1. Introduction

The best time to arrive in Hunedoara is at dusk. Driving toward the city, the sun shines only faintly from behind the hills surrounding it. The scene unfolds almost apocalyptically, with the entrance flanked on both sides by the remnants of the Steel Plant. It continues with the first signs of capitalist industry: a factory producing plastic components for German cars and numerous general stores and gas stations. Then come the apartment blocks. They begin triumphantly with two 10-story tower buildings that seem to mark the city’s gates, followed by rows upon rows of blocks organized into seven neighborhoods, each with its own unique history. All roads seem to converge toward the so-called “Civic Center,” an area with the city stadium at its heart.

Just as a visitor to Hunedoara is almost organically guided by the city’s layout toward the stadium, this article will similarly construct a narrative that converges on the stadium, metonymically revealing part of the broader story of the city as a whole.

Before proceeding further, it is essential to argue why anthropology is the appropriate discipline to tell this story in a Romanian public space dominated by economic or political science perspectives.

Anthropology, a discipline adopting a holistic perspective to explain social life, highlights qualitative data that help us understand a social phenomenon or process, regardless of the beliefs or ideologies shaping our opinions. A qualitative perspective seeks to uncover the nature of a research subject—whether concepts, opinions, or experiences—rather than merely measuring or weighing it. For instance, understanding why the residents of a specific city feel deeply connected to their local football team can help us grasp broader changes brought about by globalization or post-socialist transformations. Looking through an anthropological lens can offer the sense of calm that comes with understanding a phenomenon, freeing us from the trap of relentlessly seeking to confirm our own beliefs at any cost.

Through this article, I aim to complement and enrich the perspectives already known. The success of this endeavor will be measured by how much it contributes to bringing an understanding — and perhaps a touch of that calm — for those who struggle to understand why a 64 million euro investment in a stadium would have the support of the inhabitants of a town where jobs are scarce and people are driven abroad to secure their livelihoods.

2. Hunedoara’s “Golden Age”

The stadium is a place where people gather not only to watch a match but also to reconnect with shared memories and values that define them as residents of Hunedoara. To understand why the stadium holds such importance for Hunedoara’s inhabitants, we must start with the post-World War II period and trace how the local football team and residents’ participation in its matches came to signify more than just an occasional weekend activity.

The “Golden Age” of the local football team coincided with the peak of the Hunedoara Steel Plant. Today, memories of the team are often evoked with a sense of nostalgia for the city’s industrial past and the local community forged during that time.

Why is the memory of this Steel Plant so significant to Hunedoara’s residents? During the communist regime, the Cerna Valley was dominated by this industrial giant, which operated continuously in three shifts, producing much of the long profiles required by Romania’s heavy industry. Given that Romanian communism, from start to finish, was modeled on Stalinism’s obsessive focus on heavy industry, Hunedoara enjoyed a privileged status.

Hunedoara’s explosive industrial growth started after World War II under communist rule. The regime change and the establishment of communism were arduous processes, unevenly implemented across the country. They began in select cities designated as starting points for building the new socialist world, among which Hunedoara was included. These localities—I name them “showcase cities”—were used by the communist regime as models to showcase and promote its ideologies. Such cities were often built around key industries or infrastructure projects and received significant investments to demonstrate the regime’s success. In this way, Hunedoara in the early decades of Romanian communism played a role similar to that of Magnitogorsk for the USSR (Kotkin 1995) or, later, Nowa Huta (Lebow 2013) for Poland.

3. Social Unrest in Hunedoara

For Hunedoara, the world changed in December 1989, when Romania entered a traumatic transformation. Urban centers of heavy industry, once central to state planning, gradually began to be reconstructed — both through public discourse and  public policies — as a burden dragging the country down, preventing it from becoming more agile and prosperous. My research focuses on the people who experienced these transformations, in this case, the residents of Hunedoara, aiming to understand their experiences and the mechanisms they employed to cope.

The political regime change began with the events of December 1989 and continued until May 1990. However, the process of social transition and adaptation to the new regime remains ongoing, even 30 years after those events.

After December 1989, Hunedoara experienced a continuous decline that particularly marked the  Steel Plant, educational system, social resources, and overall city infrastructure. The effects of this process can be equated to a collective trauma. During the communist era, Hunedoara and its residents were emblematic of the working class — the ruling class (Măgureanu 2020). In the capitalist system, this status vanished and was replaced by its opposite, as mono-industrial cities everywhere in Romania were no longer central to Romania’s plans for the future. Illustratively, a prominent political leader of the 1990s referred to Romanian heavy industry as “a pile of scrap metal” (Gheorghe 2021). As a mono-industrial city built around the Steel Plant, Hunedoara’s future appeared bleak.

