Non-pasteurized Bucharest

The Travel Eurofile of The New York Times T-Magazine has just published an interesting article signed by Alexander Lobrano under the title Back to Bucharest:

"Disappointed to find that much of central Paris now serves up the same street-level visual refrain as most American cities — Gap, Zara, Starbucks, Subway — friends visiting from Boston yearned for an urban adventure. Where could they go for a long weekend that hadn’t yet been subjected to the centrifuge of globalization? 'Bucharest,' I replied, and they laughed out loud. 'Bucharest!? Is there anything to see there? And what about the hotels and the food?'

'Trust me,' I told them, and wasn’t surprised when they returned three days later raving about the delicious strangeness of Europe’s sixth largest city (if you don’t count Istanbul and leave out Russia), which is a three-hour flight from most western European capitals. Vying for the title with Belgrade and Sofia, Bucharest is one of the last major European cities that hasn’t been pasteurized by gentrification or lost its soul to mass tourism. It’s an odd but lively mutt of a city — one that’s clearly seen better days but where something is also suddenly stirring. The locals love to have a good time, and the Romanian economy is chugging along pretty nicely."

Read the whole article here.

Exhibition on Romanian prehistorical civilization

Before the establishment of the first cities in Mesopotamia ca. 4500 BC, highly sophisticated societies with advanced technology and complex systems of symbolic representation had emerged in the southeastern part of Europe.

The Neolithic people of the Balkans were the first in Europe to adopt of a new type of economy, based on agriculture and animal breeding. This happened in the 7th millennium BC and marked a radical shift in the way humans interacted with their environment. After a million of years of nomadic life – during which little had changed – people settled in permanent habitations and started developing new skills and modes of social interaction.

By the 5th millennium BC, the thriving cultures of the Balkans were among the most advanced in the Old World – featuring densely populated settlements, a sophisticated system of social hierarchy, highly symbolic cult rituals, complex long-distance exchange networks, and an amazing copper- and gold-working industry.

By the mid-4th millennium, however, this brilliant world came to an abrupt end. The reasons are not clear: Invasions? Climatic changes? Overexploitation of natural resources?

The unknown world of “Old Europe” is revealed in this exhibition, which features more than 200 Neolithic objects from Romania, Bulgaria and Moldova.

The exhibition The Lost World of Old Europe, which is organized in Athens (October 2010 - January 2011) by the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, in collaboration with the National History Museum of Romania, Bucharest and with the participation of the Varna Regional Museum of History, Bulgaria, and the National Museum of Archaeology and History of Moldova, Chisinau, demonstrates that during the Neolithic the various regions of Southeastern Europe had more things in common than differences.

Source: Cycladic Art Museum

Prince Charles in Transylvania

The Travel section of the Financial Times published, on August 27th, 2010, an interesting article signed by William Blacker about Transylvania:

"When in early 1990 I first went to Transylvania, leaving behind the bright lights of western Europe and adjusting my eyes to the more sober tones of its eastern reaches, I could hardly believe that such a place still existed. In deep winter I crossed the northern Carpathian Mountains and came down, through misty forests and snow-covered roads, into the Middle Ages – or something astonishingly like it. Horses or oxen pulling sleighs occupied the roads, and cows and geese wandered freely. The villagers were dressed in smocks, sheepskin coats and fur hats, and had rough leather strapped to their feet, with woollen cloth wrapped around their calves held in place by thongs; footwear truly from another age, as worn by peasants depicted in ­medieval illustrated manuscripts.

I was just a few hours east of Vienna, but crossing the border into Romania was a journey back in time. I settled there, and for more than 10 years I was fortunate enough to be able to live a rural life that previously I had known only through the pages of a Hardy or Tolstoy novel."

Read the whole article here.

Happy birthday, Hedda!

Hedda Sterne is celebrating today her 100th birthday. Born on August 4, 1910 in Bucharest, she is an artist best remembered as the only woman in a group of Abstract Expressionists known as "The Irascibles" which consisted of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and others. In her artistic career, she is known for maintaining a stubborn independence from styles and trends, including Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism, with which she is often associated.

