After his first attempt at sewing and displaying a Romanian flag was thwarted by his wife, on 12 June 1966, Muruziuc planned his next action more carefully, endowing it with a powerful symbolic significance. He made the flag himself, in his own shed, on 27 June 1966. He bought 2m of red cloth in the village shop on 26 June, while the blue material (1m) was acquired at the shop in the neighbouring village of Alexăndreni. Muruziuc used an old bed-sheet for the yellow portion of the flag. According to a later examination carried out by the KGB, the flag was 2m 57cm long and 78cm cm wide. Muruziuc claimed that nobody witnessed his work on the flag. Early the next day, he entered the territory of the factory, climbed the chimney, and fixed the flag on the building’s lightning rod, so that it was visible throughout the village. After Muruziuc’s arrest, the flag was confiscated by the KGB, and served as an essential piece of incriminating evidence during the trial. This was apparently the first case of the public display of a Romanian flag on the territory of the MSSR after 28 June 1940. The flag was destroyed by the KGB staff on 13 January 1967. This photo is the only remaining record of the flag made by Muruziuc.

Süleyman Kazımov Saadettinov was born on 9 April 1951, in the village of Bashevo, Kardzhali province, Bulgaria. He worked as a mechanical engineer. Süleyman Saadettinov resisted against the so-called “Revival Process” implemented by Communist Party and its campaign of forced name-changing in December 1984 and refused to change his Turkish name to Bulgarian. His resistance was peaceful; he attended a small protest against the “Revival Process”. Because of his resistance, he was arrested and sent to prison and the forced labour camp or the ”concentration camp’, as the collectors define it, in Belene, on the island Persin on Danube river. After about one year he was released and kept on probation until deportation from the country during the summer of 1989. Süleyman Kazımov Saadettinov was expelled with his family from Bulgaria in the summer of 1989, before the collapse of the socialist regime. He and his family found refuge in Turkey. He took the Turkish citizenship. Now he lives in Bursa and has double citizenship – Bulgarian and Turkish.

According to the account of Süleyman, the photograph was secretly taken at a moment when camp prisoners were removed from the camp to work outside of the camp area, near to ordinary workers. In the working area, Süleyman and his friends saw a photographer, taking photos of ordinary workers. They asked the unknown photographer to take a photo of them. The photographer secretly took the photo of the group of prisoners and a week later brought them the developed photograph. When Süleyman was set free from the camp, he took the photo with him.

Süleyman is on the right of the picture, the man crouching and with a mustache.