian gastronomy, as there were no dishes made with tomatoes or pasta, which are nowadays the main ingredients,’ Gaspar Botond says.

He confessed he highly appreciates Apicius’s work, as the Roman can be considered one of the forefathers of world gastronomy. AGERPRES

• Prahova Salt Mine (Slanic Prahova) is the largest salt mine in Europe that is opened to the public. At this moment, the mine is not used for industrial purposes but for touristic and medical ones.

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Rumyana Kostadinova Ivanova and Marius Amarie

LIVING SPACE Artifacts from the Lower Danube Valley and the Balkan foothills are presented in an exhibition, “The Lost World of Old Europe,” at New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. More Photos »

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Marius Amarie

WOMEN IN SOCIETY A fired clay Cucuteni figurine, from 4050-3900 B.C.More Photos >

For 1,500 years, starting earlier than 5000 B.C., they farmed and built sizable towns, a few with as many as 2,000 dwellings. They mastered large-scale copper smelting, the new technology of the age. Their graves held an impressive array of exquisite headdresses and necklaces and, in one cemetery, the earliest major assemblage of gold artifacts to be found anywhere in the world.

The striking designs of their pottery speak of the refinement of the culture’s visual language. Until recent discoveries, the most intriguing artifacts were the ubiquitous terracotta “goddess” figurines, originally interpreted as evidence of the spiritual and political power of women in society.

New research, archaeologists and historians say, has broadened understanding of this long overlooked culture, which seemed to have approached the threshold of “civilization” status. Writing had yet to be invented, and so no one knows what the people called themselves. To some scholars, the people and the region are simply Old Europe.

The little-known culture is being rescued from obscurity in an exhibition, “The Lost World of Old Europe: the Danube Valley, 5000-3500 B.C.,” which opened last month at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University. More than 250 artifacts from museums in Bulgaria, Moldova and Romania are on display for the first time in the United States. The show will run through April 25.

At its peak, around 4500 B.C., said David W. Anthony, the exhibition’s guest curator, “Old Europe was among the most sophisticated and technologically advanced places in the world” and was developing “many of the political, technological and ideological signs of civilization.”

Dr. Anthony is a professor of anthropology at Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y., and author of “The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World.” Historians suggest that the arrival in southeastern Europe of people from the steppes may have contributed to the collapse of the Old Europe culture by 3500 B.C.

At the exhibition preview, Roger S. Bagnall, director of the institute, confessed that until now “a great many archaeologists had not heard of these Old Europe cultures.” Admiring the colorful ceramics, Dr. Bagnall, a specialist in Egyptian archaeology, remarked that at the time “Egyptians were certainly not making pottery like this.”

A show catalog, published by Princeton University Press, is the first compendium in English of research on Old Europe discoveries. The book, edited by Dr. Anthony, with Jennifer Y. Chi, the institute’s associate director for exhibitions, includes essays by experts from Britain, France, Germany, the United States and the countries where the culture existed.

Dr. Chi said the exhibition reflected the institute’s interest in studying the relationships of well-known cultures and the “underappreciated ones.”

Although excavations over the last century uncovered traces of ancient settlements and the goddess figurines, it was not until local archaeologists in 1972 discovered a large fifth-millennium B.C. cemetery at Varna, Bulgaria, that they began to suspect these were not poor people living in unstructured egalitarian societies. Even then, confined in cold war isolation behind the Iron Curtain, Bulgarians and Romanians were unable to spread their knowledge to the West.

The story now emerging is of pioneer farmers after about 6200 B.C. moving north into Old Europe from Greece and Macedonia, bringing wheat and barley seeds and domesticated cattle and sheep. They established colonies along the Black Sea and in the river plains and hills, and these evolved into related but somewhat distinct cultures, archaeologists have learned. The settlements maintained close contact through networks of trade in copper and gold and also shared patterns of ceramics.

The Spondylus shell from the Aegean Sea was a special item of trade. Perhaps the shells, used in pendants and bracelets, were symbols of their Aegean ancestors. Other scholars view such long-distance acquisitions as being motivated in part by ideology in which goods are not commodities in the modern sense but rather “valuables,” symbols of status and recognition.

