Apa

excerpts ITHE TOMB The bells of the royal church of Bucharest tolled wailing and gradually; and from above, from up the opposite hill, answered the small round spire of Bucur's church. It was towards the end of February, in the year 1560, and recently the body of

I. Even if you do not want me, I want you  Iacov Eraclid, nicknamed The Despot, had been killed by the mace of Stefan Tomsha, who was ruling the country now, but Alexandru Lapushneanu, after he had been defeated twice by the army of The Despot, fled to Constantinople and

excerpts What's your name? asked Bajnorica. Atena, the answer sounded clear and neat, casting the light of the trustful, caring and obedient friend over the young girl. Bajnorica looked at her face closely, assessing her age around her early or even late twenties,

Evening. A gentleman is walking in front of a house: three steps to the left, three steps to the right. He examines the building, then the street, and again the building. He rubs his red eyelids. Three steps to the left, three steps to the right. A gentleman with a bamboo

PART II - THE SALT MINEexcerpt The second day in the salt mine Zahei's push-cart lay broken. The man was free to do whatever he wanted to. He asked to return to his tally on the walls. But the guard was not allowed to leave his post in the mine and no one was allowed

excerpts As he wandered out in the yard that night, as every night, actually, Platamonu saw the fire lights towards the East. He thought it should be in Teleorman, at the border of the district, or maybe in Izvoru. Anyway, it was a sign that the uprising was closing up

Romanians of more recent generations, but also some of the older ones, who were born before the Soviet occupation, and the instauration of communism in this country, without reaching then intellectual maturity, look to the period that was cut short in 1948 as a privileged

It was the month of June, 1821. Tudor Vladimirescu had risen from the darkness of Oltenia's forests; he had carried from Cernetzi all the way to Bucharest the light of his prophetic claims and he had set down like the sun, somewhere between Goleshti and Targovishte,

excerpt A lens-like sky distorting the lingering stars as they grinned their incongruous grins descended upon the frail, yet unmitigated, blue of the world at large. When he woke up, the way you may wake up when you've slept off a death, Mammon the old sighed the sigh

excerpt Olgutza's gifts, just like springtime's, proved that, during the three years of Parisian life, not only hadn't she forgotten any of the folks back home, but on the contrary, she had lived in them, like spring at the root of trees. Everybody loved

All kinds of things happen. I remember this biker. I was sitting in front of the chalet, watching him. I was waiting to see him getting bored. He was mounting the steep slope for the forth time around and, as soon as he reached the top, he would turn his bike into a smooth,

A Great Man is one of the short stories that has haunted me since adolescence when I accidentally found it on one of the shelves in my bookcase, in a volume of short stories by Eliade. I was intrigued by the title and I chose to read it first. Its reading brought in front