The president entered a mask game, holding his audience in check and asking its members to decipher the riddle :"Who is the genuine Iliescu?" On the occasion of Easter, we had the opportunity of hearing president Ion Iliescu say "Christ resurrected!" in front of several cameras. This seemed to be a profound change in the attitude of free-thinker Ion Iliescu. It was a transformation prepared during the electoral campaign, when he surprised his audience by mentioning very detailed biblical scenes. Characterized by his well-known voluntarism, Iliescu has overcome obstacle after obstacle, learning and synthesizing a lot, accepting the tortures of the self-making process, in order to be as the Romanians want him to be. The recent presidential piousness is part of a larger category of gestures meant to polish the Cotroceni image. They can be divided into several categories: gestures of reconciliation (such as the reconciliation with former sovereign Mihai I, the friendly attitude shown to Emil Constantinescu and the civic organizations whose representatives do not like Iliescu); gestures of receptivity (the taking over of the criticism directed against the law of the state secret, the injunction concerning the secret service of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the appointment of Ristea Priboi as head of the SIE (External Intelligence Service) commission; European gestures (the declarations supporting EU and NATO); modernization gestures (presenting Iliescu as an overt supporter of the market-oriented economy, property and privatization). If we analyze these changes, we might wonder whether this is one and the same character who used to label himself as a free thinker, who harassed King Mihai in a awkward way, who used to belch fire when referring to the former president and his "intelligent team". We wonder whether Iliescu the "receptive guy" is one and the same as Ili