The cotton industry was revolutionised by the use of coal, being one of the first to employ steam power.

Coal was also used to fuel the two-stroke engine invented by James Watts. The first steam locomotives and ships appeared, contributing to both territorial expansion and speedier delivery of coal to the factories that needed it.

Britain became the first industrialised nation in the nineteenth century, and it was coal that played a decisive part in the process.

The trail blazed by Britain was quickly followed by the rest of mankind.

Even in Romania, on the local scale, coal mining played the same rôle. In the communist period, the transition to an industrialised Romania was made possible by coal.

After the oil crisis of the 1970s, Nicole Ceaușescu decided to make the coal industry the central pillar of the country’s energy supply. To ensure the massive growth in coal production needed for power stations, by 1989 there were around 60,000 miners digging more than eleven million tonnes of coal in fifteen active pits.

Alongside doctors and firemen, the miners were regarded as heroes.

The year 1990 came as a turning point in public perception of the miners. After the demonstration held by the traditional political parties on 28 January 1990, the leaders of the National Salvation Front made an appeal to the miners’ unions to come to Bucharest and “restore order”.

That year, the miners came to Bucharest three times. The final visit, in June, has remained the bloodiest event since the 1989 Revolution. There were six dead and hundreds of non-fatal casualties, and the headquarters of the opposition parties were ransacked.

I was nineteen at the time. I remember that on the morning of 13 June, I was woken by a deafening droning noise. For a few seconds, I thought it was an earthquake. I’d experienced something similar a few seconds before the earthquake of 1986. But I quickly realised it wasn’t an earthquake this time and turned on the radio. I heard with my own ears Iliescu thanking the miners for coming to the capital to restore order.

I got dressed and went outside. I was in the middle of the traffic island in Piata Romana when the first bands of miners appeared, coming down Ana Ipatescu Boulevard. Their gait, their talk, their rubber cables and clubs have remained seared in my memory.

Opposite my building, a neighbour older than me came outside. A swarthy man, in a white vest, his large belly spilling over his trouser belt, he was looking at them, like I was, in a mixture of fear and curiosity.

In the vanguard of the miners, two of them cast me a glance and then looked at my neighbour. In a fraction of a second, they rushed at him, clubs raised. He managed to retreat into the yard of his building, but the miners followed him. I kept my cool and although my building was quite a distance away, I slowly walked back to my gate. I escaped by a miracle.

Besides the human victims, the miners also managed, albeit unwittingly, to deal an almost fatal blow to Romania’s fledgling democracy. By installing a reign of terror and annihilating the University Square protests, the miners once and for all snatched away any chance of Point 8 of the Timisoara Proclamation (the Law of Lustration) being applied. As a result, Romania has yet to rid itself of the former communist nomenklatura. Rather than a working democracy, Iliescu fulfilled his dream of installing perestroika on the Danube, so-called communism with a human face.

But the sword raised by the miners had two edges, stealing from us thirty years as a nation, but spelling the beginning of the end for them. The incompetents of the former communist system, which the University Square protesters were trying to depose, remained in power thanks to the miners and in the process destroyed the mining industry along with everything else.

We might think that nobody summoned the miners, although we know that in Romania nobody takes the initiative for anything. Those in doubt don’t need to ask Iliescu or whoever was taking phone calls from Bucharest at the mines on the days in question. We might think that the miners were just a diversion so that others could target University Square, the headquarters of the traditional parties, the house of Ion Ratiu. We’re free to believe whatever we wish.

Even the miners themselves, aware of what they did in 1990, would like to believe, thirty years later, that everything was a set-up, a frame-up. Unfortunately for them, nobody can defend his own turpitude by claiming to have been fooled.

Wreaking devastation to order, the miners ignited, like same as coal gas combusting in contact with air. At the time, the instigators took a risk by inciting the miners. But they were lucky that we subsequently proved to be a nation lacking in dignity, lacking a backbone, which was in no hurry to demand that the head of state, obligated by the Constitution to protect us, be put on trial for those who fell victim to the miners on their rampage.

Thirty years later, we still pretend that we want to prove in court that Iliescu, as head of state, summoned the miners, rather than trying him for manslaughter.

In March 2021, I went down into a mine for the first time, at the Vulcan pit. I became a documentary photographer in 2010. It took me eleven years to get over the shock of 1990 and to seek to gain an understanding of mining in the Jiu Valley as a professional.

I spent six days with the miners of Vulcan. In that time, I slept no more than twenty hours. Every morning, at 4.15, I joined the first shift and I finished the day at around seven p.m. I went down into the mine twice.

