GIFT

If you had the job of a customs officer in the Danube's ports at the end of the 19th century, this meant that you had to go from Sulina to Galaţi and from Giurgiu to Corabia and, to be sure, Leonte Georgescu was not spared such compulsory travels required by his position;

Among hundreds of vegetable species of the Danube Delta, I insisted only upon reed (Phragmites communis). It deserves to be called an amazing plant even though it doesn't belong to the rare or unique botanical species which can ensure the celebrity of an ambitious academician

For the Romanian cultural psyche, the interwar period still appears, after so many decades of indefatigable exegesis, as a real, alluring and embarrassing hortus conclusus, a closed garden of paradisiacal, yet so venomous intellectual flourishing. Major cultural achievements

(not for children's use) For many years after the fall of communism, the association between Romania and children meant a hellhole: European champions of neonatal and infant mortality (16. 7 % in 2003, down from 26. 9 % in 1990), juvenile AIDS (almost 9000 cases of