Category: The History Show

There are few individuals in Romanian history who have been so disliked as King Carol II, and even fewer who made themselves the object of such abhorrence. In politics King Carol has been criticized by both leading figures of Romanian democracy, such as Iuliu Maniu, and by the far right. King Carol II was a vainglorious and authoritarian figure, and reactions to his autocratic rule were quick to pile up. 10 years after his ascension to the throne, Carol II left Romania in a state of agony, bereft of big chunks of its territory in the east, west and south. Carol II was the type that would declare open conflict even to members of his own family. One of them was his brother, Prince Nicolae.

The fourth born of King Ferdinand and Queen Marie, Nicolae was baptized by Tsar Nikolay II of Russia himself, who would be executed by the Bolshevik Government in 1918. Although he received the education of a prince who would one day claim the throne of Romania if the occasion demanded it, Prince Nicolae obstinately turned down every opportunity to get more involved in politics and take the path of royalty, and the opportunities were quite a few. Historian Ioan Scurtu explains that one of the main features of Prince Nicolae was his complete lack of ambition towards becoming a monarch.

Ioan Scurtu: “Prince Nicolae was the second son of the six children Queen Marie and King Ferdinand had during their marriage. Prince Nicolae had no royalty ambitions. He had no intention to take the throne, even when Prime Minister Marghiloman suggested Prince Nicolae be proclaimed heir to the throne in 1918, when Carol married Zizi Lambrino and was on the brink of being written out of the lineage. Later on, in the regency period, between 1927 and 1930, Queen Marie insisted that Prince Nicolae be appointed first regent so that he should be the de facto leader of the Royal House of Romania. But, as I’ve said, Prince Nicolae had no such ambition”.

In any family it is commonplace to see brothers quarrelling, and the Royal Family was no exception. In the case of Carol and Nicolae, historian Ioan Scurtu says there are two reasons accounting for their rivalry. The first was Carol’s chronic arrogance. Carol wanted everyone around him to swear blind allegiance to him and to everything he did, even to his own personal choices and to his love life.

Ioan Scurtu: “On June 6th, 1930, when Carol returned to Romania from his self-imposed exile, Prince Nicolae welcomed him back with arms wide open and hugged him in public at Cotreceni Palace. I think the conflict between them is rooted in a more personal matter, namely Prince Nicolae’s marriage to a woman who was not royalty, something that was frown upon by the Royal House of Romania. Carol sought to bring his brother Nicolae back “on the right path”, although he himself was living with his partner Elena Lupescu, who was far from the stuff of nobility and whom in the end he did not marry. Nicolae however did marry Ioana Dolete-Saveanu in December 1931. Responding to Carol’s suggestion, Interior Minister Constantin Argetoianu asked the Mayor of Tohani village, where the civil marriage was performed, to bring forth the civil registry. He summoned his private notary and asked him to copy every record of all the marriages except that between Prince Nicolae and Ioana Saveanu”.

The other source of rivalry between the two brothers had to do with Nicolae’s political choices. Ioan Scurtu says this aspect inflamed Carol and kept the conflict alive.

Ioan Scurtu: “The second cause of the conflict is tied to the political choices of Prince Nicolae. He got very close to the Legionnaire movement, which in April 1936 held a Congress that approved the set up of the famous death squads, entrusted with taking out their political opponents, including Elena Lupescu. To make things worse, Prince Nicolae publicly expressed his sympathy towards the legionnaires. Against this backdrop, the Legionnaire Movement published a manifesto extolling Prince Nicolae and his standpoint against this “young madam” who was seen as a bane for the country. In April 1937, at Carol’s initiative, a gathering of the Privy Council decided to cast off Prince Nicolae from the Royal Family. It was a very sensitive issue, because Nicolae was accused of marrying a member of the lower class, in other words, he had breached the statute of the Royal House”.

The end of the war also marked the end of the Romanian dynasty, with King Carol II already in exile since 1940. He was later joined by the other members of the Royal Family. Nicolae was the one who took the first step towards reconciliation with his brother.

Ioan Scurtu: “Although he had been banned from the Royal House, although Carol had had an extremely bad attitude towards him, Prince Nicolae was the only member of the Royal Family to attend the funerals of Carol II. Neither his son Michael I, nor his sisters or other close relatives did that. Prince Nicolae was an interesting character in Romanian politics. He was not at all interested in replacing Carol as King of Romania, though he resented Elena Lupescu’s involvement in politics.”