I discovered a fantastic group of people, united by the mine. It is in their unity, something other Romanians lack, that their strength resides.

I didn’t meet a single miner from among those who took part in the Mineriads who wasn’t aware of the seriousness of those events, of the devastating effect they had on democracy, and who didn’t bitterly regret both taking part and what happened. Both Miron Cozma and the second tier of the former communist régime, who were engaged in a life and death struggle to protect their own future, took advantage of them.

After 1990, the miners were stigmatised for the trap in which they had let themselves fall. When they travel, most of them don’t say where they are from. The same as most Romanians don’t say where they are from when they travel abroad.

We know what happened in 1990, but we mustn’t forget the sacrifice of generations of miners without whom the rest of the country wouldn’t have had hot water and electricity. Most of them paid with their lives for the right to work. Most of them only enjoyed a year or two of retirement, in one of the few sectors where pensions are higher than wages.

Most of us have heard about how hard it is to work as a miner. I’m not one for metaphors, for well-crafted words, but Dante’s Inferno reads as if he wrote it after talking to a miner. Going down the pit is hell on earth. The only thing missing is the flames, but when there are accidents, the miners experience those too.

So that we can have electricity, or for a wage of around three thousand lei, whichever way you look at it, I’ll try to describe in a few words what a miner goes through during a six-hour shift down the pit.

The first shift arrives at work at between a quarter past and half past four in the morning. They change into their work clothes, collect their lamps and masks, clock in, and at ten past five, make their way to the shaft, even though the shift begins at six. They set off sooner because after they descend the shaft, the hellish journey through the galleries at the bottom of the Chorin pit, along the main tunnel, then down the Stoica slope, along the VI-IX gallery to the FBS coalface of seam 3/276, can take as long as forty minutes.

The miners ought to be paid two wages: one for the effort of just getting to the workplace, in addition to the one they get for their highly dangerous work in itself.

During the journey to the coalface, I hit my head on the walls and the pipes that run along the galleries at least twenty times. A good job I was wearing a helmet!

Work at the coalface employs much safer methods today than in the past. When you get there, and all that’s preventing the mountain from caving in on you is a mesh and some SVJ hydraulic posts, safety no longer has any meaning.

The miners prepare the coalface for the explosives technicians and they detonate the area to be mined. Then the miners come back and cut the mesh, allowing the coal to tumble down. With shovels, they load the conveyor belt behind them. As they advance, they remove the posts and beams behind, let the mountain cave in, and penetrate deeper into the coal seam. The mine envelops you in dust. At the coalface, besides dust so thick you can cut it with a knife, it rains chunks of coal whenever the posts are moved or the mesh cut.

The experts calculate the air that needs to reach the miners in the tunnels. If there is too much air, the coal catches fire. If there is too little, the miners suffocate.

Constantin Cretan, one of the miners’ leaders convicted for the Costesti Mineriad, admits his guilt, regrets his part in the 1990 Mineriads, and begs forgiveness on behalf of all miners.

I think the time has come for reconciliation. Besides the merit generation after generation of miners has earned, they have paid a heavy price for allowing themselves to be manipulated. The time has come to grant them our forgiveness and to demand that those morally responsible for what happened to pay the price.

What is wanted is electricity without coal. CO2 emissions from power stations and the high cost of coal production are two reasons why mining will cease very soon.

We needed coal miners more than gold when humanity made the transition from one era to another. A just transition in fact means a just parting with the past, a parting that will take account of the sacrifice of all those generations of miners.

But in Romania, we have the example of the Great Privatisation, when, in order to get their hands on the scrap metal and the land on which the factories stood, the political mafia gave the workers a few months’ severance pay to buy their silence.

If we wish to learn from our mistakes, in the spirit of reconciliation, the miners ought not to have the same fate. Regardless of whom lays their hands on the scrap metal and the land, when mining ceases, the miners still within the system should be granted international aid and given pensions. After fifteen years work at the coalface or after twenty-five years work in the mine machine shops, miners can’t be expected to retrain. If it’s impossible to do that even in a country like Germany, which really does make an effort to find local solutions, then it’s absolutely impossible in Romania, where the authorities have shown their contempt for the country’s citizens over the last seventy-five years.

By forgiving we heal. By forgiving, we give ourselves another chance, despite those who have put us in this situation. Generosity and gratitude make us stronger. Only in this way will we manage to bring to account those responsible for our national disaster.

But will we ever succeed in overcoming the national syndrome of wishing ill on our neighbour?