Hedda Sterne [portraited in the photo by Gjon Mili] was born as Hedwig Lindenberg, to Simon Lindenberg, a high school language teacher, and Eugenie Wexler. Sterne was raised with artistic values from a young age, most notably, her tie to Surrealism, which stemmed from a family friend, Victor Brauner. Sterne was homeschooled until age 11. Upon her high school graduation in 1927, she attended art classes in Vienna, then had a short attendance at the University of Bucharest studying philosophy and art history before she dropped out to pursue artistic training independently.

Hedda married a childhood friend Frederick Sterne in 1932. In 1941 she escaped a certain death from Nazi encroachment during WWII when she fled to New York to be with her husband. In 1944 she remarried Saul Steinberg and became a U.S. citizen. She was involved in many shows and exhibits in New York and practiced her art up until she had a stroke that affected her vision and movement when she was 94.

Source: Wikipedia

Save the Jewish food

This weekend I had the pleasure to guide through Bucharest and surroundings the Canadian journalist David Sax (author of Save the Deli, right side) and the US photographer Landon Nordeman (left side), who came to record Jewish Romania's gastronomic heritage.

Besides having visited Jewish sites in the Romanian capital, we went to restaurants and popular markets, seeking traditional culinary phenomena which gave birth to alimentary habits deeply rooted within Jewish emigrants communities in the Americas.

The main character of this gastronomic travel was the pastrami, a Romanian dish brought by Romanian Jews to the other shore of the Atlantic and transformed into a delicatessen that can be tasted in famous restaurants in New York.

The highest moment was the Romanian Jewish meal we have organized for our guests at Fernando's Hideaway in Fierbinti, 40km from Bucharest. Cooking was signed by Silvia Weiss, who offers catering services known as Silvita's Kitchen.

Milestone from Chisinau

Lewis Milestone (born Lev Milstein, 1895 – 1980) was a motion picture director. Milestone was born in Kishinev, Bessarabia, Imperial Russia (now Chişinău, Moldova) to a family of Jewish heritage. He went to the US in 1912. Milestone held a number of odd jobs before enlisting in the US Signal Corps, where he worked as an assistant director on Army training films during the war. In 1919 he became a naturalized citizen of the United States. After the war he went to Hollywood, where he first worked as a film cutter, and later as an assistant director. His work during the 1930s and 1940s was always easily identifiable by its lighting and imaginative use of fluid camera. He worked extensively in television from the mid 1950s.

Source: Wikipedia

Bukovina in the NYT

Read below part of the article Where Art and Faith Embrace in Gura Humorului, Romania, written by Ruth Ellen Gruber and published on 07 Nov 2009 by The New York Times. You may read the whole article and watch the pictures following this link.

Once the easternmost province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Bucovina (“land of beech trees”) today straddles the border between Romania and Ukraine: northern Bucovina was annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940 and the region’s historic capital, Chernivtsi (Czernowitz in German and Cernauti in Romanian) lies just 30 kilometers, or about 18 miles, north of the frontier.

The southern part, on the Romanian side, is a world of rolling farmland and steep forested hills, where antique villages and peasant culture coexist with new industry and modern construction. Horses and carts (and the occasional herd of cows) share the roads with SUVs, and intricately carved wood and other ornamentation still decorate many village homes and farmsteads.

Exceptional examples of a rich religious heritage form an important part of the mix.

Here are Romania’s famous painted monasteries, built in the 15th and 16th centuries when the region, a stronghold of Orthodox Christianity, was threatened by Ottoman invaders.

The vividly colored frescoes on their exterior walls, masterpieces of Byzantine painting, tell the tales of saints and heroes, and portray in epic imagery the cataclysmic struggle between good and evil at the end of days.

The monasteries are among Romania’s most celebrated cultural treasures. Listed on Unesco’s roster of world heritage sites, they draw large numbers of visitors throughout the year.

Here, too, however, are religious sites far less known and rarely visited that also form important components of the region’s deeply rooted spiritual patrimony. These are the centuries-old Jewish cemeteries, whose weathered tombstones bear extraordinary carvings that meld folk motifs and religious iconography into evocative examples of faith expressed through art.