The political regime donned the mantle of democracy while simultaneously establishing a governance system that shifted from a planned economy to a market economy. This brought changes to the position and significance of the former working class. Hunedoara’s residents transitioned from feeling privileged and valued by the state’s political regime to feeling like a burden on the country’s progress — a barrier to modernization, as perceived by political leaders who prioritized privatizing large industrial enterprises over keeping people’s jobs (Government of Romania, 2000). Consequently, most of these conglomerates were dismantled, and the workers were compensated with bonuses and severance pay. An unusual situation arose where substantial financial resources were not used to develop and modernize industry or create new industries to provide jobs and retrain workers for other professions, but were instead used to pay employees to leave their jobs.

One notable effect of the city’s struggle was the population decline, from nearly 100,000 inhabitants in 1989 to approximately 50,000 in 2023, as a result of a complex migration process.

In the early days of the transition period, in the 1990s, as long as the Steel Plant was still fully operational and publicly owned, membership in the working class engendered  resistance to political and economic changes. Decisions from central authorities, referred to locally as coming “from Bucharest,” were met with rejection by the working masses in Hunedoara. A former mayor described this period as one in which another “overturning of the order” (Romanian răsturnarea orânduirii) seemed possible at any moment. Confusion was widespread. For example, miners and workers from Hunedoara were seen locally as a potential threat to the central capitalist authorities, while in the capital, they were perceived as a social group loyal to power (Mareș 2010). The confusion and fierce power struggles of those times exceed the scope of this article, but it is important to note that locals expressed solidarity as workers and drew on a reactionary arsenal rooted in their self-identification as laborers.

In everyday life, the changes triggered by the events of December 1989 were deeply felt in Hunedoara, though their impact was not immediate. In the early part of the decade, a tenuous balance was maintained, as the Steel Plant’s director declared his objective to retain all employees (Iancu 2016). He attempted to adapt the communist goal of full employment to the capitalist system.

This balance, however, was undone following the 1996 Snagov Agreement, when Romania’s entire political class shifted focus toward European Union accession. The Hunedoara Steel Plant was identified as an industrial asset to be privatized, resulting in tens of thousands of layoffs. From that point until privatization was finalized, the workforce decreased nearly tenfold (European Parliament, 2000; Ioan Franc, 2000).

The privatization of the Steel Plant marked the culmination of a process that began with promises of restructuring but ended in 2003 with its sale to an foreign investor. Privatization also dismantled the entire network of organizations and institutions that existed to support the plant. For example, the workers’ canteen disappeared, and the Industrial Construction Institute, which in 1989 employed over 10,000 people, was privatized and now has fewer than 100 employees.

4. Survival Strategies

4.1 Cannibalization of the Steel Mill

What happened, after privatization, to the tens of thousands of people who had worked at or depended on the income provided by the Steel Plant? At least some of them, in a way, continued to rely on the plant and found alternative ways to survive. The steel from the massive decommissioned industrial installations entered the recycling circuit, providing a few locals with a new source of income. This period is remembered by Hunedoara’s residents as the time when the dismantling of the industrial installations began.

In the 2000s, scrap metal collection centers were numerous, with some even stationed right at the main gate of the Steel Plant. By 2018, all that remained was contaminated land and deep pits dug in search of even the smallest remaining pieces of steel. This left behind the image of a city that cannibalized its Steel Plant in order to survive.

4.2 Migration

In the early 1990s, some residents of Hunedoara left to work primarily as specialists in other industrial centers in Romania or abroad. Others, particularly those who had previously migrated from rural areas during the communist period to work at the Steel Plant, returned to their original households, taking with them accumulated resources such as severance payments or money from selling their urban apartments. However, the majority emigrated to the European Union, once this became possible.

By moving to countries such as Spain, Italy, Germany, or England, Hunedoara’s residents encountered many contradictions when comparing life abroad to life in their hometown. Locals perceived Hunedoara as a city with a homogeneous population and close social ties. Once abroad, they discovered that such networks were either nonexistent or inaccessible to them as immigrants. Although each country had its own particularities, the contrasts with Hunedoara were stark. One resident described the experience as follows: “I had neighbors who didn’t even say ‘Hello,’ but at least I had money in my pocket.” For him, emigration represented a compromise between the loss of social networks in Hunedoara and the financial gains abroad.

Leaving Hunedoara compelled locals to compare their ideas with diverse perspectives. Their reactions were not uniform, but many felt nostalgia for the Steel Plant’s heyday, expressing their sense of belonging to social groups that now exist only in memories, both through discourse and practices. For instance, groups of workers who had shared the same Steel Plant section or shift occasionally still meet, even though two decades have passed since the plant ceased to exist.

Nostalgia for the glory of the 1980s is omnipresent in conversations of all kinds — from private talks to public discourse and online discussions. Online groups (on platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn) with tens of thousands of members are vibrant spaces where people share memories of the times when Hunedoara had a state-owned Steel Plant, a construction enterprise, or a football team with international renown. These discussions attract not only the city’s current residents but also tens of thousands who once lived there and have since migrated elsewhere. Sharing memories of those times brings them together, despite being scattered across different countries or continents.

4.3 Changing The Discourse

To better understand the significance of the stadium, we must analyze the narratives of the people of Hunedoara about their past, which I have referred to above as memories or nostalgia.

