Insula

The obvious indifference of the Romanian peasant to the neighboring peoples stems from the instinct that these are more or less recent. Our physical typology is altogether different from that of neighboring and Central-European peoples. If we have some affinities with meridional

Foreword The few words that I put as motto at the beginning of this book can be translated like this: God must have had a hidden plan for this people that the western states rediscovered on the banks of the Danube and adopted like Pharaoh's daughter adopted Moses.

*More than a century ago Europe was not yet known as a cultural construction, an intellectual day-dream, a heap of broken images, a copy in a world without originals. Artists tried to escape the big fortress ensconced in coal smog and torn by wars, social conflicts, and

All roads to the West go through Vienna. Generous crossroads where the western world fuses with the horizons of eastern Europe and the Germanic spirit seems to have rich confluences with Latinity, the old Austrian metropolis still conveys the same charm that those claras

excerptThat afternoon we took a train to Constanta where, the same evening, we planned to embark on a Romanian ship bound to Constantinople. We arrived in Constanta late at night, so we didn't get to see any of the city or port. All I remember is the very agitated sea.

A traveler in Italy, what does N. Iorga see, in the twilight of the century (1897), on the via sacra of his historian's reveries? Primo tempo, what anyone strolling across the cities of the Peninsula will see: life, with its everyday, ordinary rhythms. Exaggeratedly

When I set out to New Zealand, I had a tape recorder and a tape with the bells from Putna monastery. And during the long flight, from Bucharest to Wellington – approximately 30 hours on the plane, plus two stopovers – I would listen to the bells from Putna and to the

excerptI will never forget the nights spent with Bogdanof and Van Manen around Calcutta, in Serampore and Titagarh. Bogdanof, who had been the consul of the Tsarist Empire to Teheran and Kabul for ten years, was at the time my teacher of Persian. He had made friends with

You do not need a passport to travel to Egypt or to any other English colony. A visit card will do. In Alexandria, I made friends with the tropical flora: date trees that bear almost 100 kg of fruit each year, bananas or the cursed fruits because they grow without any effort

excerptTHE CREATION WORK (1715) When he spoke to Aaron Juda Hartman, the rabbi from Spain, the one who had diplomas from Paris and Tripoli, driven to Peloponnesus to look after his poor relatives but also to take care, unimpeded by anyone, in a dusty room heated by the

Emil Popescu was an architect. His specialty was the oil factories and we can say, without any exaggeration, that wherever in the country an oil factory had been built in the last five or six years, one could easily tell it was the work of architect Popescu's skilled

Short history The Slavs, the ancestors of the Serbs, began settling on Romania's territory in the early Middle Ages. The Serbs from north of the Sava and the Danube, as well as those who went to the Balkan Peninsula, in the 7th century, became Christians in the second