Insula

Chapter XII. The Current [1907] Psychological Traits of the Romanian PeopleAll foreigners that visited the Romanian countries were unpleasantly struck by the negative traits of our character. They don't care, says Mr. X. Marmier, for the name of their master. What they

excerpts I did a great deal of field work in my life. I was on the road a lot, I slept in official rooms, good rooms (for guests), camping grounds, cheap hotels, and especially villages. I visited very different worlds, though some were neighboring. What was preserved in

It has been justly stated by foreign researchers that the melancholy of the Romanian folk doina, transposed by the brilliant George Enescu into learned creation, in the characteristic and unmistakable lyricism of the people at the curvature of the Carpathians and the mouth

Many are the peoples that crossed the land over which Romania extends today. They left their mark in ancient Dacia, Moesia and Thrace, in the Greek colonies, Roman provinces, and Byzantine themes. The indigenous populations blended with the newcomers and produced a Romance

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