Ice

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,

Peasant Dinner

Uncle's great eaters, it's hard for me to choose something suitable to the title I myself have given! It's because, on the one hand, I want to confine myself to mamaliga, small fry sour soup, mushrooms baked in ashes or meat rolled in fenugreek and fried on

Gastronomic Show

Only there isn't a show without protocol. Only the uneducated imagine that to lay the table and, especially, to have someone for dinner are trifles. When you invite someone to dinner you don't do him a favour. That's why you have to give him the impression

A Feast At The Monastery

excerpt In the end, after much talky talk, the priest managed to completely lay the guilt on Father Mitrofan from the monastery, who was now to be held accountable and punished. And since there was nothing there to eat, the priest's wife being sick, priest Bolindache

The Story Of Romanian Gastronomy

excerpt With this, we can consider that the era of medieval, traditional cuisine was over and the modern Romanian cuisine begins. In the same year the young Miclescu couple went on their honeymoon – 1880, the first Romanian cookbook with Latin characters was printed.

Woolen Gardens

European travelers such as Antonio Maria del Chiaro were struck long time ago by the uncommon abundance of woolen carpets in each Romanian home, be it aristocratic, bourgeois or peasant. Carpets were laid mainly onto the walls of the rooms, but they also covered the beds,

The Legend Of Saint Friday

The legend is part of the martyr-cycle and it contains fairy tale elements (the dragons), which is not unusual in hagiography, as shown in the last chapter. It was copied by the parson Grigore from Mahaciu before 1600 after an original that has been lost. It is still preserved

On Snatched Souls And Their Stories

Popular belief has it that Death is an old crone, carrying a scythe. She scythes people and snatches away their soul. Or she sips their breath and again, snatches their soul. Or simply touches them lightly but cruelly with her frozen wing. And snatches their soul. As a child

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 Romanian Death Iconography Or A Different Kind Of Assisted Death

In the field of iconography the rhetoric of the end manifested itself initially as a history of silences, the absence of the motif being possibly equally significant as its presence since, as Michel Vovelle demonstrated, images interest us as expression of a selective, oblique

The Funeral Maple

excerpts The cosmic tree, whose root, trunk and branches uphold – by dividing yet uniting – the three cosmic levels, is the same as the funeral tree, because, to the folk mentality, the cosmic tree is the only passageway to the other realm that the soul of the dead

Enemies And Friends Of Man III

excerptsTHE WATER PIXY. Representations. The Water Pixy and the Human Head. The Water Pixy's Wraith. Stories. The Water Pixy in Other CulturesAccording to Romanian popular beliefs in Bucovina, the Water Pixy is a tall, heavily- built woman, some say as tall as a camel,