Manifest

Editor's Note - Memento Vivere

It seems almost provocative to launch such an issue on the local pleasures, pastimes and delights, while nowadays a troublesome Romania appears as plunged into unending economic and social difficulties, striving to cope with various shortcomings and weaknesses. However,

Woolen Gardens

European travelers such as Antonio Maria del Chiaro were struck long time ago by the uncommon abundance of woolen carpets in each Romanian home, be it aristocratic, bourgeois or peasant. Carpets were laid mainly onto the walls of the rooms, but they also covered the beds,

The Romanian Death Iconography Or A Different Kind Of Assisted Death

In the field of iconography the rhetoric of the end manifested itself initially as a history of silences, the absence of the motif being possibly equally significant as its presence since, as Michel Vovelle demonstrated, images interest us as expression of a selective, oblique

Romanian Mythology In Dance

Myth as a source of folkloric artistic manifestations continually delineates new territories waiting to be re-discovered. In the moments of mythological reconstruction a process of sifting the essences is kindled, which fascinates and re-sizes the participants in a meta-real

Discovering America - Projecting A Myth. Mircea Eliade's Perspective On The Birth Of A New World

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

Construction Rites And Legends

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

A Case Of Reduction To Human Scale: The Legend Of Master Manole

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

A Museum-Synthesis Of The Romanian Ethnological Patrimony

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

The Museum Of The Romanian Village

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

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

The Earth Beliefs Of The Romanian People I

excerpt THE MAKING OF EARTH AND ITS LIFE STORYI have already put together in my earlier works a whole series of histories and beliefs dealing with the world before its making as well as with the world above the endless realm of eternal water: And I strongly doubt that anyone

Romanians - 1943

excerpt THE ROMANIANS' SPIRITUAL LIFE The Two Myths of Romanian SpiritualityIn any culture, there is always a central myth that discovers it and that is to be found in all its major works of art. Romanians' spiritual life is dominated by two myths that express,