Noting the diffusion of these shells at this time, Michel Louis Seferiades, an anthropologist at the National Center for Scientific Research in France, suspects “the objects were part of a halo of mysteries, an ensemble of beliefs and myths.”

In any event, Dr. Seferiades wrote in the exhibition catalog that the prevalence of the shells suggested the culture had links to “a network of access routes and a social framework of elaborate exchange systems — including bartering, gift exchange and reciprocity.”

Over a wide area of what is now Bulgaria and Romania, the people settled into villages of single- and multiroom houses crowded inside palisades. The houses, some with two stories, were framed in wood with clay-plaster walls and beaten-earth floors. For some reason, the people liked making fired clay models of multilevel dwellings, examples of which are exhibited.

A few towns of the Cucuteni people, a later and apparently robust culture in the north of Old Europe, grew to more than 800 acres, which archaeologists consider larger than any other known human settlements at the time. But excavations have yet to turn up definitive evidence of palaces, temples or large civic buildings. Archaeologists concluded that rituals of belief seemed to be practiced in the homes, where cultic artifacts have been found.

The household pottery decorated in diverse, complex styles suggested the practice of elaborate at-home dining rituals. Huge serving bowls on stands were typical of the culture’s “socializing of food presentation,” Dr. Chi said.

At first, the absence of elite architecture led scholars to assume that Old Europe had little or no hierarchical power structure. This was dispelled by the graves in the Varna cemetery. For two decades after 1972, archaeologists found 310 graves dated to about 4500 B.C. Dr. Anthony said this was “the best evidence for the existence of a clearly distinct upper social and political rank.”

Vladimir Slavchev, a curator at the Varna Regional Museum of History, said the “richness and variety of the Varna grave gifts was a surprise,” even to the Bulgarian archaeologist Ivan Ivanov, who directed the discoveries. “Varna is the oldest cemetery yet found where humans were buried with golden ornaments,” Dr. Slavchev said.

More than 3,000 pieces of gold were found in 62 of the graves, along with copper weapons and tools, and ornaments, necklaces and bracelets of the prized Aegean shells. “The concentration of imported prestige objects in a distinct minority of graves suggest that institutionalized higher ranks did exist,” exhibition curators noted in a text panel accompanying the Varna gold.

Yet it is puzzling that the elite seemed not to indulge in private lives of excess. “The people who donned gold costumes for public events while they were alive,” Dr. Anthony wrote, “went home to fairly ordinary houses.”

Copper, not gold, may have been the main source of Old Europe’s economic success, Dr. Anthony said. As copper smelting developed about 5400 B.C., the Old Europe cultures tapped abundant ores in Bulgaria and what is now Serbia and learned the high-heat technique of extracting pure metallic copper.

Smelted copper, cast as axes, hammered into knife blades and coiled in bracelets, became valuable exports. Old Europe copper pieces have been found in graves along the Volga River, 1,200 miles east of Bulgaria. Archaeologists have recovered more than five tons of pieces from Old Europe sites.

An entire gallery is devoted to the figurines, the more familiar and provocative of the culture’s treasures. They have been found in virtually every Old Europe culture and in several contexts: in graves, house shrines and other possibly “religious spaces.”

One of the best known is the fired clay figure of a seated man, his shoulders bent and hands to his face in apparent contemplation. Called the “Thinker,” the piece and a comparable female figurine were found in a cemetery of the Hamangia culture, in Romania. Were they thinking, or mourning?

Many of the figurines represent women in stylized abstraction, with truncated or elongated bodies and heaping breasts and expansive hips. The explicit sexuality of these figurines invites interpretations relating to earthly and human fertility.

An arresting set of 21 small female figurines, seated in a circle, was found at a pre-Cucuteni village site in northeastern Romania. “It is not difficult to imagine,” said Douglass W. Bailey of San Francisco State University, the Old Europe people “arranging sets of seated figurines into one or several groups of miniature activities, perhaps with the smaller figurines at the feet or even on the laps of the larger, seated ones.”

Others imagined the figurines as the “Council of Goddesses.” In her influential books three decades ago, Marija Gimbutas, an anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, offered these and other so-called Venus figurines as representatives of divinities in cults to a Mother Goddess that reigned in prehistoric Europe.