The rivalry between King Carol II and Prince Nicolae did not go as far as the one between the King and Corneliu Codreanu, the head of the Iron Guard, which ended in Codreanu’s assassination. But the whimsical king did not shy from using against his brother all the tricks he could possibly use in order to impose his will.

The holistic study of human activities has been a lofty aim for generations of scientists and men of culture who wanted to overcome the boundaries of theoretical science and everyday life. Thus appeared anthropology in the late 19th, early 20th century, a science aiming to be more than any other science before it. Anthropology studies humans, their behaviour, mentality, as well as social and cultural life.

In Romania, anthropology was represented among others by Francisc Iosif Rainer, an ethnic German physician from Bukovina, where he was brought at the age of one by his parents in 1875. He taught at the universities of Iasi and Bucharest, and he was the staunchest promoter of anthropology until his death in 1944. Rainer tried to integrate medical science in comparative cultural studies, and was the first to teach a university course in anthropology. Rainer tried to build a school of thought for future physicians, with specialty studies offset by solid general knowledge. For instance, in his anatomy course, Rainer used ancient statues or medieval paintings to showcase the beauty of the human body and its representations. He blended the teaching of science with teaching appreciation for the arts. Historian Adrian Majuru, Rainer’s biographer, told us about the erudite physician’s creativity.

Adrian Majuru: “What was new in Francisc Rainer’s contribution? In 1937, Bucharest hosted an international anthropology, archaeology and prehistoric studies congress. On that occasion, Francisc Rainer managed to open the first anthropology institute in Romania. His research method was interdisciplinary, and he was a university professor who introduced culture in an anatomy course. One should not separate biology from culture in the attempt to understand human nature. Why is this perspective important? For each profession, from corporate to liberal, anything to do with humans, takes knowledge that shapes that profession. Francisc Rainer brought something new in anatomy, saying that anatomy is the study of living humans, of humans in motion. Man in motion is a living being, in a limited framework defined by time, which evolves from birth to death.”

One of the scientific points of attraction in the period when anthropology flourished was eugenics, which had a different aim than anthropology, that of improving human genes, trying to improve the human condition. Many physicians were involved in the eugenics project, turning it from a scientific endeavour into a way of legitimising cultural and racial superiority. Francisc Rainer was tempted by eugenics, but kept away from it because of its ideological component, as Adrian Majuru told us:

Adrian Majuru: “He generally stayed away from any methodology, let’s say scientific, embraced by right wing ideological dogmas. He was a leftist without being politically involved. Eugenics never was a part of his sphere of concerns with practical or theoretical application.”

In spite of his rationalist concerns and political convictions, Rainer believed in man’s relationship to the divine. He was not an agnostic, like most physicians or socialists, but believed that the metaphysical side of man has a connection to the physical, says Adrian Majuru.

Adrian Majuru: “He developed an interesting element, which can be summarized as follows: man can make a bridge to the godhead through knowledge and culture. Rainer was rather leery with respect to divinity. He said that modern man no longer pays attention to the inner man, he eats, enjoys himself, consumes. He was talking about the late 1930s. Modern man no longer has a grasp of the inner man, which we all have until we die, sometimes without ever getting to know him, until the day we die. This inner man, this alter ego, may bridge that gap, and makes knowledge possible. The other man deals with the practical side of things. We are not necessarily doubled, but we have a soul and a spirit. Rainer was very concerned with what happens to spirit after death. What he knew for sure about the soul is that it would free itself and have a very clear path, but he didn’t know what happens to it.”

Francisc Iosif Rainer’s method of offering the individual a wide cultural horizon was his attempt of finding answers to life’s questions. For the man of the 20th century, who believed it was free of the limitations of previous eras, scientific authority was the most important of all.

There were a few pillars buttressing the emergence and growth of the Soviet-styled political societies in the former Soviet Union’s satellite countries in the early 1950s. These pillars were the Soviet army, the communist party, the repression apparatus and the Soviet advisers. The latter brought with them from Moscow the communist mindset and specific ways to implement it in all Central and East European countries. Romania was no exception to that plight; back then, Soviet advisers flooded all public institutions, to stage a close surveillance of the shift from a capitalist to a socialist society. The Romanian government submitted an official request to Moscow, but in fact dispatching Soviet advisers to Romania was entirely Moscow’s decision.

