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The baptized JewIn the late 1990s I had planned to include at the end of my book The Imaginary Jew in Romanian Culture a chapter entitled The Baptized Jew. As I worked on this subject I realized that it had been extensively discussed by the historian Mihai-Răzvan Ungureanu

excerpt Two people went down the chimney in a house. Only one of them got his face dirty with soot. The dirty one looked at the clean one and didn't imagine that he might look different, so he didn't wash the soot away. The clean one, on the other hand, saw the

* The boom of geographic discoveries and trading expeditions that began on the eve of the Renaissance and continued throughout that era developed a new taste for describing remote, if not downright imaginary, countries and peoples. Before being discovered, the savage was

excerpts Motto: It is known that, when a people is about to disappear, first its high society disappears, and with it the literature. (Milorad Pavici, The Khazar Dictionary) Lazar Saineanu and his studies in folklore. An ethnographic controversyLazar Saineanu was a very

In the nineteenth century, and also in the inner-war period, Romania had one of Europe's largest Jewish communities. Between the wars, its Jewish population was the third largest in Europe both in absolute terms (after Poland and the USSR) and as a proportion of the

Who can even imagine nowadays that more than a century ago, Romania, going through a period of economic expansion, was a sort of terra promessa on which the seasonal workers relied in order to make money and on which the immigrants from western countries relied in order

They arrived in Romania over a century ago, and they were skilled craftsmen and scholars. Now, even if they only represent a small community, a couple of thousand people, the Italians in Romania try to perpetuate and promote their traditional values.  Short historyItalians

Situated on a hill in the midst of the Csík valley in the heart of Szeklerland, the Franciscan order in the small village of Csíksomlyó hosts the largest annual pilgrimage in Central Europe. Regardless of their religious affiliation, three to four hundred thousand Hungarians

Resentments between Romanians and Hungarians feed on a twofold frustration. Until 1918, the Romanians of Transylvania were generally looked down on by the Hungarians. They were largely peasants, with few townspeople and intellectuals among them, while Hungarians made up

None of the minorities living in Romania had a tenser relationship with the majority of inhabitants. Still, Romanians and Hungarians have been living together for centuries. The Hungarians in Transylvania praise their past, values and traditions within a context that permits

I think I would never have come to love Balkania so much, had I not met Marina Marinescu in Munich several years back. We had been acquainted since we met for the first time in Athens. Florin Marinescu, the specialist in Byzantine history to whom I was talking one day in

Life Histories in Bucharest – the 20th Centuryexcerpt All the Greeks in the city sought to make me their son-in-law. Demostene Gramatopol, 1910-? My initial intention was to interview both Greeks belonging to the old Greek community in Bucharest, and some of those who