Orient

My grandfather Mehmed Ali was an old-fashioned Turk. He wore a long beard and the traditional Turkish costume. Each morning he would sit down next to the charcoal, the earthenware pot filled with live coals, sip his coffee and puff his long-stemmed chibouk. He would often

The Roma Study Center, the History Faculty of the University of Bucharest I. The Roma's first contacts with the natives of the Romanian spaceThe Roma are a people hailing from India and their migration to Europe, in successive waves, spanned several centuries from the

excerpts Motto: It is known that, when a people is about to disappear, first its high society disappears, and with it the literature. (Milorad Pavici, The Khazar Dictionary) Lazar Saineanu and his studies in folklore. An ethnographic controversyLazar Saineanu was a very

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

excerpt Themistocles was standing at the bow of his ship, which was beyond the battle line, so he could oversee the entire battle, staring inquisitively at the enemy. He could even see the grudging eyes of the warriors, filled with hatred. But the Persian battle line still

We do not hate the Greeks; quite to the contrary, we love them and we share the same heritage: a nationality to build; for we have the same interests, the same pains, the same hopes; and when we say 'we love them' we can bring proofs to support this statement:

I have always wondered why so many of those who happen to be born within the Carpathian arch, in Transylvania, have a sense of coming from a unique, privileged area, why they keep an enduring and unquestioned commitment to it whatever may happen in their lives, whether they

Mosilor Street, the modern thoroughfare of a Bucharest that struggles so hard to appear occidentalized and yet doesn't quite manage to: something Balkan, Levantine lingers in the atmosphere of the streets, in spite of the concrete ten-floor blocks, of the road with

Editor-in-chief of Ararat The oldest evidence of Armenian presence on Romanian territory is an inscription on a tombstone dating back to 967; it was found at the White Fortress (Cetatea Alba). At around the same time, the presence of an Armenian colony in Transylvania is

excerpts The gradual development of a cultural Moldo-Walachian elite of Albanian origin, that was able to manifest an awareness of the cultural identity of its origins through certain activities in this respect, an elite devoted to the idea of a modern and independent Albania,

IXRome (Hôtel d'Europe), 11 octobre 1870. Ma chère Sacha, . . . C'est ma première journée de Rome! J'ai passé la nuit dernière en chemin de fer, partageant un coupé à banquettes pour dormir avec une jeune Autrichien que j'ai rencontré à la

L'écrivain Al. Odobescu appartenait à l'aristocratie roumaine et, conséquemment, avait été, dés son enfance, soigneusement éduqué par des gouvernantes et des précepteurs étrangers. Il a poursuivi ses études en France, à l'époque où Louis Bonaparte