In the autumn of 1949, the leader of Romanian communists, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej would send a letter to A. A. Gromyko, the then USSR acting Foreign Minister, requesting one or two specialists to provide assistance to the Romanian Workers Party, and specifically to analyze the status of some of the party members whose activity was deemed suspicious. In the Soviet Union Communist Party’s Political Bureau meeting of November 9, 1949, Dej’s request was officially approved. Sent to Romania on the part of the USSR State Security Ministry were A.M. Saharovski and V.S. Patrikeev. That was only the beginning. A Convention between Romania and the USSR, signed on February 5, 1950, sealed the deal for Romania’s subordination to Moscow.

First of all, Soviet advisers were sent to the army and Securitate, the political police. They were dispatched on a three-year term, and the living expenses for the Soviet officials and their families were covered by the Romanian side. The Soviet advisers cashed two sets of salaries, one in the Romanian currency and another in Soviet currency, the ruble, which was paid to the Soviet state. Also, Soviet advisers were offered free lodging, access to special shops and transport facilities.

But the Army and the Securitate were not the only strategic areas for the Soviet advisers. So were Romania’s economic sectors. Nicolae Magherescu ran the cabinet of Liberal Mihail Romniceanu’s short term in office as Minister in the communist-dominated Petru Groza government. In 1996, Magherescu told Romanian Radio Broadcasting Corporation’s Oral History Center about the presence of one such Soviet adviser in the National Bank of Romania.

Nicolae Magherescu: “I was sent to Ploiesti, in southern Romania, to a subsidiary of the National Bank, where I stayed for only two years before coming back. And when I came back to the Central Bank, at the end of 1949, there was a soviet adviser, Romashov, I can clearly remember his name. I also remember his sloppy clothes, his crumpled trousers. He came with instructions from the Moscow-based Gost Bank, and we had to follow suit, all our bank operations emulating the Soviet model. But we were lucky to have Aurel Vijoli as governor; he had been working for the National Bank since 1923. He was indeed a professional, well trained and willing to preserve the National Bank’s tradition and to educate its staff in that spirit.“

Nicolae Magherescu also spoke about how the policy of Romania’s Central Bank changed, in keeping with directions from Moscow.

Nicolae Magherescu: “We had to change our policy because we had been ordered to adjust to the new system. And what did that mean? Well, all the currency on the market had to be placed into National Bank accounts. No enterprise was allowed to keep cash above a certain amount. The loan plan for a company would be established in accordance with its deposits at the National Bank. It was the National Bank that was funding all companies, after the Ministry of Finance had supplied them with current assets of their own. The amount exceeding the current assets had to be covered from bank loans. So, the state’s centralized system started to be implemented at the National Bank and at other existing banks.”

The policy of Sovietising Romania began with the repression apparatus and the economy, although the cultural area was also important. In an interview he gave in 2000, artist Ion Salisteanu recollected the presence of soviet adviser Kovalenko.

Ion Salisteanu: “He would not have a dialogue with students and always came with a bodyguard. He was portly, chubby, a little bit conceited and had an Asian look. He was a strange man with a penchant for giving orders and scaring people. Professors always whispered when he was around, everybody felt ill at ease back then. We later learnt that his services were not very appreciated in Moscow and he was dispatched to a prison camp somewhere in Siberia, where he eventually died. He would come to us accompanied by his translator, a fat, blonde lady who spoke with a strong Russian accent. Kovalenko had a certain insolence and was always ready to shower you with good and bad examples; we all had the feeling that he didn’t belong there, his presence was suffocating.”

On January the 14th 1957, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union ruled that Romania had enough advisers to carry on towards communism by itself. The Soviet advisers were no longer needed. Although most of these were called back to Moscow in 1958, the Soviet Union military advisers remained in Bucharest until the early 1960s.

On June 22nd 1941, the Romanian army alongside the Germans crossed the Prut River to liberate Bessarabia, a Romanian province the Soviet Union had annexed a year earlier. At that point the winners of World War I found themselves in a desperate situation. France had been occupied in June 1940, while, within the confines of its own archipelago, England found it very difficult to protect itself from Luftwaffe’s rage. Romania, punished by Hitler for its pro-French and pro-English policy, had no other choice than to adopt Europe’s new German order and substantially contributed to the war effort.

The Romanian army started its offensive against the Soviet army on a battlefront stretching from the Black Sea to Bukovina’s Carpathians. In the wake of the poor Soviet poor resistance, in three weeks alone, the Romanian troops completely liberated the two provinces Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina. On July 27th, Hitler sent Marshall Antonescu a telegram congratulating him on the liberation of the Romanian territories and also asked him to cross the Dniester River in order to occupy the Transdniester region. Alongside the German army, the Romanian contingents continued their anti-Soviet offensive via southern Ukraine and eventually reached Stalingrad.

