The wedding of Leresti

In the summer of 1973, Leresti, a remote mountain village in communist Romania was the site of a most unusual event: an American couple were getting married in this village and according to Romanian tradition: journalist Harry Morgan and his partner Catherine Devlin. Foreign guests were flown in to attend the ceremony, local officials were in attendance, and folk musicians provided the entertainment for the guests and the many village residents who showed up in traditional ware.

The event was all the more remarkable as ordinary Romanians had little opportunity of travelling abroad in those days, especially to countries in the West, as the communist authorities heavily restricted foreign travel for its citizens. They weren’t so rigid, however, when it came to western travellers visiting Romania. On the contrary, this was a time when the Socialist Republic of Romania, led by Nicolae Ceausescu, was actively encouraging foreign tourism, branding itself as an affordable, picturesque destination, as part of efforts to engage with the West and distance itself from the influence of the USSR.

The groom himself was no ordinary American. He was a journalist, founder of the World Press Institute and of the Friendship Ambassadors programme and had interviewed the Romanian president Nicolae Ceausescu. His wedding to Catherine Devlin was widely covered by the press, with scores of international and Romanian reporters dispatched to Leresti to report on the festivities. Among them was Radio Bucharest’s Tibor Tomcsányi, who recorded every stage of the wedding ceremony and put together an exciting 30-minute-long documentary which today can be found in Radio Romania’s archives.