Reconstituirea fondurilor arhivistice ale vechilor case comerciale „grecești” (I)
The Reassembly of the Old “Greek” Trading Houses’ Archival Fonds (I)

Summary/Abstract: Using the “Greek” (videlicet Aromanian) trading houses' archives as a paradigmatic sample, this paper advocates for the proper physical organisation of the archival material specific to old microeconomic entities, and for exorcising the traps set by collections.In order to dismantle the resistances that dictate maintaining these archives in a deficient statu quo, from the perspective of both scientific valorisation (constrained by the graeca non leguntur palaeographic obstacle) and archival treatment (marked by the antagonistic pairs: trading houses versus personal/ family archival fonds, accounting books versus manuscripts, archival fonds versus collections), the paper presents the current state of the art and the archival research methodologies (which are not spared, in their turn, from vicious touches), along with successfully employed or failed archival steps, objectives, methods, principles, and remedies.The virtual documentary reassembly ‒ a solution that is useful for research, albeit a compromise one ‒ is displayed in the “Annexes”, by relocating the accounting books into their matrix-fonds and coalescing the series of archives of the Euro-Balkan trading houses that operated in the Romanian territories during the XVIIth ‒ XIXth centuries.

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