The discrepancies between the locals’ perceptions and the official narratives about the communist era reflect tensions between personal experiences and the institutional vision of the past. These differences offer insights into how individual perceptions shape the collective memory and understanding of history. While the official interpretation of history is cohesive, each person creates their own version based on personal memories. However, these individual versions can help form a broader perspective and bring us insights into the locals’ collective memory — how locals view and remember their city. After December 1989, in Romania’s public sphere, the communist past began to be approached with a strongly negative perspective, sometimes used propagandistically to distract from the shortcomings of the present. It is telling that events from the decades of the communist regime are studied by a government institution named the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes and the Memory of the Romanian Exile. As a result, this dissonance pushed discussions about the perceived glory of the communist era into private, informal settings.

In response to the social transformations of the past three decades, one survival strategy adopted by the people of Hunedoara has been to preserve and materialize nostalgia for the “Golden Age” within the city’s story. They reclaim memories of their youth from an era now labeled as “criminal” (Tismăneanu, Dobrincu, and Vasile 2006, 626) through their narratives about the glory of the 1980s. By recounting the industrial expansion, they can glorify the historical period without explicitly referencing the political regime of the time.

The case of the Iron Museum in Hunedoara captures these processes well. The museum existed from 1970 to 2003 within the Steel Plant. In 2024, it was under reconstruction in a modernized building in the city center. The reopening of the museum is appreciated by the people of Hunedoara for its potential  to offer a variety of perspectives on the past: locals whose lives were linked to the plant, having worked there and/or having family who worked there, can reconnect with fond memories of that period, young entrepreneurs who see tourism as the city’s future support the creation of a modern museum, and local authorities consider it a tool for garnering the support of diverse voter groups. The new museum allows the celebration of the industrial past without glorifying communism, presenting a narrative acceptable to everyone. This initiative reflects efforts to create a cultural and historical space that reconciles the diverse perspectives and experiences of the local community.

Another set of identity elements rooted in the past, perhaps even more visible and widely shared among the people of Hunedoara, comes from the realm of football and belongs to the glory days of the 1980s. During that time, the local team, Corvinul Hunedoara, was a renowned team across Romania.

5. The Glory of the Past Brought into the Present

“Go Corvinul, Hunedoara
Go Corvinul, throughout the country
Let it be heard in the capital
Of the Hunedoara standard”

— George Pîrvan in the song ‘For the club, for the colors’

The “Golden Age” of Hunedoara, which we previously referred to as the period of maximum industrial expansion and development, is still alive in the memories and nostalgia of its residents. One of the places where this nostalgia is materialized in the city’s space is the football stadium, and it can be especially seen in the way the local team is supported on match days. After the closure of the steel mill, the football team became an important part of the city’s collective narrative and strengthened the sense of belonging among its people.

In the early 2000s, with the decline of the local industry that once served as the cornerstone of the people of Hunedoara’s connection to the city, the visibility of the football team’s supporters grew significantly and their project filled the void. Their plan to revive the team gained popularity in a city where people were still mourning a past that now only lived on in their memories. As one of the veterans of the supporters’ movement told me, the city had lost its identity, and the search for a new one needed to go no further than the legendary local team.

In addition to managing and supporting the local team from the stands on match days, the supporters established February 2 as the most important day in the city’s life. They created a new holiday to commemorate the passing of Michael Klein, the legendary captain of Corvinul. He was one of the most famous players and the team captain during its peak years in the 1980s. Thus, every year on February 2, the supporters organize a parade on the main boulevard, with banners, songs, and smoke bombs. This movement has steadily grown, especially because it offers a rare opportunity for the older generations, those who built Hunedoara, to collaborate and interact with the younger generations, the entrepreneurs.

When the supporters’ movement reached a critical mass and became well-known and supported by a sufficient number of locals, local politicians joined in, and during the 2018 commemoration, a statue of the legendary captain was unveiled.

After the statue unveiling, the next goals of the supporters were to redeem the Corvinul brand, which had been lost in 2005 when the club’s administrators used it as collateral for a loan, and to build a new stadium. The locals crowdfunded and the brand was bought back in October 2021, while the new stadium project was announced in the autumn of 2023, with the contractor selection process already in progress. The estimated cost is 64 million Euros, to be covered by the country’s national budget.

6. Conclusion

By tracing the story of the city and understanding that the need for an identity to be proud of has been a continuous motivation for its residents, we can more easily understand why the vast majority of them support such a grand project.

The supporters are excited about the stadium project that will be built in their city and hope that it will spark envy among the residents of other cities in the country, just as the Steel Plant once made the people of Hunedoara proud and envied by other Romanians. The pride that the people of Hunedoara still feel when talking about the Steel Plant and their industrial past is of the same nature as the pride they feel when Corvinul wins a match, or when they think about the stadium that will be built in their city.

The team is the soul of the city, and the city comes alive again when Corvinul plays. Both the young and the elderly gather by the thousands at the stadium for every match. “Just like in the good old days,” as many locals told me.