Vasile Gârneţ: „Scenarii ale nimicului” • „Asterisc” – o rubrică de Eugen Lungu • Tamara Cărăuş, „Capcanele identităţii” – cronică de Vitalie Ciobanu • Versuri de Mariana Codruţ, Svetlana Corobceanu şi Cătălina Bălan • „Provizorat”, un roman de Gabriela Adameşteanu • Alexandru Tabac: Jurnal dominican • Foametea din Basarabia, anii 1946-1947 (II). Un studiu de Aurelia Felea • Avanpremieră editorială: John Updike, „Rabbit la pensie”
More...Keywords: political myths; Habsburg;
More...Keywords: 10th–11th century; Carpathian Basin; East-Alps; ring with knob ends; earring; brooch;
In my study I tried to analyze the button terminalled rings, the brooches and the earrings with engraved pattern or with enamel inlay, which are typical of the eastern Alps region finds. The button terminalled rings were used as head jewelry, bracelet or ring. The crescent-shaped earrings are known from 15 sites, which can be ranked among two main groups. Brooches turned up from 11 sites. The earliest occurrence had the button terminalled rings, which could have already appeared in graves in the middle of the 10th century The earrings could have appeared in graves from the 980/990’s as well, while the brooches can be dated from the turn of the millennium. We can notice a certain site concentration on the northern shore of Balaton, on the territory of Győr, Moson, Sopron, Vas, Baranya and Heves counties. Regarding both the way of wear and the combination of certain object types, eastern Alpine parallels can be detected.
More...Keywords: Middle Bronze Age; metallurgy; Otomani culture; North-Western Romania;
Bronze metallurgy of the Otomani communities of the Carei Plain and the valley of the Eriul River. From the cultural point of view, the Carpathian Basin resembled a mosaic during the circa 500 years of the Middle Bronze Age. Despite the fact that every community developed a specific material culture we still may speak about a so-called “tell society” in this period based on social and economical macro features. This is specific type of habitat in the region under study and the major part of the great Hungarian Plain, where a “cultural complex” characterized by the homogeneity of pottery and bronze metallurgy developed during the Middle Bronze Age. In the last decades, the problematic of the metallurgy of the Otomani communities became the subject of several archaeological studies written by Romanian scholars like Ivan Ordentlich, Nicolae Chidioşan, Tiberius Bader, Alexandru Vulpe etc. and colleagues from other countries too. Despite the undertaken research and the fact that the study of metallurgy was popular among Bronze Age scholars, a proper typological and chronological analysis of the discovered artefacts according to the latest archaeological data was still needed to be done. In our opinion, the key of understanding the Otomani culture’s problematic is represented by the proper knowledge of the archaeological material which provides a firm foundation for the study of the social complexity of the Bronze Age policy. The aim of the present paper is to sketch a picture about the Otomani culture’s metalworking and debate some typological and chronological issues linked with the bronze artefacts discovered in the Carei Plain and the valley of the Eriul River. Fifty-nine bronze items were discovered during our investigations in the Carei Plain and the valley of the Eriul River, which could be dated from the 2nd and 3rd phases of the Otomani culture. 44% of the finds are weapons, 25% are tools, 28% are pieces of jewellery and 3% are specimens linked with metallurgical processes (casting moulds, bronze ingot etc.). Through the reinterpretation of the archaeological evidences, we have sketched a more accurate picture of the bronze working and metallurgical activity of the Otomani communities.
More...Keywords: birth; wedding; funeral; midwife; fate; baptism; asking in marriage; wedding flag; bride’s wreath; the bride and groom’s tree; alms.
The authors present the activity carried out at the Transylvanian Museum of Ethnography between 1922-1951 to set up an Archive that keep information on material and immaterial folk culture, obtained using the questionnaires as a research method. The following Questionnaires are presented: The list of objects to be collected for the Ethnograpfic Museum (1923), To preserve our artistic monuments (1925), Questionnaire no. 1: Christmas customs (1926), Questionnaire no. 2: Christmas and New Year customs, Young fellowships (1927), The New Year’s Goat Ritual (1927), The House (1931). The answers to these questions were the base for setting up The Museum’s Folklore and Ethnography Archive, that also includes Collections of folkloric materials, Collections of Year’s Events Customs and Seminar Papers made by students on the following topics: Customs throughout the year; Habits in relation to human life; Settlements and House; Village Monographs; Grazing; Folk costumes; Folk medicine; Pottery; Furriery. Among the materials preserved in the Museum’s Archives, the authors present 14 seminar papers on the customs related to human life events (birth, wedding, funeral). In connection with human birth, some popular beliefs and practices are described: from the prenatal period (bans for pregnant women), and from the post-natal period, focusing on the role of the midwife and of the godmother in the first days of the newborn’s life. On the wedding theme, the authors expose the main phases preceeding the wedding: looking for the predestinated spouse, asking in marriage, the engagement, wedding invitations, the preparation of the flag, of the wreath, of the tree and the fir-tree, the wedding ceremony, the wedding party. Regarding the funeral, the authors present beliefs about the signs portending the death (the owlet song, howling dogs, objects falling off the walls), the dying persons’s spiritual preparation (Confession, Communion), physical preparation of the dead person (washing, grooming, dressing), the wake, the funeral service, the burial, alms (highlighting the importance of water as charity for the dead). The authors also present the funeral with fir-tree, for the unmarried young people, known as the dead’s wedding.
