Pita

Return To The Interwar Bucharest

excerpts  So closeSuddenly, the interwar people make the body visible: men are allowed to shave off not only their beards, but also their moustaches – a facial change that overthrows an aesthetic canon with centuries-old resistance – and women, punished and ridiculed

Ways Of Seeing

Minority ethnic groups have usually developed some separate cultures within the larger framework of the majority. Their particular language and specific customs generally single out such societies. From the cultural point of view, the main characteristics of a minority society

Social Capital And Ethnic Relations. Tolerance, Trust And Cooperation In Multiethnic Communities

excerpt Conclusions and perspectivesThere are some problems connected with the research of the implications of the social capital in the development of ethnic relationships in Transylvania. Social trust and participating in secondary organizations are rather issues of availability

The Almsmonger's Lover

excerpt They'd dozed off. The devilish furnace of the sun was blazing fiercely. They were positively stewing as through the shadow cast by their soles two Gypsy women walked by, bent under the burden of a galvanized bucket with a chunk of ice protruding from it. Ice-cold

My Peaceful, Multiethnic Village

I saw the light of day in an atypical village of Bucovina. It was a multiethnic village, a kind of summary of Europe. A European Union avant la lettre. It is there, I believe, that a direction in my life was traced, an ecumenical dominant feature, one of understanding of

Memoirs Of A Witness

I was born and I spent my childhood in the capital of the country that is called Romania, a state that at that time had prided itself for about a decade with the name of Greater Romania, which was a creation of the preceding generation, but also the outcome of a long series

Ethnic Alterity And Collective Imaginary

excerptConclusions and final ideasStereotypes, as they are described in the first researches in this field, tend to be quite long-lasting, yet they do show changes. Images of the other are less enduring than images of self. In 1992, Romanians had a negative self-image on

The Ethnogenesis Of The Dobrujan Turks

The definition of the genesis, as well as the delimitation of the area where the Turkish people was formed, and from where they spread from Central Asia to the Mediterranean Sea, is still a controversial issue among specialists. Discussions between Turkology scholars usually

The Violin Player Ion Voicu

It is hard to say when the Gypsies came to Romania for the first time, and then settled for good, but the oldest documents date from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, when the royal charters mentioned the fiddler slaves, sold alongside the dependencies and objects from

The Roma In The Romanian Medieval Imaginary

The Roma Study Center, the History Faculty of the University of Bucharest I. The Roma's first contacts with the natives of the Romanian spaceThe Roma are a people hailing from India and their migration to Europe, in successive waves, spanned several centuries from the

The Gypsies

Nowadays, the Romanians' principal obsession is the Gypsies, who make the Romanians feel as if they were living in a castle under siege. Almost all crimes are attributed to Gypsies, whose population seems to be rising every day. Although the figure given by the 1992

The Macedonian Minority In Romania

Declared population at the last census: 695 according to the 2002 statisticsEstimated true population: over 15,000 Inhabited territory: the South of Romania, especially Oltenia and big industrial and urban areas Population in the rural/urban areas: 60% in the urban areas,