Although the late Dr. Gimbutas still has an ardent following, many scholars hew to more conservative, nondivine explanations. The power of the objects, Dr. Bailey said, was not in any specific reference to the divine, but in “a shared understanding of group identity.”

As Dr. Bailey wrote in the exhibition catalog, the figurines should perhaps be defined only in terms of their actual appearance: miniature, representational depictions of the human form. He thus “assumed (as is justified by our knowledge of human evolution) that the ability to make, use and understand symbolic objects such as figurines is an ability that is shared by all modern humans and thus is a capability that connects you, me, Neolithic men, women and children, and the Paleolithic painters in caves.”

Or else the “Thinker,” for instance, is the image of you, me, the archaeologists and historians confronted and perplexed by a “lost” culture in southeastern Europe that had quite a go with life back before a single word was written or a wheel turned.

Photo credit (c): ISABELA PAULESCU / AGERPRES STREAM

“This year on December 11, the Sibiu Public Bath will celebrate its 110th anniversary. I managed to see not only the designs made by a German architect, as the bath has been built over five years by constructors brought from Vienna, Budapest and Cluj, but also pictures of the initial construction. I found on e-bay an old, foreign newspaper featuring an article about the Sibiu Public Bath and the Munich Public Bath, which described the construction process of the Sibiu bath. We want to provide our clients with high quality services, but also to maintain the specifics of this venue,” Ioana Dancanet said.

Photo credit (c): ISABELA PAULESCU / AGERPRES STREAM

According to her, not only the public bath has been operational since 1904, but also its power plant and a huge steam ironing board, especially made in Vienna. On entering the Sibiu public bath, there is a clock on a wall dating from 1904 showing the hour; the clock has a mechanic, original mechanism, with beats per second. The former water tower can still be found in the yard of the public bath; at the beginning, water was brought with the cistern, from tens of kilometers away, from Sadu, and changed on a weekly basis.

Photo credit (c): ISABELA PAULESCU / AGERPRES STREAM

“The Sibiu public bath welcomes at least 200 clients in each day, most of them children. We have at least 6,500 clients per year, but in the winter, the number can exceed 8,000 visitors,” Dancanat elaborates.

Many children come here to learn how to swim. One of the swimming instructors is Adrian Ganju, who has worked in the United States for ten years.

This place is also frequented by people interested in spa treatments, for example contrast bath therapies, also known as hot/cold immersion therapy that increases the local blood circulation. Also, this is the only spa in Romania equipped for taking Romanian-Irish sauna.

Photo credit (c): ISABELA PAULESCU / AGERPRES STREAM

The Sibiu City Hall continues this year with the series of investments in the local public bath. Revamping works on the sauna are currently underway, this being closed to the public until September. The sauna of the public bath was built 110 years ago, being a Romanian-Irish sauna, unique in Romania. The complex currently undergoing modernization works is made up of a wet sauna, a dry sauna, 32 welding booths, two pools for contrast bathing (one with hot water, 35 degrees temperature and another one with cold water, 10 degrees), showers and massage rooms.

The works under the contract regard plating both pools with glass mosaic, setting up the water filtration and circulation systems for the two pools with quartz sand, installing a heat transfer equipment, automatic heat exchangers and automatic systems to measure and monitor chlorine and pH levels. The value of this contract is 165,000 lei, pre-VAT.

Photo credit (c): ISABELA PAULESCU / AGERPRES STREAM

The hair salon was also modernized, being moved from the ground floor to the first floor. The electricity, water and sewerage systems have been changed, as well as the tiles; a waiting room was also built.

Works on the beauty parlor are also underway. Besides the change of the electricity, water and sewerage systems, new tiles and furniture pieces have been purchased.

Following the modernization works carried out over the past few years, the services provided by the Public Bath became vary varied and improved their quality, and as a result, more and more people choose this place as their holiday destination. Over January-July 2014, the Sibiu Public Bath recorded a total number of 46,017 clients, up 3,000 people compared to the same period of 2013. Even in the summer months, May, June and July, the number of clients has been on the rise, with 18,573 people having visited the bath in the aforementioned period, compared to 14,823 in the similar interval of the previous year.

The largest investment worth over 2 million lei was made by the city hall ten years ago.

