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 Grandfather Mehmed Ali
My grandfather Mehmed Ali was an old-fashioned Turk. He wore a long beard and the traditional Turkish costume. Each morning he would sit down next to the charcoal, the earthenware pot filled with live coals, sip his coffee and puff his long-stemmed chibouk. He would often
The Ruthenians
I was, am, and will remain, a Rusyn. Aleksander Dukhnovici A short historyThe Ruthenians are a population that is descended from a Slavic branch of the Indo-European nations. Their name is mentioned by Julius Caesar, with reference to a Celtic tribe settled in Gallia Narbonensis.
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 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 Macedonians From Bailesti Region
excerpt Below are described a few aspects of the settlement of the ethnics who came from south of the Danube to Bailesti. It is a known fact that, starting with the first half of the 19th century, new administrative units appeared in the Romanian principalities, especially
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,
The Life And Convictions Of Zacharias Lichter
excerpt Motto: Prophetic utterance comes into being via negation: it is the knowledge induced by ashes. In the aftermath of speaking the word entrusted to them, prophets taste the ashes of the world upon their tongues; their wisdom is the aftertaste of ashes. A portraitMany
Love Thy Neighbor
excerpts . . . Chaplin. Einstein, Rubinstein, Chagall, Spinoza. I summon these exalted spirits above all because their proximity feels good; their genius, both innocent and supple, has a wholesome quality about it, and their absence from any intellectual banquet worthy
Religious Conversion In 19th Century Moldavia
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
The Images Of The Nations. Ethnic And Ethic Characteristics
* 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
The Hungarians
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