More...Keywords: communism; dictatorship; memory;
A series of texts about the life under communism in Romania.
More...Keywords: Mărginimea Sibiului; historiography; history; ethnology; monographies; Romanian cultural heritage;
The study offers a broad view upon the bibliographic references regarding Mărginimea Sibiului, a specific area of 18 Romanian villages around the city of Sibiu, lying at the foot of the Southern Carpathians. The special literature includes the historical studies about Mărginimea Sibiului, the ethnologic and ethnographic approaches concerning the Romanian shepherds from this area, the historiography of Mărginimea’s inner and outer juridical relations, as well as monographies of the localities composing the area. Our historiographical study approaches the following research fields: 1. preoccupations of medieval archaeology regarding the border fortifications in Mărginimea Sibiului; 2. its historiography reflected by studies of medieval and modern history; 3. the historiography regarding the juridical relations of Mărginimea Sibiului; 4. historical biographies from Mărginimea Sibiului; 5. church history; 6. national and confessional statistics from the 18th century; 7. school history of Mărginimea Sibiului; 8. art history: churches and hand-painted icons from Mărginime; 9. the troițe (wayside crosses) heritage of Mărginime; 10. ethnological literature on the shepherds from Mărginimea Sibiului; 11. monographies of the localities in Mărginimea Sibiului; 12. perspectives in promoting the cultural heritage preserved by Mărginimea Sibiului.
More...Keywords: Late Middle Age; rescue digging; inn; pottery; interdisciplinary research;
A major real estate development required a rescue archaeology intervention in the very downtown Bucharest, mainly between February and June 1996. A large section, 75 long and about 3 m large was made in the street, mostly mechanically, just in the front of the National History Museum. The archaeological rescue digging documented 12 rooms belonging to a large inn, built by a famous Ruler of the Romanian Country (Ţara Românească), Constantin Brâncoveanu, in the last decade of the XVIIlh century. This kind of inn, of Oriental inspiration, is typical for the passage from Late Middle Age to Modem times, and is, in fact, a complex project including hosting areas, enclosure for animals, large storehouses, but usually churches also. Flourishing in towns with a certain demographic growth, but with a very poor communication means, like Bucharest, the inns were supposed to gather all goods needed by community in five months of cold and wet weather, when the road network was impracticable. The inn functioned about 160 years, until around 1860, the internai spaces being frequently restored, up to 7 times. Despite the fact that the landlord was unique, for its entire existence, a comparison between the type of internai rehabilitation operations proved that the initiative was lefi on tenants, the sequence type offloors (wood, bricks or vegetal cover) being unrepeatable. The use ofthe spaces - when proved by micromorphological study - is also distinctive, either cooking area, workshops connected with open fire, or even stables for sheep, for some relatively short episodes. Those 12 rooms are placed on the western wing of the building, on the main facade, facing a major street - Podul Mogoşoaiei - studied in the southem end of the archaeological section. The public road was made of wooden boards supported by wooden pillars buried under the walking levei, similarly with a bridge, from which the street took its name ("pod" meaning bridge). This type of public street, made entirely of wood, is documented in wet lowlands, where stone is not available, like Timişoara (western Romania). The history of the place begins during the late XV1 h century, for which deep buried huts were discovered. For the mid XVIlh century a new type ofhouse was in use, made ofwood, relatively large and with cellars, typical for aristocracy. In the XVIIlh century this strip of land was no more a constructive area, a little cemetery being discovered in the southem part of the trench. The layers dated between the cellar-houses and the inn are first in which fragments of bricks and mortar were recorded, probably from buildings in proximity. Regarding the political history of the Romanian countries, it might be surprising that from our discoveries Ottoman co ins are missing. W e found instead some Turkish pipes, a good witness of adopting an oriental life-style. This paper also presents the main results of the sedimentological and micromorphological study performed on Constantin Vodă Inn archaeological site. The field study firstly considered in the analysis of the sedimentary successions observed on the main stratigraphic profiles and the identification of the different types of units. The main diagnostic criteria observed in the field at the macroscopic levei - texture, structure, color, nature of constituents, homogeneity and degree of compaction - allowed establishing a typology of sedimentary facies necessary for the interpretation in terms of mechanisms of formation, in order to identify human activities and post-abandon transformations of the accurnulated deposits. Thus, different types of construction and arrangement units, occupation units and natural accumulations were recognized. Micromorphological analysis, at the microscopic scale, brings detailed information on the sedimentary units and thus contributes to a better interpretation of the archaeological levels. Extraordinary information provided by this study is the identification of sferulites, structures indicating the presence of the domestic animals (Ovis/Capra) in spaces fitted out with a wooden floor. The palinological expertise - the first ever done in an archaeological site from Bucharest - revealed a predominance of a ruderal vegetation, followed by hydrophilic vegetation and lowlands trees, but not cereals, explained by the position is in the middle of the medieval town.
