Mircea Eliade

Mihaela Marinescu: Did you know maestro Ionel Perlea before visiting him in New York in 1967?Theodor Grigoriu: No, I didn't, he had left the country a long time before. He was a legend to my generation, like Enescu, like Lipatti. Before my trip to the United States

Lisbon, a town whose name comes from the mythical traveler Ulysses – so they say – , illustrated in the Middle Ages by so many navigators and explorers curious and eager for adventure, shows to the visitor first its drowsy side. It is true that I first visited it on

The news that a German foundation offered me, many years ago, a scholarship to Heidelberg gave me an incommensurable joy and an unrestrained curiosity of knowing places that, for a very long time, I could only associate with the plot of Wilhelm Meyer Förster's play.

For centuries now, every once in three years, The Feast of Immortality – Kumbh Mela, takes place alternatively in four Indian centers : Allahabad and Hardwar (Uttar Pradesh state), Ujjain (Madhya Pradesh) and Nasik (Maharashtra). Descending from Vedic mythology, the feast

Journeying to people instead of places is the reverse of the current, holiday-bound view on travels. Indeed, the projected picturesque of the surprising landscapes is the main constituent mesmerizing people into moving at great distances, sometimes despite the difficulties

excerptI will never forget the nights spent with Bogdanof and Van Manen around Calcutta, in Serampore and Titagarh. Bogdanof, who had been the consul of the Tsarist Empire to Teheran and Kabul for ten years, was at the time my teacher of Persian. He had made friends with

C. H. R. – I was telling myself: how can a man like Mircea Eliade experience the diversity of idioms, cultures, fatherlands, abodes, countries? I begin to understand this now and yet would like to ask you how fatherland and the world interrelate in your inner self?M. E.

We are all collectors. Whether it is paintings, art objects, CDs, books, stamps, insects, pipes, watches, posters, napkins, match boxes, memories, connections and many other artful, useful or simply useless things, everybody has the instinct of gathering in a personal collection

If ever I ventured to write a treatise on the savoir vivre, I would not neglect to address, in an entire chapter, the art of whiling away. It seems to me that this type of happiness – which is, equally, an admirable instrument of knowledge – has long been forgotten.

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

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

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