Trio

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

Property Vs. Possession

Temptation One is tempted by what one sees, and seeing is the basic experience in cyberspace. One perceives the wondrous site, the desirable realm, but also the density of the transparent space that comes in-between – a psychological double of the transparent obstacle

Peleş - The Castle And Its Collections

click here to see film The Peleş Castle, former royal summer residence, today a museum open to numerous visitors from the country and abroad, was built between 1875 and 1914 in two important construction phases. Placed at the foot of the Bucegi Mountains, in the upper

More Parisian Than The Parisians: Georges De Bellio

Everybody knows Monet's famous painting, Impression, sunrise. The canvas, considered to be Impressionism's manifest, due to its style and title (the latter was chosen to designate the group of artists who had the same style of painting and were united by the same

I Was Playing Belote

I was playing belote – ancient surrealism heralding as its ultimatevalues the nine and the Jack, nobody knows why, some poets claim this is an idea meant to consecrate the troubadour and the portal he passes under at night – I waspeacefully playing one evening in a house

Idle Hours

In the olden times, in the Year of Our Lord 1937, as soon as the vernal wind had started wafting, I would cross the Danube with a handful of companions, to hail the passage of woodcocks in some of the parts of the Dobrudja. We reposed in propitious places, groves and copses,

Lent And Drama

A conflict has arisen, a platonic one for now. The directors of the theatres in Bucharest are questioning the sense of an out-dated provision stipulating that performances must not be carried out during fast weeks. The holy metropolises and bishoprics have demanded this

Old And New Squires

excerpts Chapter XV. Scenes of Social Life The beautiful autumn days of the year 1817 had already flitted along with the joys they bring to pass for the inhabitants of Romania. Winter had made quite an early appearance and the western wind had by now started to blow in

The Litter Pit

excerpts At the end of every winter, in a hall illuminated by electric lights and covered by wooden floors, near the Central Station, at Locomotiva, the Craftsmen's Ball was the event of the season. Craftsmen from all over Bucharest brought their wives to party and

At Medeleni

excerpt Olgutza and Monica had forgotten the size and duration of a Romanian banquet. Compared with French meals, the Romanian ones are like a trip in a carriage versus a precise urban taxi ride. When you have finally reached the last course – incidentally, in Romania,

A Last Judgment That Lacks Heaven

The relevance of iconography for the study of the history of mentalities has been uncontested in the Western cultural space for the last few decades. The seminars organized in Aix-en-Provence on the relationship between iconography and the history of mentalities as far back

The Architect

Emil Popescu was an architect. His specialty was the oil factories and we can say, without any exaggeration, that wherever in the country an oil factory had been built in the last five or six years, one could easily tell it was the work of architect Popescu's skilled