In 1993, sublieutenant Ahile Sari told Radio Romania’s Center for Oral History that as they were crossing the southern part of the Soviet Union he came across unbelievable situations and things.



Ahile Sari:” For the first time in my life I got to see a train loaded with Soviet deportees, they were not prisoners but deported families, they were probably being sent to Germany. It was also the first time that I experienced that kind of life and the dramatic situation of those starving people with agonized faces, who were holding out their tin cans begging for food. It was a sad image for me, and all of us, soldiers and officers alike, hurried to give them everything that we could through the barbed wire fences, while the watch dogs guarding the railcars were fiercely barking.”



The disaster that ensued for the Romanian army on the Eastern front would begin in Stalingrad. The Soviet Army’s Uranus operation focused on attacking the northern flank of the German army lineup in Stalingrad. Defending it were the Romanian and Hungarian troops, whose equipment was poorer than the Germans’, and who also had a low morale. Benefiting from the massive support of armored vehicles, the Soviet attack on November 19 was ferocious. But the Romanians had already gathered intelligence on that and asked for help from the Germans, but the help never came.

Sublieutenant Ahile Sari recollects an episode from the days preceding the Soviet attack: ”A Russian prisoner was brought to the bunker of a battalion commander, and he told us that the great Soviet offensive was going to start in a day or two, so we’d better be careful and take measures. We’re armed to the teeth, the Russian said, with very many war machines. We reported that to the higher echelons, but nobody wanted to believe that after a month or two of fighting, something could happen in the depth of winter. That was on November 17. On November 19, 1942, at 4 a. m. the great Don and Stalingrad offensive started.”



At the Don River bend the Romanian army lost over 300 thousand soldiers. In 1998 notary Mircea Munteanu recollected his participation in the war. He was wounded, he had to withdraw and get medical care in extremely tough conditions. His confession confirms the idea that even if wounded and, theoretically, out of danger, sufferings would not end.



Mircea Munteanu: “The attack started on November 29th on the banks of the Don River and a bullet penetrated my left clavicle, right near the shoulder blade. After I was wounded, I withdrew with the Germans on a German tank. There I met two majors who saw me on that tank and asked me to get off and talk to them. I told them that the commander of the platoon had been killed by a Russian bayonet. They started patching up my wound. Then we got to a kolkhoz, named Frunza (leaf). I found a sergeant there who gave me a loaf of bread and a can, and told me to go to another village, where there were about 16 wagons from the 16th Infantry Regiment. I went there and I found the wagons, but my shoulder hurt, because I had got there on horseback across the field, which was covered in snow. It was terribly cold and my wound was bleeding, as the patch had fallen. I didn’t have a compass or anything, I would find my way guided by the moon, without being able to see anything else. After I walked for a while I saw a village. A Romanian sentinel was there and I asked whether I could find someone to bandage my wound. He told me they had a veterinarian there. So I left again, with other wounded people, 30 kms to the back of the front line. There they had a camp bath and a hospital, and the Germans had our clothes sterilized and dried, as they were full of blood. Then a train came, we all got on, in wagons lined with blankets and they took us all to Poland.”



Considered by military historians as the bloodiest battle in history, the battle of Stalingrad was actually the one that changed the fate on the eastern front. But this is what we know now. People back than were still hoping that history would turn around, as history is never fully predictable.

Such was the case of socialism in Romanian society, where it started spreading from the West quite early. After the revolutionary moment of 1848 and with the establishment and consolidation of the Romanian modern state between 1859 and 1866, socialism started to gain momentum. The development of industry led to the emergence of a social group that would respond to socialist ideology.

Socialist periodicals such as the Romanian Telegraph, set up in 1965, the Worker, the Romanian Worker, the Typographical Annals or the Contemporary addressed socialist intellectuals and partisans of progressivism who sought to circulate their own ideas in the public sphere. Leading contributors included Ioan and Gheorghe Nadejde, Panait Musoiu, Zamfir Arbore and Titus Dunca. Romanian socialism was also infused with a good dose of Russian socialism via the scholarship of narodniks such as Constantin Dogrogeanu-Gherea, Nicolae Zubcu-Codreanu, N. Russel and other immigrants oppressed by the Tsarist regime.

Dogrogeanu-Gherea was perhaps the most prolific and influential socialist scholar of nineteenth-century Romania. His task was extremely difficult. Whereas on the one hand he had to respond to those who believed that socialism was at odds with the Romanian spirit, he also had to adapt Marxist principles to rural society. Sociologist Calin Cotoi explains the predicament of Romanian socialists in the public sphere, of Dogrogeanu-Gherea in particular.

