Empire

Three Centuries After Milescu

The parallel journals of two travelers, separated by more than three centuries, who crossed Asia from the west to the east, following the same route to the capital of China, offers us a human measure of the passage of time. Double photographs of the same places, even the

The Land Between Snows And Orange Trees

excerptsKartvel architecture, in its plastic traditions associated with nature and derived from nature, covered much more than the mountains; the current material of the tops was also brought down into the valleys, for towns. This is how it happened with the immense Zion

Constantin Pappia And His Library

The history of a country's libraries is made not only of facts and events related to large (or smaller) institutions, but also of phenomena that illustrate the taste for books and bibliophily of particular individuals, especially when such libraries come to be included

Poor Ioanide

excerpts IV In his office on the ground floor, Saferian, on a chair and surrounded by four men, all standing, was contemplating an oil portrait, set near them against the back of an ordinary straw chair. It is an Ingres, most certainly, said one of the four, a man with trimmed

Property Vs. Possession

Temptation One is tempted by what one sees, and seeing is the basic experience in cyberspace. One perceives the wondrous site, the desirable realm, but also the density of the transparent space that comes in-between – a psychological double of the transparent obstacle

Peleş - The Castle And Its Collections

click here to see film The Peleş Castle, former royal summer residence, today a museum open to numerous visitors from the country and abroad, was built between 1875 and 1914 in two important construction phases. Placed at the foot of the Bucegi Mountains, in the upper

Georges De Bellio, Friend Of The Impressionists

In 1878, Theodore Duret quoted the names of several amateurs (rather few, actually) in order to prove a fact that might have seemed a paradox at the time, namely that people with a certain reputation appreciated artists like Claude Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley and Berthe

The Faces Of Decadence

A civilization starts decaying when Life becomes its only obsession. Flourishing ages aim to values per se: life is but a means of attaining them; the individual being is not aware that he lives, he just lives – a happy slave of the shallowness that he breeds, nurses and

Everyone's Cuisine - The Watchdog Of Gastronomy

For well over one year, since I and the retiring actor Stelian Nistor marketed our tee-vees to see the magazine Everybody's Cuisine through the press, our peers, notably those at The Catzavencu Academy, never fail to cheek me: You meatball-journalist, recipe commentator,

From Tradition To Avant-Garde... And From Washington To Dumbrava Sibiului

Corneliu Bucur has been the manager of the ASTRA Museum of Traditional Folk Civilization since 1990. In 1965, he graduated the Babes Bolyai Faculty of History and Philosophy in Cluj. In 1981 he presented his doctoral thesis, with the following theme: Introduction in the

A Landmark On The European Map: The Dimitrie Gusti National Village Museum

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

One Afternoon With A Nymphomaniac

excerpts  I passed the entrance exam in philology at Cluj, but I was already bored after my freshman year. I had the best results in my class, but that was not my place. Whenever I danced at parties, and I felt the boys' knees splitting my legs through my dress, my