The plot of land was initially used for the construction of Transylvania’s first factory producing stearin candles, opened in 1840.

After the factory was moved on the current street Turnului, Franz Fruhbeck Senior opened the first steam public bath in the city in the ’40s of the 19th century.

In 1886, Johann Habermann bought the establishment from Fruhbeck’s descendants. The bath was located at that time on the site of the current pediatrics hospital in the Astra Park.

The idea of building a public bath accessible to everyone in Sibiu in late 19th century belonged to Dr. Carl Wolff. The General Assembly of the Savings Office (Hermannstadter Allgemeinen Sparkassa) provided the financial resources for the construction of this place from its reserve funds.

The construction, designed by Karl Hocheder (1854-1917), architecture professor at the Technical University in Munich, combines various styles, i.e. Baroque elements and Art Nouveau (Jugendstil) art (late 19th century — early 20th century), being the most representative building in the city for this architectural style. Professor Karl Hocheder charged one of his best assistants with supervising the construction works. Hans Heckner together with craftsman Gustav Matz and his team did a brilliant job, being able to inaugurate the public bath on Dec. 11, 1904.

As for the architectonic structure, the Sibiu Public Bath is an almost exact replica of the Muller Bath in Munich, as both are designed by the same architect. At that time, no other city as large as Sibiu in Austria-Hungary had such an institution.

The complex included a swimming pool 21 meters in length, 9 meters in width, covered with sea green coloured tiles; a Romanian-Irish sauna, which consisted of a steam room with 32 booths, wet sauna, dry sauna, two pools for contrast bathing, showers, massage rooms.

The facilities located on the first floor were ten booths with tubs and showers for bathing, and five rooms for spa treatments: treatments with mud brought from Battaglia, Italy, electric light baths or a bathtub for galvanic baths. The majority of these services are still available.

The growing popularity of this establishment convinced Dr. Carl Wolff to take into consideration the idea of providing foreign patients both with therapies and accommodation. Thus, he decided to build a sanatorium. The Stadtpark Sanatorium (inaugurated in 1906) and the Sibiu Public Bath represented a unique spa treatment unit in Transylvania until the First World War. The building of the sanatorium, constructed according to the plans of the same architect, Hocheder, is made up of two halves, one that includes the rooms for patients and the home of the doctor of the institution, and the other composed of rooms available for rent. The dining room and the reading room were located partially in the building body connecting the public bath to the sanatorium. After the opening of the sanatorium, the number of clients rose to an average of 5,000 per year, with patients coming from all corners of the country, as well as from Turkey and Germany.

An interesting fact, during the communist regime, the authorities changed the name of the Sibiu Public Bath into Neptune Public Bath, thinking about God Neptune. Well, a few years ago, trying to find the right logo for its promotion, the incumbent chairwoman consulted an architect, who suggested the swan as the institution’s symbol. What’s interesting is the fact that a swan was already drawn on the building. AGERPRES

Photo credit (c): ISABELA PAULESCU / AGERPRES STREAM

Photo credit: (c) Mihai Dragomir / Sibiu County Tourism Association

“The Bazna spa resort of Sibiu County is in high demand. Located about 18 km northwest of the city of Medias, it is easily accessible. The County Council and the Bazna commune will take steps to have it declared a resort of national interest, and infrastructure works are underway to increase the quality of its amenities,” Sibiu County Council Vice President Ioan Banciu told AGERPRES.

The Bazna resort sits 18 km from the city of Medias, cozily snuggled among low hills and wide swampy valleys that hide deposits of natural gas and mineral springs in the underground. Bazna is mentioned in written sources as early as in the 13th century. Its salty and mineral springs, as well as the existence of methane gas were reported as early as in the 17th century. In modern times, the village and the resort developed concurrently.

A landmark in the history of Bazna is the year 1672. On a late autumn day, a few shepherds who had rounded up their flocks near the village lit a fire near the marshes. To their great surprise the swamps went up in flames that hovered skywards over the water in a ghostly appearance; unbeknownst to them, the shepherds had discovered methane gas.

In the early 19th century, doctors and chemists came from as far as Vienna to study the effects of the Bazna salt and the local microclimate. The resort was founded in 1843 and was taken over in 1905 by the evangelical community that turned it into a spa whose fame spread all over Transylvania.

