Ion Ghica

Cismigiu gardens, Icoanei park, Kiseleff park (see also The green within in Gallery). Many of Bucharest’s gardens and parks, which no longer exist because of extensive urban reorganising, were shaped as the aristocracy tastefully redesigned the open space around their

Bucharest is a city in search of identity. Its precise moment of birth is unknown, for the Cetatea Dîmboviţei of the 14th and 15th centuries only played host to its rulers when they occasionally came to ward off threats from south of the Danube or Hungarian attacks form

Walking around the city arm in arm with literary recollections… Laying on façades invisible memorial plates with quotes in verse or prose… Experiencing live the sensation of osmosis between fiction and reality… Feeling literature become history, and history – literature…

excerptsThe Beginnings With the passage of time the ancient road was called by sundry names: lane, bridge, promenade – as if it needed any name or title, this street of streets whose reign over the city goes back two hundred years. Victory Promenade! The Nation's

 I must admit I didn't quite understand in the beginning why, shortly after 1989, the Western mass-media has so hastily labeled us as suffering from a deep identity crisis. I was downright indignant: after having sadistically experimented Communism on us for half

Only there isn't a show without protocol. Only the uneducated imagine that to lay the table and, especially, to have someone for dinner are trifles. When you invite someone to dinner you don't do him a favour. That's why you have to give him the impression

A Ion Ghica Mirceşti, 9 août 1880 Cher vieux, Je t'envoie les quatre premiers actes de Pepelea. Quant au cinquième; je dois le retoucher avant de te l'envoyer, ce sera fait bientôt. J'ai eu un tas d'affaires et de moussafirs depuis mon retour. J'espère

L'Europe, mais c'est une chose terrible et sainte, l'Europe. Dostoïevski (Journal d'un écrivain) Tout aussi bien, j'aurais pu dire: l'Europe, ou le refus des alternatives mutilantes. Car, depuis bientôt trois millénaires et demi – si

La question d'Orient, question dont la gravité et les résultats précieux n'ont rien de comparable dans les annales de la diplomatie moderne, cette question, éminemment européenne, essentiellement anglo-française, offre une occasion heureuse de faire prévaloir

Winters in Ramnicu Valcea were quite mild in those times, though there was plenty of snow (I guess this is the cliché of those whose childhood memories are blurred by their excessive subjectivity); anyway, they unfolded following a certain ritual: at the beginning of December

C'est un fait reconnu depuis longtemps: les plus grands accomplissements culturels des Roumains ont presque toujours transité la culture française dans leur parcours vers le monde. Brancusi, Enescu, Ionesco, Cioran sont les figures de proue de ce que l'on pourrait