Matter

excerpt It happened, not too often, but especially after a theater evening followed by dull group discussions at a terrace forgotten open. Camil, the second day after the torture, ran wild. He met Sandu, the sports teacher, the scare of the second division at rugby, the

Emil Racoviţă (1868-1947) The house of the family Racoviţă was indeed a strange one as it looked like nothing else. It was the place of someone who wanted to get rid of all the material values. . . Emil Racoviţă had a fantastic appearance, he looked massy and noble,

It seems almost provocative to launch such an issue on the local pleasures, pastimes and delights, while nowadays a troublesome Romania appears as plunged into unending economic and social difficulties, striving to cope with various shortcomings and weaknesses. However,

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,

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

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

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

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,

excerptsDEATHDeath, whom some mistake for Samodiva, Sila Samodiva or Salea Samodiva, is the invisible spirit that takes away any man's soul, irrespective of the fact that the latter is old or young, rich or poor, happy or unhappy with his life, at the moment when it

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

excerpts1. Participation and RepetitionPerhaps the most significant difference between modern man and archaic man consists in this: for archaic man, a thing or an act acquires significance only in as much as it participates in a prototype, or in as much as it reiterates

In his opening speech at the inauguration of the Village Museum, Professor D. Gusti said: …We did not have the example of open air museums from the northern countries, such as Skansen, Bigdo or Lillehammer. They convey us too much romantic and ethnographical merit, focusing