“The mineral waters, the sapropelic mud, the Bazna salt, the favorable climate conditions and the picturesque landscape draw every year crowds of tourists to Bazna who seek here treatment for various diseases. The treatment facilities are perfect for musculoskeletal impairments, rheumatic diseases and conditions, orthopedic impairments, gynecological or respiratory diseases. The commune is also studded with cultural resources entered in the national heritage — the historic centre, the fortified churches of Bazna, Boian and Velt — all placed in a special natural setting which earned Bazna the status of ‘Romania’s most beautiful village’ in 2011,” said Simina Manea, executive director of the Sibiu County Tourism Association.

Bazna is a perfect destination for those who want to relax in the middle of nature or for active tourism enthusiasts who can enjoy hiking or cycling on the hills covered with orchards and in the beech forests that surround the locality.

According to the County Statistics Directorate and data provided by the mayor’s offices in the area, there are 11 tourist accommodation facilities in the Bazna resort, with a total capacity of 367 (9 percent more than in 2012), accounting for 3 percent of the total capacity of the county. Proceeds from the hotel tax decreased 8 percent in 2013 compared to 2012.

However, Bazna continues to develop and it has obviously come a long way since 1672, when the shepherds who lit a fire to warm themselves came upon the natural gas deposit trapped in Bazna’s underground, informs the website www.bazna.ro. This, and the subsequent discovery of the mineral waters, brought the resort into the people’s attention even beyond the boundaries of Transylvania. In the 18th century Bazna’s mineral waters are the subject of several interesting works. Thus, Rudolf Rothens mentions them in 1749 in his “Memorabilia Europae”, which is a selection of some of the most remarkable European sites a curious traveler should turn his attention to; doctor Klaus, in his study “Healing springs within the boundaries of the Austrian monarchy” also refers to the curative benefits of the Bazna waters.

After the year 1752, chemical analyses are being conducted, at first by pharmacist George Bette from Sibiu, and then by other specialists. Rich and thorough information was passed down by priest Andreas Gaspari, who left a manuscript with observations collected between the years 1762-1779 about the condition of the baths here. The author mentions the existence of several mineral springs: the Church bath, the Beggars bath, the Sour Fountain, complete with a description of their condition.

The year 1791 is related to the publication in the “Transylvanian Writings” quarterly of an article titled “About the Bazna Sulfur Bath” confirming that Andreas Gaspari had left the most accurate description of the beginnings of this resort.

In 1808 doctors and chemists embark on scientifically researching the local mineral waters and a favorable report is published in 1813 in the “Medical Yearbook of the Imperial State.” In November 1814 the decision is reached to build a spa treatment facility and Bazna’s mineral springs are transferred under the ownership of the local Evangelical Church; chemical analyses are performed, based on which scientific recommendations are made.

The year 1835 sees Bazna fitted out with four cabins and a boiler-equipped water heating system. Yet the first balneal facility was built only in 1843 by a joint-stock company made up of Medias highbrows. In 1845, as many as 637 people were registered to have sought treatment here.

In 1877 the baths get into the possession of magnate Iulius Brekner from Medias, who leases them out for 70 years; he also built systematized installations, making a substantial contribution to the development and modernization of the resort.

In 1905 the first physician of the resort was hired, a pharmacy was set up and the production of the Bazna salt kicked off under the commercial name of “Victoria.” In 1907 geologist Louis Mrazec, one of the future members of the Board of Directors of the Sonametan Methane Joint-stock Company, explains the origin of the mineral waters and of the mud.

The “Romanul” newspaper was writing in its balneal bulletin of July 22, 1919 that “prices are low, amenities are civilized, the music, soirees, celebrations, tennis, gymnastics equipment, the Lido, all tone the tanned muscles and conclusively satisfy the visitors that Bazna has a dream climate and springs sparkling with health.”

In 1949 the Bazna baths entered under the management of the Ministry of Health, and in 1950 the resort switches from a seasonal to all-year resort regime.

As of 2000, the healing powers of the Bazna saltwater are put to work in the Romgaz-owned Spa Complex Expro, which also has a hotel with a capacity of 62 guests. AGERPRES