„Curat şi bine aranjat, faci din colibă un palat”: broderiile româneşti cu inscripţii pentru bucătărie din prima jumătate a secolului al XX-lea
“Cleaned and well-arranged you make a palace from the hut”: the first half of the 20th century’s Romanian embroideries with inscriptions for the kitchen

Summary/Abstract: In a broad anthropological view, the paper reminds an interesting moment – temporary and ephemeral – in the history of the popular ornamentation in the last century Romania, rather after the First World War and until the 50s: that of the embroideries with inscriptions (samplers) hung on the walls of the kitchen in the homes of the relatively prosperous popular strata – so not of the upper class, and nor of the (very) poor –. Not forgetting the epistemological conclusions, the paper describes the embroideries with their motifs and inscriptions and interprets them as specific forms of acculturation following the development of urban civilisation as well as the literacy of women: specific cultural diffusion of a form of material culture borrowed from the German tradition – via Austro-Hungary – and related to the process of modernisation felt at the level of petty-bourgeois urban and rural strata and promoted by women in a lagged-behind East-European country. Thus, the analysis contains the integration of the embroidery work, and especially with inscriptions, in the large European tradition, and reveals the meanings of the inscriptions and the social atmosphere embroidered on these specific aesthetic objects.

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