Radio România Internațional

Tag: reign

  • The Old Orhei Museum Compound

    The Old Orhei Museum Compound

    The Old Orhei, Orheiul Vechi, in Romanian, is a museum compound on the valley of river Raut, a right-hand side tributary of river Dniester, in Republic of Moldova. The Old Orhei cultural-natural reserve enjoys a special status and is Republic of Moldova’s most important site. Currently a process is ongoing, for the Old Orhei to be included on UNESCO’s World heritage List.

    The compound is made of several dozens of hectares of Orhei medieval town. Orhei is a settlement of the 13th and the 16th centuries. It is known as Old Orhei. We recall initially the settlement was deserted and a new city was established in a different location, bearing the same name, today’s Orhei, a town in Republic of Moldova’s Orhei district.

    Part of the compound are two large promontories, Pestere and Butuceni. Added to them are three smaller adjoining promontories, Potarca, Selitra and Scoc. On the territory of the promontories the ruins of several fortifications can be found, as well as dwelling places, baths, worship sites, that including cave monasteries, dating from the Tartar-Mongolian period, the 13th to 14th centuries, but also from the Moldavian period, 14th to 16th centuries.

    The Old Orhei Compound is a system made of cultural and nature elements, such as a natural archaic landscape, biodiversity, an exceptional archaeological environment, historical-architectural diversity, a rural traditional habitat and ethnographic originality.

    The medieval settlement of Old Orhei saw its heyday several times. During the 12th to the 14th centuries, the period before the Tartar-Mongolian invasion. In the early days of the medieval settlement, the wooden and earth citadel is believed to have been erected in that period of time. The Golden Horde Age of the 14th century, the period the stone fortress dates from. Between the 14th and the 16th centuries, the settlement was included in the Moldavian state, for the town, it was a period of transformation, from an Oriental settlement into a Moldavian town.

    During Stephen the Great’s reign (1438-1504) the stone fortress was repaired, and strengthened. In the 60s of the 15th century, the Orhei citadel was erected. It was a defense centre of the country’s eastern borders against the Tartar invasions. The Tartar invasions in the summer of 1469 prompted Stephen the Great to take measures, in a bid to strengthen the country’s defence capacity along Dniester River, initiating important works, carried in order to build a strengthened citadel in Orhei.

    The archaeological excavations that made possible the discovery of the citadel’s foundation speak about those events. Similarly, the official documents of that time speak about that as well. So, in Stephen the Great’s charter of April 1st, 1470, for the first time the mention is made of a burgrave, that is a military commander of the Orhei citadel. We recall at that time the burgrave had military but also administrative responsibilities of the Orhei district.

    The period of decay begins in mid-16th century and lasts until the early 17th century, when the inhabitants abandon the Old Orhei, moving into the new settlement, today’s Orhei. The stone citadel is destroyed.

    Stefan Chelban is the Reserve’s Head of Archelogy and Ethnography Service. We sat down and talked to Stefan Chelban about the history of the Old Orhei:

    „The Old Orhei is a nature cultural reserve set up in 1968, yet, in time, it has been going through several restructuring and reorganizing processes. The reserve is made of several localities and its purpose is to preserve the region’s natural heritage, but also its cultural heritage.

    Actually, it was one of the main reasons why the reserve was set up. Arguably, it is one of the areas with the biggest number of assets part of the archaeological and ethnographic heritage, but also of assets of the immaterial heritage and such like. So, it is a region where the cultural heritage has been acceptably well preserved, to this day. “

    The Old Orhei’s cave monasteries are part of a cave remains compound. They are located in the lime rocks on the Raut River valley. The compound is extremely attractive in terms of tourism; it includes roughly 350 cave remains, of which around 100 are man-dug rooms, while the remaining 200 are karstic formations, grouped in six compounds. They include well-defined monasteries, underground churches, galleries and cells.

    Here is Stefan Chelban once again, this time speaking about the cave monasteries and about the reserve:
    Track: ”This is likely to be the central point for many, yet the reserve has a lot more to offer. For instance, the ruins of the Tartar city, a city that used to be here in the 14th century, albeit for a short period of time yet worth visiting all the same, that including the ruins of an old mosque which, judging by its surface area, it was allegedly South-east Europe’s biggest mosque.

    Ștefan Chelban also told us something about the Old Orhei museum compound:

    “The Ethnography Museum is a model of traditional architecture, specific for the late 19th century and the late 20th century. This house has been restored, refurbished with EU funds, using only traditional material and techniques.”

