RECORD

The Collector Onic Zambaccian

If his consuming passion for art gained Krikor Zambaccian a familiar fame amongst the collectors in Bucharest, particularly by dint of his acquisitions in the field or foreign art, few know that his younger brother, Onic (1891-1975), yet another aficionado of beauty, was

Once Upon A Time, At Mişu Weinberg's

It was in May 1972, when I paid my first visit to the Weinbergs. I still have a warm dedication from the host as testimony. I was coming from the Museums Review to record a few thoughts about the Weinberg collection, the foundations of which had been laid in the tumultuous

The Slătineanu Comparative Art Collection - An Extinct Art Museum

1947. The year of the most despotic deeds of the communist regime come to power in the shadow of the Soviet tanks. The ordeal of the Romanian intellectual elites (and not only) begins. The Slătineanu family find themselves treated like common criminals. The whole family

Anastasie Simu

Simu Museum A conservative MP in the 1888, 1891 and 1899 parliament sessions, Anastasie Simu finally became tired of the Machiavellian political life in Romania at the end of the 19th century; realising he had no prospects to achieve momentous social and cultural events

The Romanian Was Not Born A Suicide!

political scientist Let us start from the end: thank God Romanians are Orthodox, have not totally renounced the traditional values of the village (where 45% of them are still living, a record in Europe!), do not seem to show an ethnically-grounded morbid penchant for suicide,

When Time Is My Oyster

Have you noticed the relaxed way in which we actually re-create ourselves in our times off? Dem lieben Gott die Tage stehlen – Germans refer to the waste of time as to a theft committed in the face of God. I remember an episode during my student years, when, at the close

Grigoraş Dinicu: Memoirs

excerpt  These lines will introduce us into the international career of the great violin virtuoso. At the height of his career, Grigoraş Dinicu carried across the world the fame of Romanian fiddlers and of the rich Romanian folk song. After the creation of the Bucharest

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

The Funeral Maple

excerpts The cosmic tree, whose root, trunk and branches uphold – by dividing yet uniting – the three cosmic levels, is the same as the funeral tree, because, to the folk mentality, the cosmic tree is the only passageway to the other realm that the soul of the dead

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

Comments On The Legend Of Master Manole

excerpts1. Participation and RepetitionPerhaps the most significant difference between modern man and archaic man consists in this: for archaic man, a thing or an act acquires significance only in as much as it participates in a prototype, or in as much as it reiterates

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