“Stout, with unruly short greying hair, sharp blue eyes beneath the low eyebrows and a fascinating smile . . ., she made everyone feel that they were dealing with a true personality. I always felt when I was around her that she was like a boa constrictor which had just been fed, so it wasn’t going to eat you up on the spot! . . . My subsequent meetings with her showed me the cold and dehumanised brilliance thanks to which she had reached the powerful position she held now.”

They say he was the mastermind behind Romania’s Crown during the reign of King Ferdinand and Queen Marie, the great unifiers of the country. They say he charmed the King and seduced the Queen. They say he was the Queen’s lifelong secret lover. They say he was the natural father of her youngest son, Mircea, who died of typhoid fever when he was 3, in 1916. They dubbed him “the White Prince” for his dignified beauty, impeccable reputation, elegant manners, aristocratic posture

Romania’s Jewish community has dwindled dramatically over the past decades: while in 1930 more than 4% of the country’s population was Jewish, ranking third among the country’s minority ethnicities, only 0.02% of Romania’s population is Jewish at present, according to the 2011 census. The main causes for this loss were, on the one hand, the Holocaust of the 1940s, in which 340,000 people perished [1], including the 1941 pogrom organised by the far-right Iron Guard legionari,

In her Memoirs, Zoe Cămărăşescu, a Romanian aristocrat whose mother had been a lady-in-waiting at the belle époque Court of King Carol I and Queen Elisabeth, refers repeatedly to the Roma protagonists of her childhood memories. One such man is Vasile the coachman of the boyar Golescu family, “a former slave on their estate who, when the slaves were freed, declared that he didn’t need his freedom and wished to stay on with the Golescus”; Vasile was the family patriarchs’ most

This year Romanians are celebrating 100 years since the Great Union. Back in 1918, King Ferdinand and Queen Marie of Romania saw their Old Kingdom, made up of the former principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, grow into greater Romania through the addition of the other provinces inhabited by Romanians: Bessarabia, Bucovina and Transylvania, which had been previously part of the Russian and Habsburg Empires, respectively. But Ferdinand and Marie were not the first unifiers o

Looking into entrepreneurship in contemporary Romania can be a bit like entering perilous territory. As a recent documentary shows (Kapitalism: Our Improved Formula), business and politics have been far too close to each other since the 1989 Revolution, a “marriage” oftentimes wrought with suspicions of corruption. Hence let it be said from the very beginning that, in order to avoid exploring the slippery ground of allegedly corrupt business today, this article will focus on

If we were to search back in time for images of the first Romanian actors, we might well have to put up with scattered blurry memories of raw theatrical shows held at popular events such as fairs or some boyar’s wedding by possibly talented but undoubtedly anonymous performers. To put names to the blurred faces of the first Romanian actors, we have to look first at the emergence of formal, written drama and professional theatres in the three Romanian principalities. Thus, the