Calin Cotoi: “Gherea’s case was most interesting, because his works reflect the tension between the theory of form without content and Marxism. Most of Gherea’s arguments had a clear-cut purpose, namely of legitimising the need for a local socialism. To him, criticism against Romanian socialism could be summed up in one phrase: “Socialism is an exotic plant in Romania”, which meant that advocates of socialism were strange individuals who had little to say, although they were nice people from a progressive and moral point of view. Romanians did not form a society that responded to socialist rhetoric. Gherea’s strategy, which was interesting at the time, was to turn society into something exotic and socialism into something normal. Romanian society was a monstrosity; it was the opposite of serfdom and as such was an oddity. Gherea dwelt on the abnormality that characterised Romania. The biggest problem, Gherea argued, was that any analysis of Romanian society should employ the same terms as in the West, since they meant one thing over there and a completely different thing here. He even proposed a law in order to account for abnormality which he termed ‘the law of social orbiting’”.

The setting up of the first Romanian socialist party, the Romanian Workers’ Social Democratic Party, on March 31st 1893 was a difficult enterprise. Given the system of voting, which back then was based on the wealth of voters, the party’s election base was extremely small. The party program was drawn up by Dobrogeanu — Gherea, who found inspiration in the Erfurt Program of the German Social Democratic Party. Gherea believed that the idea would gradually create the critical mass of followers.

Calin Cotoi: “His strategy was to find social abnormality in Romania in order to preserve the normality of the socialist position, an approach that partially worked. At one time he said, quote ‘socialism is just like liberalism in Romania’. If it hadn’t been for liberalism, modern Romania would not have existed. Socialism is the next stage. Imagine how it would have been if the Romanian liberals had started reforms in 1770 instead of 1848”. That was Gherea’s main argument. What is interesting is that when somehow forced to explain why socialism was necessary, Gherea used arguments typical of the Russian populism. He claimed socialism was something we owed to the people who fed us, dressed us and raised us all through hard work. In fact, socialism is something rather emotional and moral. And this matches what was happening in the Romanian socialism at the turn of the century, which was a sort of sub-culture of socialism. There were small groups of people doing natural sciences and counting very much on emotional aspects. If we look at what the semi-socialist Contemporanul paper used to publish, we see many articles on natural sciences. So, it was a mixture of emotional, natural sciences, morality and social change.”

Despite considerable efforts, social democracy and its party stayed on the outskirts of Romanian politics until after WWI. These efforts were seen as the passions of some day-dreaming intellectuals’ passions, rather than valid solutions.

As early as the autumn of 1944 anti-communist and anti-Soviet resistance groups were formed in the Romanian mountains. Soldiers, students, peasants, workers, men and women alike joined these partisan groups, which operated particularly in the Carpathians. It was only after 1989 that silence was broken in this respect, and Romanians found out about the participation of women in the anti-communist resistance movement. The iconic figure of the struggle for a principled life was a peasant, Elisabeta Rizea from the village of Nucşoara, in the central Romanian county of Argeş, who became famous thanks to a television documentary called The Memorial of Suffering.

If we look strictly at the facts, we could say that nothing of what Elisabeta Rizea did falls into the category of heroic acts. She did not fight on any front, saved no one from death, did not sacrifice herself for anyone else. What she did however was to stand by her principles, something that today we are tempted to see as relative values. Elisabeta Rizea did not lie, did not inform the political police on her neighbours and acquaintances, did not lose her faith that justice would eventually prevail. Elisabeta Rizea was on the side of those who fought for justice and truth, and she helped them as best as she could: she gave them food and protected them from enemies.

Elisabeta Rizea was the best symbol of the decent peasant defending her small universe, that is property, family and faith. She paid for that serving 12 years in jail. The Oral History Centre of Radio Romania had the honour to interview Elisabeta Rizea in 2000, when she was 88 years old, asking her how she had kept in touch with the Arsenescu-Arnautoiu group of partisans:

Elisabeta Rizea: “I have no connection with politics, I’m a straightforward woman. If I’m Romanian, why should I side with another country and not with my Romanians? I didn’t meet the partisans. I had a willow tree with a hollow in it and that was my mailbox. If I saw an army passing by, I wrote on the note: “Beware! The army is passing by!” When Securitate officers came by, as they tracked me down, I put a water mug in the wall. They would talk while sitting at the table here and I would listen to them from the other room. And then, I would hurry away along the path. I had a ladder there, would get down the ladder and go to the hollow to put the note in. And the boys and captain Arnautoiu would look for the note in the willow hollow and read it. I wrote where the army was, where I had put food for them, anything I could do.”

