Iasi

The news that a German foundation offered me, many years ago, a scholarship to Heidelberg gave me an incommensurable joy and an unrestrained curiosity of knowing places that, for a very long time, I could only associate with the plot of Wilhelm Meyer Förster's play.

I once saw a wounded crane, dying, on the edge of a forest where he had fallen while his friends were dashing away to the horizon, like a black arrow. The bright eye that ripped the horizon was shaded little by little, his long, powerful legs were sinking into the dust,

CHAPTER 8 –THE ORIENT AND ITS INFLUENCE ON THE ROMANIANS' SOULexcerpt With such borrowed habits, it is obvious that the people to whom the destinies of the Romanian countries were entrusted could only run these countries into ruin and destruction. Laziness and slothfulness

Barbu Lautaru rustled up his physical and artistic resources, desirous to make an impression on Franz Liszt whom he met during the great Hungarian virtuoso's visit to Moldavia. Their encounter became famous thanks to an article carried by the French weekly La Vie Parisienne,

excerpt Nothing, says Mr. N. , in an witty critique of Iaşi society, nothing is more boring than Iaşi for a foreign traveler whose name does not include the rewarding of particle, and whose only concern is to do business and not entertain the little civilized inhabitants

Corneliu Bucur has been the manager of the ASTRA Museum of Traditional Folk Civilization since 1990. In 1965, he graduated the Babes Bolyai Faculty of History and Philosophy in Cluj. In 1981 he presented his doctoral thesis, with the following theme: Introduction in the

The essential resemblance between the legend recorded by Bandinus in 1647 and the folk legends about the Flood, collected at two and a half centuries' distance (around 1900), is conspicuous. In all these variants (but especially in the one chronicled by Bandinus) some

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

They arrived in Romania over a century ago, and they were skilled craftsmen and scholars. Now, even if they only represent a small community, a couple of thousand people, the Italians in Romania try to perpetuate and promote their traditional values.  Short historyItalians

Between the mountains of Semenic, Anina and Almaj, to the south of the Romanian Banat, between Semenic and the Danube lies a flat land which geographers deem specific of the Carpathians. Ellipsoidal in shape, crossed by the river Nera, the land of Almas is girdled by wooded

Editor-in-chief of Ararat The oldest evidence of Armenian presence on Romanian territory is an inscription on a tombstone dating back to 967; it was found at the White Fortress (Cetatea Alba). At around the same time, the presence of an Armenian colony in Transylvania is

Gopo's Little Man (see Short History - click on Scurta istorie to see movie) I have been studying the Gopo archive belonging to the National Film Archive for some years, and now the first volume goes to print. It contains only a part of the legacy left by the film genius,