Hidden Leper Colony, Legacy of Ceausescu, Fights to Gain Respectability : Romania: Hostile attitudes in the outside community keep even fully healed victims inside the lonely settlement.

The dirt road leading to the Tichilesti Leper Colony branching off the main highway from Tulcea is unmarked. The complex, screened by hills and trees and 6 kilometers from the nearest village, do not appear on any map and there are no signs indicating its existence.

It is the legacy of the former Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu who wanted its existence kept secret and who told the World Health Organization that the disease had been eradicated.

The sun is shining on the bright Tulcea Hospital’s white buildings, grouped around the courtyard nestling in a small valley. The doctors and cluster of patients are cheerful and relaxed.

The director of Romania’s only leper colony, Dr. Gheorghie Popa, is frank about his reasons for being there: “The money is better.” His salary is 60% higher than the equivalent elsewhere. He has been at the colony for a year and has come to enjoy it. He took charge when authorities failed to find a replacement for the last chief, leaving the post vacant for 3 months.

The colony was opened in 1877 with a capacity of 100, but the numbers have shrunk in recent years as standards of hygiene have improved. The 54 patients--27 men, 27 women--are mostly elderly. Only two are contagious, the rest are stabile. Some are bedridden; others have lost limbs, fingers noses, ears or sight.

They are victims of a bacterial disease that is transmitted through saliva and secretions and causes a disorder of the tissues. Flesh dries and crumbles, leaving some of the victims badly disfigured, although the disease is rarely fatal.

The majority of patients no longer need treatment beyond medication but stay because of the outside world regards them with disdain.

A group of male patients sits talking politics around a wooden table. They say they distrust Romania’s National Salvation Front, but from television and occasional newspapers they feel optimistic about the future of their country’s fledgling democracy. When they saw their revolution unfold on television, most of them danced all night in their spacious community hall.

Their days are spent cultivating about 10 hectares of farmland that surrounds the settlement and looking after sheep and chickens. There are few visitors.

Mihai Buzatu, 64, invited visitors into his small room on one side of the courtyard. There is no running water, heating is rudimentary, and conditions are cramped. Leprosy has left him hard of hearing, and he has trouble walking, spending much of his time reading the piles of books and newspapers neatly stacked on his wardrobe. Three photographs of calendar girls stare provocatively from their wall.

“It is hard to understand when you are old and not any more young,” he explained. “I like to see these (pinups) because I like to have the memories of youth.”

Like a few other residents, Buzatu has spent most of his life in the colony. He tried unsuccessfully to live in the outside world once his disease stablized, but found attitudes too hostile. “After a few years I came back because my treatment from people was not good. I expect to die here.”

Some of the residents are reclusive but others want to talk, relieved to have visitors who do not mind their disease.

New admissions are down to a trickle--the most recent was four years ago. One or two of the residents, nearly all elderly, were born at the settlement and some have married one another. Popa expects a few new admissions now that medical information is freely available in Romania, because he thinks new patients will be discovered.

Doctors at the colony are also eager to discover whether theirs is the only colony remaining on mainland Europe or whether rumors of colonies in Poland and East Germany are true.

The doctors’ main worry now is for funds to patch up the buildings, which are crumbling after 20 years without repair. Romania’s previous government ignored the colony, starving it of funds, and it was perhaps the only part of Ceauscecu’s Romania to be without Securitate informants.

Even at Tichilesti, however, the influence of the secret police was felt. Patients and doctors were obliged to write reports on conversations with a few visitors who came to the settlement in past years, in the event they were spies.

The revolution has brought a dramatic increase in medical and food supplies reaching the colony, much coming from the West. But the director does not believe the revolution will bring a corresponding change in attitudes of Romanians toward leprosy victims, saying that they will continue to be shunned by society. “This place will remain,” said Popa. “The patients do not have the possibility of a normal life outside.”