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At the Outskirts of Giurgiu*At the outskirts of Giurgiu there was a Turkish village, and that village was called Selima. When the Turks left the city, a hundred and a half years ago, we, the gypsies who tinned the pails, continued to live in that village. We remained in

excerpts All chronicles show that this nomadic people appeared first in Moldavia; indeed, in order to come to Europe from India, they had to cross the Black Sea, which Moldavia used to border on at that time. In 1417, in the 19th year of the rule of Alexander the Good,

We are very aware that there is a continuity in history from past to future, through the present. Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski (1901-1981), Primate of the Millennium BackgroundRomanian history from the 14th century until the 18th century displays the significant influence

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,

excerpt 'I can hardly understand what you're saying, your words make my hair stand on end. . . What do you want, actually?' Masha could hardly contain herself. This talk raised her suspicions. The visitor's look could very well be deceitful. Whoever

Hans (some people called him Hanz, or Franz, others Krantz like the cake, and others didn't even take the trouble to call him that much) had a wife who towered over him by a full head, and had a truly horse-like face. Her legs were long and slender, and seemed to lack

There were Jews in Bucovina even before its existence as a separate province. As early as the 18th century, some Jewish families in the German area looked for a better life in this northern part of Moldavia, which subsequently became Bucovina. Here they were given more protection

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

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