Ucin

Journey Around The Earth

You do not need a passport to travel to Egypt or to any other English colony. A visit card will do. In Alexandria, I made friends with the tropical flora: date trees that bear almost 100 kg of fruit each year, bananas or the cursed fruits because they grow without any effort

Taking The Road

Whether the purpose is study, pilgrimage, or entertainment, traveling assumes a great thirst for knowledge and self-knowledge. Ioan Slavici believed that rambling builds one's character. No mean feat, I'd say: were it for this alone, it would still justify an

The Collector Hrandt Avakian

The inauguration of the art collection Beatrice and Hrandt Avakian, held on a torrid day in August 1974, brought together an extremely numerous public. The exceptional interest manifested was owed to the fact that two siblings living in modest conditions, from hand to mouth,

Peleş - The Castle And Its Collections

click here to see film The Peleş Castle, former royal summer residence, today a museum open to numerous visitors from the country and abroad, was built between 1875 and 1914 in two important construction phases. Placed at the foot of the Bucegi Mountains, in the upper

Georges De Bellio, A Romanian Witness To The History Of The Painting Olympia

The year 1863 was full of events that had a significant impact on the artistic world of Paris. On the 24th of July, the new rule of the annual Salon, organized in the Palace of Industry, was announced. The rules were perceived as a way of waving the jury, formed only by

Pleasure

One might think that all men desire pleasure because they all aim at life (…). Pleasure completes (…) life, which they desire (…). But whether we choose life for the sake of pleasure or pleasure for the sake of life is a question we may dismiss for the present. For

Woolen Gardens

European travelers such as Antonio Maria del Chiaro were struck long time ago by the uncommon abundance of woolen carpets in each Romanian home, be it aristocratic, bourgeois or peasant. Carpets were laid mainly onto the walls of the rooms, but they also covered the beds,

On Snatched Souls And Their Stories

Popular belief has it that Death is an old crone, carrying a scythe. She scythes people and snatches away their soul. Or she sips their breath and again, snatches their soul. Or simply touches them lightly but cruelly with her frozen wing. And snatches their soul. As a child

Comments On The Legend Of Master Manole

excerpts1. Participation and RepetitionPerhaps the most significant difference between modern man and archaic man consists in this: for archaic man, a thing or an act acquires significance only in as much as it participates in a prototype, or in as much as it reiterates

Do Something, Be Somebody

The experimental artist Grigorescu Ion has forged himself some time ago out of the painter Ion Grigorescu. Indeed, in Romanian it is rather unusual for an adult to put his family name before the forename. Customarily, this happens in official documents or in school registers,

The Weed Talk

I have never met Ştefan Bertalan. A founder of the sigma group in Timishoara, the most influential hub of constructivist experimentalism in Romanian art, Bertalan has always seemed to me somehow ill-timed, included in the canon, and confined therein. I came once into contact

The Architect

Emil Popescu was an architect. His specialty was the oil factories and we can say, without any exaggeration, that wherever in the country an oil factory had been built in the last five or six years, one could easily tell it was the work of architect Popescu's skilled