INFORMATION BULLETIN

Each country is interesting in it­self, but it is often more interesting to consider what is its significance for the development of mankind, for the culture of humanity as a whole. The older school of historical writ­ing concentrated on establishing in­dividual facts, while the broad lines of historical development were often neglected. For this reason the public, while buying the books, was but little impressed by them. Nowadays the main attention of the historian shall be directed towards tracing the great currents which penetrate and inspire national societies, and the syntheses created within their limits.

I will try to bring before my audi­ence the significance of Romania’s past in different ages: in antiquity, in the Middle Ages, and in the more recent periods of Continental history.

Firstly, Romania can show an un­broken continuity of those elements which dominated European prehis­tory. Her soil is rich in treasures belonging to the millennia which preceded the appearance of written language. The manner of construction of the small huts and of the better houses in the village – and such elements were transmitted to later forms of art —, the superstitions, the character of the popular arts, as dis­played in the rugs and carpets, in the shirts, in the woodcarving, the orna­mental spoons and spindles, the met-alwork, belts and the like – all go back to prehistoric times. The colors themselves in their nuances and blend­ing and in their technical preparation form a part of the same primeval heritage. Scattered fragments of this art are to be found throughout all Southern Europe, from the Basques to the Slavs of the Balkans, among the Greeks and the Turks. They ex­tend in Asia Minor and up to the boundaries of Persia (at least as re­gards the linear forms); they are found in Little Russia, in Slovakia and Bohemia, in some parts of Hungary and as far as Sweden and Finland, wither they are transmitted by the Goths who, in their old homes on the Dnieper, borrowed them from the Thracians. The principal features of this highly developed art passed through Asiatic channels, across Si­beria – which in remote antiquity was much more densely inhabited than it is today – to the American Conti­nent, where it descended as far as Mexico and the neighboring repub­lics; the penetration extended by un­known routes, and to a limited de­gree, as far as the Polynesian Archi­pelago. But the region in which this art presents itself in the most highly developed form is undoubtedly Ro­mania. It is characterized by the trans­formation of natural objects and as­pects into a system of geometrical lines: it is an abstract, mathematical, stylized conception of beauty.

The race itself, the ancient Thracian race, whose tribes, the Getes and the Daces, occupied the basin of the Lower Danube and the slopes of the Carpathians, in close union with its neighbors, the maritime Illyrians, lives on today, Romanized in speech, in the countries inhabited by the Roma­nians. More closely than the other descendants of the same ethnographi­cal stock, they have preserved the physical lineaments of their barbian ancestors, despite all additions to the aboriginal stock effected by the slow, unnoticed penetration of the Roman invaders.

It is certain, however, that the el­ement introduced by the Romans, the Latin influence, was a large one. Trajan was not the first to introduce this element among the villages of the conquered Dacians. Before his organized measures, and on a far larger scale, a popular immigration of shepherds and ploughmen had taken place, which transformed the etnographical character of the Balkan and Danubian countries. The immi­grants recast the original inhabitants in a new mold. These too, became Romans; they acquired the habit, and the right to be called by that glorious name. The colonists of the victorious Emperor found the ground already prepared by their explorers and pio­neers. The Romanians, who, despite their partition into two principalities (Moldavia and Wallachia), bear the common name of Roman, constitute the most striking example in history of the Romanization of a rural popu­lation through ethnical infiltration ignored by the official world.

In the course of time, the Empire was divided into an Eastern and a Western half – although the theo­retical conception of unity did not. and could not, change. At this epoch, under the reigns of Constantine and Theodosius, the greater part of the Balkan peninsular could be consid­ered as definitely Romanized. In some cases the funeral inscription employ Greek letters for Latin words; the poor had no occasion to commemorate on their gravestones nationality to which they belonged. Only the seacoasts were populated by Greeks. The flood of Slavonic invasion brought impor­tant changes. Out of this Roman unity of the East, the Romanians alone survived. They are the only repre­sentatives today of the whole East­ern Latin world.

They were abandoned by the Em­pire during Aurelian’s reign, but not in the common acceptance, by a sud­den withdrawal of the legions and officials. This was only a practical and temporary concession to the threatened danger of invasion. The Emperors retained all political rights. The barbarians were tolerated in a province which was kept on the reg­isters of the State, and they could figure as mere «foederati». But there was no Roman force to protect the citizens, and no German or Touranian king was interested in ruling over poor districts where the cities had vanished, over a population living on a patriarchal system. The «Ro­mans» were forced to organize their life of purely popular lines; wholly free, subject only to patriarchal rule.

This is no isolated example. The campaign of Rome was a «Roma­nia» at the end of the classic age. and the name of «Romagna» has clung to it to this day. The island of Sardinia was divided into small popu­lar units. Venice, in its origin, was merely a miserable haunt of simple fishers obeying no rulers beyond their own humble chieftains. The South of Italy can show a long list of similar communities. So, too, the «Romanches» in the Alps, who call The Danubian Romans, in their Romaniae», recognized the supreme authority of the distant Emperor, the Imperator (the mbret of the half-Romanized Illyrians of Albania), but it was very seldom that they enjoyed the opportunity of seeing him. In their homes, therefore, they entrusted the first duties of administration to the «good old men» (oameni buni şi bătrâni; homines boni et veterani) similar to the old senators of Venice. As in Sardinia, judges (Roum: juzU sing.: jude) decided all matters of justice. In time of war, the territories of several judges combined in a duchy, under a duke, who bore the Slavonic title of voevod; the duchies coalesced into counties (Jeri: terrae) and, in the absence of an Emperor, a peasant Emperor, a domn (dominus). who could not assume the full title of the Caesars, took the first place among the various popular chiefs. The old­est democracy of Europe was alone able to create a State of its own which preserved the name of «Roman Coun­try» – «Ţara Românească»,

Another characteristic of Roma­nian history is the way in which, thanks to geographical conditions, it was able to combine all currents of Art, and, to a lesser degree, all ten­dencies of thought, Eastern and West­ern alike, in an ethnographical syn­thesis. Before the Slavs of the 7th century altogether disappeared as an ethnical component, such tendencies as could form a corresponding syn­thesis in the moral field of artistic creation were retained. The primi­tive popular tradition formed a com­mon basis connecting them all.