Bucovina was once home to a large and thriving Jewish community. Today, however, as throughout much of Eastern Europe, only a few dozen Jewish families live there.

Most of the cemeteries are neglected, but several are fairly well maintained and easy to visit.

Though there are many organized tours to the painted monasteries, a car is needed to see the full range of sites. The roads and overall infrastructure in Bucovina have been upgraded significantly since Romania joined the European Union in 2007.

Nobel prize for Literature 2009

Herta Müller is a Romanian-born German novelist, poet and essayist noted for her works depicting the harsh conditions of life in Communist Romania under the repressive Nicolae Ceauşescu regime, the history of the Germans in the Banat (and more broadly, Transylvania), and the persecution of Romanian ethnic Germans by Stalinist Soviet occupying forces in Romania and the Soviet-imposed communist regime of Romania.

In October 2009 she was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature.

She was born in 1953 in Nitzkydorf, a historically German-speaking village in the Romanian Banat in western Romania. The daughter of Banat Swabian farmers, her family was part of Romania's German minority. She studied German studies and Romanian literature at the Timişoara University.

Bukovina monastery on Russian stamp

Since June 2008 stamp collectors are able to include in their collections a beautiful (and probably first-time!) philatelic Romanian-Russian joint issue regarding monuments listed in the UNESCO World Heritage List.

The Romanian monastery of Voronet (right side) in Bukovina, famous for its unique predominating blue color, is depicted in a Russian stamp of 12 rubles.

Ausländer

Rose Ausländer (1901-1988), maiden name Rosalie Beatrice Ruth Scherzer, was a German and English language poet, Jewess from Bukovina, who lived in the USA, Romania and Germany.

She was born in Czernowitz, at that time the second most important university center of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Between 1907 and 1919, she received her education in Vienna and Czernowitz, which became part of Romania after 1918. In 1919, she began studying literature and philosophy. In 1921, together with her friend and future husband Ignaz Ausländer, she left Bukovina and migrated to the US. There, she began writing poems.

In 1927, she returned home to take care of her sick mother. In 1931, she returned home again for the same reason. She left Czernowitz for Bucharest in 1936. In 1939, she emigrated again to the US but came back in the same year in order to take care of her sick mother. There in Czernowitz she published her first book; the greater part of the print run was destroyed by the Nazis in 1941, after they had occupied the city. As a Jew, she had to move into the ghetto. She remained there two years, plus another year in hiding so as not to be deported to the camps. In the ghetto, she got to know the poet Paul Celan, under whose influence she modernised her style. In 1944, the city was occupied by the Red Army. She left the country again, returning to New York. In 1967, she went to West Germany. From then on, she lived in Düsseldorf, where she died in 1988.

Source: Wikipedia

Modernist Ukrainian writer

Olga Kobylyanska (Ольга Кобиляньска) was a Ukrainian modernist writer, born in 1863 in Gura Humorului (Gurahumora), in today's Romanian county of Suceava, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Kronland of Bukovina. She was one of the first female writers to explore feminist topics in Ukrainian literature. She is also considered the most important Ukrainian writer to emerge from the region of Bukovina. From 1891 until her death in 1942 she lived in the city of Chernivtsi (Czernowitz). The only language she knew perfectly was German, which is the language of her first writings. Only when Olga was about 20 years old, she realized, supported by other Ukrainian intellectuals, that writing in Ukrainian is inevitable.

Source: Wikipedia

Jewish families in Arad and Hunedoara

Between 1-5 July, I guided Veronica Singer (US) through Transylvania, the land of her grandparents, searching - and finding! - records and graves related to her familiy (Roth, Grün etc.) at the Jewish Community and at the local branches of the Romanian National Archives in the towns of Arad and Deva. Our journey also included a visit to the Hunyad Castle in the city of Hunedoara, the largest gothic construction of this type in Romania, and to the villages of Bârzava, Petris, Pui and Baru, where Veronica - in the photo, holding a chick at a family house in Pui - was warmly received by local people and was able to grasp the atmosphere in which her ancestrals once lived.