Fashion

excerpts  So closeSuddenly, the interwar people make the body visible: men are allowed to shave off not only their beards, but also their moustaches – a facial change that overthrows an aesthetic canon with centuries-old resistance – and women, punished and ridiculed

In a village, the story goes, there once lived a lad who had neither father, nor mother, nor any other kin; so obscure was his lineage, in fact, that for all we know, he may well have dropped there from the sky. As the boy was meek, long suffering and slow to speak, the

excerpt Our first poets (the Vacarescus, Milu, Conachi and others) were experts in erotic pathology, the maladies induced by love. But the true physician erotologist appears to have been Anton Pann. The Love Asylum attempted to cure precisely that kind of ailment. The enamored

Minority ethnic groups have usually developed some separate cultures within the larger framework of the majority. Their particular language and specific customs generally single out such societies. From the cultural point of view, the main characteristics of a minority society

excerpts X In the morning of May 27th I went to see Mr. Tatarescu, at the office of the Prime Minister. I quote the main points of what Mr. Tatarescu told me: He is the Under-Secretary of State for political issues, including Minorities issues. As these latter are of particular

An event that happened several years ago and has turned, in time, into an urban legend, goes like this: the employees of a German-owned media trust had become lazy and unruly, would come to work when, and if, they felt like it, and would actually work only between two coffee

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

Gianina lu' Manşonică of Sinteşti interviewed by Tita Chiper Our host's courtyard could be best described as transition in progress, accurately preserving each of its successive stages: it begins with two run-down foreign cars, and ends with an ashen tent proudly

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

excerpt Bunthe had thought it appropriate to put up their two unexpected guests from Bucharest with Father Calist. The villagers were saying they had got lucky. The weather was beautiful, spring was coming. The sun shone as if it was already April. The wildflowers that

excerpt Let's not be beastly to the nemţi[1], indeed. We owe them solid buildings dating back to prosperous times, they founded many a fortified city and settlement of historic importance; in one of our common sayings, absolute fairness is equated to splitting costs

Lend us some cash, do, till pay-day, now how's one supposed to react to such an entreaty, and at such short notice, too?, one may have or not have the money, but when one has an equally hard time making ends meet, when the gap between the lustre of respectability and