Matter

I think I would never have come to love Balkania so much, had I not met Marina Marinescu in Munich several years back. We had been acquainted since we met for the first time in Athens. Florin Marinescu, the specialist in Byzantine history to whom I was talking one day in

Life Histories in Bucharest – the 20th Centuryexcerpt All the Greeks in the city sought to make me their son-in-law. Demostene Gramatopol, 1910-? My initial intention was to interview both Greeks belonging to the old Greek community in Bucharest, and some of those who

see movie trailer excerpt My grandfather was called Goldschmidt, H. H. I. G. Goldschmidt, and he came from Schirkanyen, near Fogarasch. He was a Saxon of Transylvania, coming from a family eight hundred years old! and, documents could prove it, a pure German for twenty five

excerpt Let's not be beastly to the nemţi[1], indeed. We owe them solid buildings dating back to prosperous times, they founded many a fortified city and settlement of historic importance; in one of our common sayings, absolute fairness is equated to splitting costs

There had been groups of German colonists in all the historical provinces, which came to make up Greater Romania at the end of 1918. But these Germans had not immigrated into Romania: they had come to Bessarabia when it belonged to Russia (and was returned to Soviet Russia

Although not in large numbers, the Bulgarians have been the southern neighbors of the Romanians for centuries. They are a varied community in respect to religious confession, but united in matters of language and culture.  Short historyThe Catholic Bulgarians from Banat

Lend us some cash, do, till pay-day, now how's one supposed to react to such an entreaty, and at such short notice, too?, one may have or not have the money, but when one has an equally hard time making ends meet, when the gap between the lustre of respectability and

Mosilor Street, the modern thoroughfare of a Bucharest that struggles so hard to appear occidentalized and yet doesn't quite manage to: something Balkan, Levantine lingers in the atmosphere of the streets, in spite of the concrete ten-floor blocks, of the road with

excerpts The gradual development of a cultural Moldo-Walachian elite of Albanian origin, that was able to manifest an awareness of the cultural identity of its origins through certain activities in this respect, an elite devoted to the idea of a modern and independent Albania,

Art history is usually at ease when imposing its own concepts and technical terminology upon an apparently unconscious body of visual accomplishments called works of art. For art historians and art critics, art seemingly exists in order for theorists to put words on it and

Excerpts from a discussion with Raluca Barac, published in Acum (Now) magazine, No. 13, April 1990 Going back to the fate of the cultured generation, let me make so bold as to ask your opinion of the so-called age of Noica, a phrase that seems to get bandied about quite

excerpts  The significance of Transylvania during the childhood and teens of those who in 1916, at the time of the Old Kingdom, went to place our youth in the melting pot where the spirit of a whole nation was to broil in order to win its political unity is not only of