    Here is Ștefan Chelban once again, giving us further details on the monastic life of the Cave monastery in the Old Orhei:

    „We understand initially the monastery was inhabited by 12 monks since there are 12 cells by means of which we can tell each cell was individual, so there were 12 monks. We do not know exactly the year when it was built, yet that happened somewhere between 14th to 15th centuries. ”

  • Medieval Romanian rulers and their age

    Medieval Romanian rulers and their age


    Stephen
    the Great was the most important ruling prince in the history of Moldavia. Stephen
    the Great ruled Moldavia for 47 years, between the second half of the 15th
    century and the early 16th century, actually between 1457 and 1504. It
    was a most remarkable feat in itself, not only because of its duration, at a
    time when instability was rampant, but also because of the management of power.
    Stephen the Great knew how to play an intelligent game between Hungary and
    Poland, then the regional powers, and the Ottoman Empire, in turn being their
    ally and their opponent.


    The Romanian historians of the Romantic period in the 19th
    century created a heroic image of Stephen the Great, as well as an image of a
    powerful and thriving Moldavia. However, even during such an auspicious reign as
    that of Stephen the Great, the principality of Moldavia still lay at the periphery
    of European civilization. If we look into the external and internal documents
    of that time, we can see Moldavia was a marginal territory, with people living
    on limited means and with a high degree of insecurity. Historian and archeologist
    Adrian Andrei Rusu is the author of the most recent work on Stephen the Great’s
    ruling period. Rusu focuses on the material civilization of Moldavia in the
    second half of the 15th century. The historian is set to bust the exaggerations of
    historians of the Romantic period as well as the archaeological errors. Historian
    Ovidiu Cristea is affiliated to the Nicolae Iorga Institute of History. Dr
    Cristea told us the discrepancy between what the authors of the documents say
    and the historians is caused by the difficulty to tailor the language and the
    content of the past to suit the demands of the present.

    Ovidiu Cristea:


    I am quoting one of
    professor Rusu’s tenets: the medieval reality could not have been covered by
    the dictionaries of the chancellery language. And at this point, a very good
    example was provided by Umberto Eco. Examining Marco Polo’s text,
    Eco used to say Marco Polo mentioned some sort of unicorn because, to the best
    of his knowledge at that time, what he had seen, and which was in fact a
    rhinoceros, could not possibly have been expressed through an appropriate word.
    Using his knowledge of the medieval bestiary, Polo spoke about a unicorn
    instead of of mentioning a rhinoceros. And that can also happen when we run
    into apparently unusual objects, whose usefulness is unbeknownst to us.


    Historian Adrian Rusu said that in his most recent research nhe focused,
    among other things, on as detailed as possible descriptions of daily life, in a
    bid to make the Moldavian world at the time of Stephen the Great accessible to contemporary
    readership. A case in point was the recast of the residence where Stephen the Great
    used to live, which was something that had never been done before.


    Dr Adrian Adrei Rusu:


    I had to go over
    the entire archaeological and architectural information for a second time
    around and prove that in his Suceava castle, Stephen had princely suites. He
    had an assembly hall with a gothic vault, with very beautiful keys and, come to
    think of it, the Moldavian rulers even had a bathroom, a cold-water bathroom
    and a hot-water bathroom. There also was a garden, which was absolutely normal
    for all neighboring princely and royal courts. It was hard to imagine for those ruling princes, especially for
    Stephen the Great, who had a long-lasting and unswerving reign, which was
    strongly built into all sectors of civilization, to be deprived of something which,
    in his time, simply went with the territory.


    As for the dynamism of the economic activity in Moldavia, historian
    Adrian Rusu expressed his skepticism.


    We’re speaking about the great trade route,
    crossing Moldavia from north to south, but shipment was only made of
    pepper and silks, and that could not be a driving force for civilization. Very
    few people got rich doing that kind of trade. Other people got rich, the Saxons
    in Transylvania, Brasov and Bistritsa got rich, in Moldavia they were selling
    nails, hammers, hacksaws, timber, textile, all that the ordinary people of that
    time needed. All those products, in fact, pushed society forward. There also
    was a come-and-go movement of craftsmen, they did not settle in Moldavia.
    They came and worked seasonally, yet they worked constantly because Stephen the
    Great offered them an inflow of construction yards, he guaranteed their payment
    and that is how that string or architectural foundations came into being and
    which also began to perform stylistically.


    Under the circumstances, how was it possible for Stephen the Great’s
    reign to be that long? Here is historian Adrian Rusu once again, attempting an
    explanation.


    Clearly it is all about his personal qualities. The man understood
    his time, and understood his competitors. It was all clear that one year after
    the next during his reign, he was threatened by the rivals who could turn up in
    droves from everywhere. He was capable of knowing his country, his was a
    governance solution he inherited from John Hunyadi. If you want to know your
    country, you need to go places all the time so that people can see you. It wasn’t
    written anywhere, but everyone could tell it was a princely suite coming. There were
    signs of display of the princely authority we were not that much aware of: how exactly
    the ruling prince showed up before his country ? .


    In 2006,
    as part of the Great Romanians contest, Stephen the Great was voted the greatest
    Romanian ever to have existed. Yet about the voivode and his age, we need to
    know all about that using a language
    which remains a language of the past but which always needs to be adapted to
    the present.

    (EN)