Arhiva Dugan-Opaiţ. O paranteză necesară în investigarea culturii române din Bucovina
The Dugan-Opaiţ Archive. A Necessary Disgression in the Investigation of the Romanian Culture in Bukovina

Summary/Abstract: In 1961 Ilie Dugan-Opaiţ (1886-1962) donated to the State Archives of Iaşi “the ‘archiveʼ of the old Romanian academic societies Arboroasa (1875-1877) and Junimea (1877-1938) from the University of Czernowitz, first an Austrian university and later a Romanian one”, as it had been organized by his brother, Arcadie Dugan-Opaiţ (1878-1951). “Your deed”, Gh. Ungureanu, the administrator of the archives, said, “will be preserved in the annals of Romanian culture eternally”. The commendation is not inflated even though his donation has been almost forgotten. The collection is made up of thousands of biographical records, more than 2,000 photos, letters, a.s.o.In 2015, the Ştefan cel Mare University Press of Suceava published a volume of what the author named “The Great Album” of the two aforementioned societies, actually a very small part of the donation made to the State Archives of Iaşi. The present article explores this volume, taking it as the starting point for the reconstruction of various aspects that are informative in regard to both the author (he developed his own methodology as well as the instruments, he planned everything in detail and as a whole) and the atmosphere of the two societies (internal conflicts, disputes, dissidence, anecdotes, notes regarding immigration, non-Romanian names of Romanian people, mixed marriages, etc.).Consequently, the complex image that one gets is that of the life of Romanians in Austrian Bukovina, the volume turning into an efficient instrument but also into a fascinating labyrinth that is meaningful in itself. Moreover, the article is implicitly a tribute to Bukovina and to the two brothers, also a plea for the complete digital publication of the entire donation.

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