Urban Memory: Museums Of The Romanian Capital
1st row: National History Museum, Old Court Museum, Archeology Museum (detail), National Museum of Art2nd row: Collections Museum, Zambaccian Museum, Theodor Aman Museum, Gh. Tattarescu Museum 3rd row: Storck Museum, Romanian Peasant Museum, Astronomical Observatory (detail),
The Past: Plus Quam Perfectum
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
Perdition, Old-Style
When on the 20th of September, 1459, the throne of Wallachia moved from Târgovişte to Bucharest, the new settlement, which was lying along Dâmboviţa River, was a picturesque settlement, with slow hills, lakes and boundless orchards and especially with venerable forests.
The Difficult Beginnings Of A Superstar
An ancient symbol of war, because of its reddish color, Mars started with a low profile in the gallery of inhabited worlds. Up till the 19th century, it could bear no comparison with the Moon. In his Itinerarium exstaticum (1656), Athanasius Kircher (1601-1680) proposed
Playing With The Past
A Word with Two Meanings We invent words, then let ourselves be subjugated by them. There would be no knowledge without words, but it is words again that grow into independent entities, obstacles that come between us and the real world. They move us closer to and at the
The New Man
An Individual without Individualism To a new society – a new man. Naturally, one would not fancy a communist world inhabited by middle-class people in disguise. That was the most delicate problem raised by transformist mythology. One could not rebuild the economy and
For Writers Are All Jesters, And All The Jests Together: Literature
For writers are all jesters, and all the jests together: Literature In the history of literature, Tristan Tzara is regarded as the founder of Dada, an international literary and artistic movement, born in Zurich in 1916, with ramifications and outposts across three continents.
The Dialectic Of Dialectic
A Message to the International Surrealist Movement We address ourselves to our surrealist friends scattered all over the world and, as in great shipwrecks, we indicate to them our exact location, at latitude 44° 5' North and longitude 26° East. The inexhaustible
How Modern Is the Modern Romanian Fantastic?
As everything modern, the fantastic mode, which seems to be still one of our great favorites in these last years of the modern millennium is to be defined through the series of transformations of the traditional forms of the fantastic art. In her excellent reference book
Yesterday Will Be Another Day
I wonder if nature always plays the same game (Einstein) Of course I was coming from sleep, how else is a day supposed to start? However, I didn't know much about the world I was coming from. On the other hand, the world I had landed in should have been very familiar
The Book Of The Millionaire: I. The Book Of Metopolis
(from: Chapter 5 - The Map of Metopolis Scaled 1:1; Chapter 4 - The Rail Car of the Millionaire, and from At the Armenian's Tavern and Once Again at the Armenian's Tavern - Chapters 3 and 6) If you are far, far away from the city and take a completely different
The Impossible Oasis
The wire that I had failed to see hit me below my knees. The earth turned, the boles propped against the stars somersaulted and I no longer heard the whistles. The red bells started to toll. Whipped up by the rain, the smell of weed and death that had simply been the breath