Empire

The other Monday walking on Victoriei Road I met a friend. It is a well-known fact that today any guy you treat to a glass of wine at Fialkowsky's or who is in the delightful habit of bumming two or three lei from you is called a friend. Last year, this guy borrowed

*excerpts THE SOPHISTICATED PEASANTS The Romanians are a social phenomenon. As a nation among nations, they are westerners evolved in the East. They are Latins surrounded by Slavs. They are Romans two thousand years away from Rome. They are contemporaries re-produced on

I will begin by quoting myself. Talking about the polemics between two people whose intelligence and moral stature I admire (the polemics took place, in its major parts, in the very pages of the 22 magazine), I used to say with a certain regret and doubtfulness: On whose

Strangely enough, in all the periods of political, economic and/or military infeudation either to Turkey or to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to Germany or to Russia, or to the Soviet Union, the Romanian Principalities and Romania always nurtured the illusion of autonomy from

excerpt It's lunch time. Instinctively, I make for Calea Victoriei, where this hour is set for the fashionable to meet between the Royal Palace and [Elisabeta] Boulevard, as on rue Vivienne during the Restoration. The beautiful shops that border the narrow sidewalks

Ancientness is also confirmed by our energetic fatalism (which is not at all an Oriental aspect). Newer peoples are more stirred by desires, the achievement of which will barely endure, whereas Romanians cultivate a sound skepticism toward any pointless undertaking. New

Chapter XVII. On the Moldavians' Habits (excerpts) While we are trying to describe the Moldavians' habits, about which no-one, or just few foreigners hold a true image, the love we feel for our country on the one hand prompts us to praise the people among which

Foreword The few words that I put as motto at the beginning of this book can be translated like this: God must have had a hidden plan for this people that the western states rediscovered on the banks of the Danube and adopted like Pharaoh's daughter adopted Moses.

Toward the end of the Middle Ages, the Romanians, until then living in their traditional peasant autonomies, which stand for an entire, complete political order with archaic roots, arrived, after the abolition of anarchy, at their boundaries and, on one side, because of

excerpts Que voulez-vous, nous sommes ici aux portes de l'Orient, où tout est pris à la légère. Raymond Poincaré*Welcoming the Philanderers…au tapis-franc nous étions réunis. L. Protat**Although no further than the night before I had promised myself under

All roads to the West go through Vienna. Generous crossroads where the western world fuses with the horizons of eastern Europe and the Germanic spirit seems to have rich confluences with Latinity, the old Austrian metropolis still conveys the same charm that those claras

excerptThat afternoon we took a train to Constanta where, the same evening, we planned to embark on a Romanian ship bound to Constantinople. We arrived in Constanta late at night, so we didn't get to see any of the city or port. All I remember is the very agitated sea.