Romanian folklore

The secret world of Dr. Nicolae Minovici (excerpt) The legends about Dr. Nicolae Minovici’s experiments, conducted at the Medico-Legal Institute in Bucharest, at the beginning of the twentieth century, are notorious. Beyond legends, Dr. Nicolae Minovici showed a real

Sometimes glowing colorfully in the dusk air, as doors of museums open up for late visitors, or, some other times, its dark sky flushed by lasers for white nights of entertainment, Bucharest often begins to live and breathe anew after sundown.  White NightsNow that the

Born in Botosani (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) in 1850, Mihai Eminescu is widely regarded as Romania's finest romantic writer, and is recognized as both Romania and Moldova's national poet. Most Romanians can recite line after line of his work, the

The early-20th-century major Romanian art is not a block, but a very particular construction of intertwined cultural layers. One could not affirm that the most fertile and valuable Modern cultural period of this country was characterized by a certain, homogenous Romanian

Ever since the mid-18th century, the city off the Dâmboviţa banks has enjoyed a particular sentimental popularity, not only from the point of view of its merry, party-loving, enterprising inhabitants, but also in the memory of tourists, who christened Romania's Capital

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

Simplicity is not an end in art, but one arrives at simplicity in spite of oneself, in approaching the real sense of things. Simplicity is at bottom complexity and one must be nourished on its essence to understand its significance. Catalog of Brâncuşi exhibition, Brummer

For the sparkling sculptor of modern art, music represented a secret passion. It was only after the master's death that his close friends, V. G. Paleolog and Marcel Mihalovici revealed to the world the place the art of sounds took in the atmosphere of the mysterious

I met Ioan Tugearu in Constanţa at the Oleg Danovski Ballet Theater where he spent days on end staging Kurosawa, Mon Amour, on a collage of traditional Japanese music, with stage decoration by Ion Codrescu. The show premiered early in September. With a tape-recorder in

The ballet dancer who made his debut on the stage of the Kirov Theatre in Sankt Petersburg, prime ballet dancer at the Opera in Bucharest, then, after 1961, prime ballet dancer at the Norwegian Royal Opera in Oslo, decorated by King Olaf with the Constitution medal, first

A superstar of Romanian ballet in its golden era, when the light coming from the East would fashion great interpreters, Gabriel Popescu began the study of dance with the maestra Floria Capsali. He was hired by the Bucharest Opera in 1948, when he was 16, and in 1949 he was

In the summer of 1982, as I was saying an emotional good-bye at Floria Capsali's deathbed, the whole mournful world felt we were witnessing the end of a living legend of Romanian dancing. Indeed, for over half a century (she was born in 1900 in the town of Bitolia,