PLURAL MAGAZINE

In the true spirit, these three concentric spaces – the village border, the village margin and the household enclosure – are in harmony with each other and with the cosmic order as well.  Romanian Folk Culture, 1999 by Nicolae Constantinescu

We have been acquainted with the fundamental myths of Romanian spirituality in Mircea Eliade's view and read his comments on the legend of Master Manole, the legend which, according to Eliade, certifies that myth is essential to the process of artistic creation, and

One of the landmarks of Moldavian-Wallachian simplicity is the diminutive character of Orthodox religious architecture. On a very serious note, a number of more or less serious researchers into the field of architecture, many of them under the metaphysical pressure coming

The essential resemblance between the legend recorded by Bandinus in 1647 and the folk legends about the Flood, collected at two and a half centuries' distance (around 1900), is conspicuous. In all these variants (but especially in the one chronicled by Bandinus) some

To the achievement of literary impact, Argeş Monastery comes up with a simple and ingenious solution: the absolute contrast between the soft and caressed tenderness of form, on the one side, and the wild graveness of the underlying tragedy, on the other. In the style and

excerpts1. Participation and RepetitionPerhaps the most significant difference between modern man and archaic man consists in this: for archaic man, a thing or an act acquires significance only in as much as it participates in a prototype, or in as much as it reiterates

Downstream on the wideArgesh River's sideNegru Voda's riding;Ten men go beside him:Masons, craftsmen fine, Masterbuilders – nine;Manoli makes ten,The greatest craftsman. Down this dale, they're boundTo erect and foundA monastery hall,A memorial. There, as

Like an Egyptian pharaoh, who built a pyramid to be the abode of his body, with a view to future life, the powerful Romanian princes built monasteries to rest and keep their bones till Doomsday. Their unflinching faith in the immortality of the soul drove them to these pious

  Joy usually produces beauty and beauty produces communication. . . , as Horia Bernea once said. That is also the dominant impression that I had after having visited the Romanian Peasant Museum. Beauty and joy are being offered to the Romanian or foreign visitor, whether

Architect The architecture of a country is, perhaps, the most accurate expression of its history, and nothing can give us a more certain insight into the past and more authentic knowledge of a civilisation. By what it has achieved throughout time, Romanian architecture

In his opening speech at the inauguration of the Village Museum, Professor D. Gusti said: …We did not have the example of open air museums from the northern countries, such as Skansen, Bigdo or Lillehammer. They convey us too much romantic and ethnographical merit, focusing

Historian The National Village Museum in Bucharest is the kind of museum in which the traditional exhibition halls are replaced by authentic households, consisting of dwellings and their extensions, technical devices, churches and triptychs transplanted from their places