More...Keywords: fibulae; early La Tène scheme; Middle Dniester; Getic fortifications; “late Scythian” tombs; Celts;
The present study brings to the foreground of discussions a certain type of artifacts, the importance of which in the process of analyzing archaeological finds is difficult to overestimate, but which, unfortunately, was not used by the researchers to the proper extent. Thus, in the archaeological literature there is no single work on the Iron Age fibulae that were discovered on the present-day territory of the Republic of Moldova. Moreover, even when some specimens were introduced into scientific circulation, their publication was very short, often without a clear and precise presentation of the context, and the images accompanying incomplete texts in most cases are not clear enough for detailed analysis. Based on this situation, we decided to fill this historiographic gap and at the first stage we devoted our research to the iron fibulae of the early La Tène scheme found on the territory of the Republic of Moldova. As a result of the investigation, a lot was allocated, consisting of 12 fibulae, most of which were found on the territory of the Getic hillforts on the right bank of the Dniester. The degree of preservation of the items leaves much to be desired. The number of undamaged fibulae is relatively small, and those preserved fragmentarily create sufficient impediments for the possibilities of classification. Despite these circumstances, a catalogue of early La Tène scheme fibulae was developed, on the basis of which the main analogies were identified both in the neighboring areas (Romania and Ukraine), and in the Central Europe. We suggested to trace the chronological landmarks for the existing analogies, as well as to evaluate the chronological framework of the presented artifacts. At the same time, we set out to follow the ways and means by which these fibulae reached the Prut-Dniester area and, where possible, to highlight probable phenomena and processes that were behind the respective distribution of this type of artifacts.
More...Keywords: Libraria; Biblioteca Județeană Mureș; biblioteconomie; bibliologie; carte veche; carte bibliofilă; istorie locală; servicii de bibliotecă; Biblioteca Teleki; carte veche românească;
More...Keywords: Apulum; municipium/colonia; necropolis; canabae; personal equipment; buckles; phalerae; armour; apron and harness fittings;
ROMAN BRONZE MILITARY EQUIPMENT AND HARNESS IN THE COLLECTIONS OF THE ALBA IULIA MUSEUM
More...Keywords: Herules; Thule-Athens-Rome-Constantinople; "Fatherland";
L'auteur propose un premier essai de monographie sur les Herules de l'Europe continentale entre les lll-e - Vil-e s. A D. et sur la localisation de leurs "Territoires Paternels" dans la zone piemontane (terrain de chasse et de larges incursions militaires) Nord-Ouest cis-carpatique (la Slovaquie collinaire, l'Ukraine cis-carpatique, le Nord-Est de l'Hongrie la Nord-Ouest de la Roumanie).
More...Keywords: Father Arsenie Boca; biography; historical sources; spiritual sources; studies; monasticism; arrest; Sâmbăta Monastery; Prislop Monastery; painting; opera; communism;
In the present approach, I tried to reconstruct Father Arsenie Boca’s biography with the help of historical and spiritual sources, most of them unpublished. Due to the numerous works written about Father Arsenie, many of them parasitic, we considered it more useful to ignore them and build our historiographic discourse by identifying and analyzing every historical source that we had at hand. That is why the biography I wrote is a documentary one, loaded with texts from historical sources, precisely to dispel the main controversies hovering over Father Arsenie, which are due either to a lack of documentation or to ignorant opinions related to the historical context and which later, “rolled over time”, led to totally unfair and inauthentic assessments of the great cleric. We believe that we have managed to outline an objective and documented preliminary biography of Father Arsenie Boca. The biographical study is divided as follows: Education and spiritual formation, Entering monasticism, Aproached as a doctor of the soul, First arrest, Second arrest, Moving and establishing a community at the Prislop monastery, Missionary activities and spiritual relations, Third arrest, Gathering talents, The fourth arrest, Final days in the monastery and going back into the world, Living in the world and being watched by the Security, Spiritual and artistic work, Father Arsenie’s attitude towards communism, Father Arsenie’s spiritual legacy.
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