European

We are very aware that there is a continuity in history from past to future, through the present. Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski (1901-1981), Primate of the Millennium BackgroundRomanian history from the 14th century until the 18th century displays the significant influence

excerpts The village of Sarichioi is situated in southeastern Romania, in the region of Dobruja. In Turkish, Sarichioi means 'yellow' or 'sunny' village (sary – 'yellow, sunny' and köj – 'village'), but in spite of its Turkish

There were Jews in Bucovina even before its existence as a separate province. As early as the 18th century, some Jewish families in the German area looked for a better life in this northern part of Moldavia, which subsequently became Bucovina. Here they were given more protection

The baptized JewIn the late 1990s I had planned to include at the end of my book The Imaginary Jew in Romanian Culture a chapter entitled The Baptized Jew. As I worked on this subject I realized that it had been extensively discussed by the historian Mihai-Răzvan Ungureanu

excerpt Two people went down the chimney in a house. Only one of them got his face dirty with soot. The dirty one looked at the clean one and didn't imagine that he might look different, so he didn't wash the soot away. The clean one, on the other hand, saw the

* The boom of geographic discoveries and trading expeditions that began on the eve of the Renaissance and continued throughout that era developed a new taste for describing remote, if not downright imaginary, countries and peoples. Before being discovered, the savage was

excerpts Beyond any currents, interpretations and influences, Judaism brought at least three fundamental principles to the basis of European culture: the secularization of the eternal, the ennoblement of matter through spirit, and the consideration of the human being as

In the nineteenth century, and also in the inner-war period, Romania had one of Europe's largest Jewish communities. Between the wars, its Jewish population was the third largest in Europe both in absolute terms (after Poland and the USSR) and as a proportion of the

If we contextualized the phrase 'minority culture' into a larger, European, even global, perspective, we would notice that it has lost at once its obscure, frustrating meaning of 'small', 'weak', or 'frail', because in the globalization

Situated on a hill in the midst of the Csík valley in the heart of Szeklerland, the Franciscan order in the small village of Csíksomlyó hosts the largest annual pilgrimage in Central Europe. Regardless of their religious affiliation, three to four hundred thousand Hungarians

Resentments between Romanians and Hungarians feed on a twofold frustration. Until 1918, the Romanians of Transylvania were generally looked down on by the Hungarians. They were largely peasants, with few townspeople and intellectuals among them, while Hungarians made up

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