Mining, Memory, and Moral Authority in Roșia Montană: Community Perceptions from State Socialism to Corporate Withdrawal

This article examines the changing social meanings of mining in Roșia Montană (Romania) from late state socialism to the period following the withdrawal of the Roșia Montană Gold Corporation (RMGC), which had proposed a large open-cast gold project there. The study uses an exploratory sequential mixed-methods design. It draws on seven semi-structured interviews with local clergy of different confessions, conducted in spring 2019, and on questionnaire surveys of 282 residents and 45 resettled former residents, carried out in 2020, before the site’s inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2021. Perceptions are traced across four moments: the state-socialist period; the post-1989 years before the closure of the state mine; the RMGC investment phase; and its aftermath. Treating priests as local moral authorities and interpreters of change, the article finds that mining was remembered not merely as employment but as a source of order, prestige and collective identity under state socialism; that the post-1989 transition bred moral ambivalence; and that the RMGC years polarised the community. At the time of the research, perceptions remained divided but were increasingly articulated through memory, heritage and survival rather than extraction. The article shows how religious actors mediate collective memory and local responses to economic change in post-socialist mining communities.