The intruder emerged from the thick forest just before dawn on June 20 and approached the entrance of the luxury resort.
The break-in took 23 seconds. The suspect weighed around 400 pounds. His motive: honey.
The bear, captured by security footage that morning, used its paw to pry open the sliding glass door of the Grand Hotel Balvanyos, before squeezing its shoulders into the lobby. As a terrified employee sprinted away, it headed to the breakfast buffet and ate all the packets of honey.
It was one of three bear intrusions in June at the four-star hotel, which sits on a mountainside in Romania’s Carpathian range. Another bear entered the resort’s spa and downed a three-liter jug of massage oil, while a third opened a door into a hotel hallway and chased away a housekeeper.
Romania’s relationship with its bears has come undone. The brown bear — the ursus arctos — is one of the country’s national treasures, interwoven into its mythology. Villagers still host annual bear dances, a ritual that goes back to pre-Christian times, when people believed the animals staved off misfortune. Romania’s brutal Communist dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu, would flaunt his power by ordering aides to lure bears from the forest with food, then shooting them in a macabre display of machismo.
For years, tourists flocked to the Carpathian forest, hoping to catch a glimpse of one. But if it used to be that people came to Romania see the bears, these days, it’s the bears who are coming to see the people.
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The post The Law Protects Them. The Villagers Fear Them. appeared first on New York Times.
