what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020

Tuesday, June 3, 2014

A window to Romania's past

I’m at the fine-tuning stage of the guide – giving me the freedom to surf some of the links I had added to the text which lead to others I had not had the chance to explore. For example some of the book references in a discussion thread about Romanian literature .
But it was the back issues of the francophone bimonthly Regard which led me via an interview to what seems (probably wrongly) to be a typically surreal bit of recent writing by a young historian Choosing your Ancestors - an imaginary genealogical journey to Romanian Boyars.(2013) If you scroll further down the link(and have automatic translate) you will see that the launch (last August) was kicked off by Romania’s two greatest historians - Lucian Boia (whose family name google automatic magnificently and variously translates as “pulveriser” or “paprika”!) and Neagu Djuvara

It was author Filip Lucian-Iorga’s well-connected website which led to me the tremendous photo archives Costica Acsinte Archive celebrating the work of a man born in 1897 who was a war photographer in the First World War and then set up shop in the town of Slobozia about 70 kms east of Bucharest.

The site is a unique record of life in those times – and encourages readers to write stories around particular photos!!

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