Byzantine art was transplanted into this new soil immediately after the foundation of the earlier southern principality of Wallachia. Hence it passed naturally into the northern principality of Moldavia, and into that part of the Daco-Romanian heritage which was still enslaved: Tran­sylvania. It was forced, however, to adopt the basic local characteristics: the love of bright, striking colors, invariable in Romania. Thus the frail wooden improvisations and stones dipped in cement – the former serv­ing as a frame for the latter –  were replaced by better, larger stone build­ings with a narthex – later doubled by an open peristyle – a nave and a secluded, mysterious altar, in front of which stood a wall or wooden screen covered with religious scenes and figures. The Gothic of Transylvania added only ornaments of carved stone round the windows and doors; crossed lineals of window frames and a series of tall, interlac­ing ogives. The outer walls were covered, after the manner of popular art, with materials of variegated col­ors, including discs of ceramic at the point of intersection of the arches and under the eaves, and with reli­gious paintings. The gracious shape was crowned by a small turret, the belfry being set in the surrounding walls, which were as thick as those of the fortress.

Literature kept its popular charac­ter. Monks and nobles worked on the unchanging foundation of the ancient peasant tradition. A style common to all provinces was created as early as the 16th century, the Gospel being translated under the influence of the spreading hussitism in the early years of the fifteenth. The old rhythm of the popular ballads and lyrics of love, desire and sorrow continued to set the tone for all poetical work. Byzantium contributed only literature dealing with the Orthodox religion, a type of chronicles, works of rhetoric and world histories and, incidentally, the old Indian tales adopted into Greek literature. In the 16th century the renaissance came less from decaying Transylvania than from Poland. In the middle of this period came a com­plete translation of the difficult Herodotus, while the Moldavian Metropolitan Dositheus issued a Psalter in folk ballard Jorm, in rhymed verse. Literary individualism began to manifest itself, the propensity to write personal memoirs in a desul­tory and capriciouis form, as shown by Miron Costin, a pupil of the Pol­ish school. His son Nicholas, another historian and champion of the Latin origins of the nation, was a scholar in the sense of the Western Latinists. In Prince Demetrius Cantemir, who was forced to take refuge in Russia after the catastrophe of his great ally the Cezar Peter, unexpectedly defeated by the Turks in 1711, the Romanian race had an universal genius, able to treat in different languages – Ro­manian, Latin, Greek, Turkish, Slavonic – all topics, from the Ori­ental songs to a geography on the lines of the anthropogeographical essays of our own days, and to a history whose lines of original de­velopment preceded and inspired the parallel ideas of Montesquieu. French philosophy was introduced by a large number of emigres, who were em­ployed as teachers of languages and secretaries by princes and nobles; freemasonry had some adherents, including members of the clergy, in the latter half of the eighteenth cen­tury. French romanticism, French lib­eralism swept over the Romanian cities in the past century, while Ger­man thought, which later exercised a strong influence, combined to form a new modern synthesis.

Withal, the fundamental elements in the traditional intellectual and moral training were not lost. Mihail Eminescu, the greatest Romanian poet, and one of the foremost poets of modern Europe, shows the influ­ence of the Germans in his enuncia­tion of the fatal emptiness of all be­ing; of Alfred de Vigny in the defi­ance which he hurls at human des­tiny; of the popular mind in his use of the most picturesque legends of his nation, of all the charms inherent in the rich and delicate Romanian nature.

It was through Romanian channels that new currents of science and arts began to flow in South-Eastern Eu­rope; it was Romanian intellectuals, such as Nicolae Milescu in theologi­cal studies, Demetrius Cantemir, Fel­low of the Berlin Academy, in the new lay directions. Antiochus Cantemir in classical French poetry, Herescu (Cherascov) in the theatre, who introduced Russia to spheres of knowledge other than the Byzantine. Serbia was a subject country under Turkish domination, Bulgaria did not exist; the Greeks were long tutored by the Moldavians and Wallachians, who paid for and controlled their religious organizations, in the holy places, from Thessaly and Mount Athos to Jerusalem and kept up for the benefit of Greek scholars and pupils, schools which had been built for the sons of the native nobles in Jassy and Bucharest; who printed, in their capitals and convents, books which were distributed as a work of charity to all the Christians of the East; Greeks, Slavs, Caucasians, Ar­abs and Syrians. The natural majesty of the Eastern Empire shed its glow upon the Courts on the lower Danube. And by those same capitals, in those same schools, under the guidance of those same ambassadors of Western thought, the ideas of political revo­lution, of radical reform, of national liberty, were transmitted to all the nations of the European South-East, living before Byzantine influence.

And today, too when any influ­ence has to penetrate to those coun­tries, it must necessarily begin by making its way to Bucharest, the center of all Romanian life and ac­tivity, the true intellectual capital of South Eastern Europe.

(Reproduced from: Nicolae Iorga, “My American Lectures,” Bucharest, 1932.)