According to her confession, when she was being investigated, she was hooked by the hair and beaten until she lost consciousness. At that point, she remembers crossing herself with her tongue, praying God to give her strength not to say anything of what she knew. It is the oath that a straightforward man does not break. Elisabeta Rizea also recalls the visits that the Securitate officers would pay to her before her arrest.

Elisabeta Rizea: “There was a wooden footbridge, not a cement one and the Securitate officer had his boots on. And when I was hearing boots, my heart started pounding ready to break out of my chest. I told myself: now they’ll grab me and I’ll get shot. That’s how I felt, why lie about it? I was raising the wick on the lamp, and they came in and asked me about them. I was telling them I don’t know, I don’t know anything. And I told them nothing, it didn’t work with me. I was swearing on the bible and cross laid out on the table. I was taking the cross in my hand and swore on the Holy Gospel. Colonel Arsenescu was there, just like Toma Arnautoiu, there were some doctors too. People with book learning, all of them. And I swore I would never betray them. That’s what I did.”

Over 200 years ago, Irish philosopher and statesman Edmund Burke said that for evil to triumph it is enough for good people to do nothing. In the case of Elisabeta Rizea, it was precisely good people who supported evil ones. Neighbours kept an eye on her and reported to the Securitate everything she was doing in her courtyard. She was jailed, and was released in 1963, managing to survive the political regime that scarred her existence.

The impact that Elisabeta Rizea had on Romanian public opinion was great, especially between 1990 and 2000. This could be seen from the place she got in the ranking made by Romanian public television for the TV contest called Great Romanians. She came in 58th. When there was a proposal to build a monument of the anti-communist national resistance, Elisabeta Rizea was the first name on the list, and got the most support from Romanian civic organizations.

In 2003, at 91, Elisabeta Rizea passed away, and left a trace of dignity in history. It is a small example of how a person can be tormented, but never defeated.

As early as the autumn of 1944 anti-communist and anti-Soviet resistance groups were formed in the Romanian mountains. Soldiers, students, peasants, workers, men and women alike joined these partisan groups, which operated particularly in the Carpathians. It was only after 1989 that silence was broken in this respect, and Romanians found out about the participation of women in the anti-communist resistance movement. The iconic figure of the struggle for a principled life was a peasant, Elisabeta Rizea from the village of Nucşoara, in the central Romanian county of Argeş, who became famous thanks to a television documentary called The Memorial of Suffering.

If we look strictly at the facts, we could say that nothing of what Elisabeta Rizea did falls into the category of heroic acts. She did not fight on any front, saved no one from death, did not sacrifice herself for anyone else. What she did however was to stand by her principles, something that today we are tempted to see as relative values. Elisabeta Rizea did not lie, did not inform the political police on her neighbours and acquaintances, did not lose her faith that justice would eventually prevail. Elisabeta Rizea was on the side of those who fought for justice and truth, and she helped them as best as she could: she gave them food and protected them from enemies.

Elisabeta Rizea was the best symbol of the decent peasant defending her small universe, that is property, family and faith. She paid for that serving 12 years in jail. The Oral History Centre of Radio Romania had the honour to interview Elisabeta Rizea in 2000, when she was 88 years old, asking her how she had kept in touch with the Arsenescu-Arnautoiu group of partisans:

Elisabeta Rizea: “I have no connection with politics, I’m a straightforward woman. If I’m Romanian, why should I side with another country and not with my Romanians? I didn’t meet the partisans. I had a willow tree with a hollow in it and that was my mailbox. If I saw an army passing by, I wrote on the note: “Beware! The army is passing by!” When Securitate officers came by, as they tracked me down, I put a water mug in the wall. They would talk while sitting at the table here and I would listen to them from the other room. And then, I would hurry away along the path. I had a ladder there, would get down the ladder and go to the hollow to put the note in. And the boys and captain Arnautoiu would look for the note in the willow hollow and read it. I wrote where the army was, where I had put food for them, anything I could do.”

According to her confession, when she was being investigated, she was hooked by the hair and beaten until she lost consciousness. At that point, she remembers crossing herself with her tongue, praying God to give her strength not to say anything of what she knew. It is the oath that a straightforward man does not break. Elisabeta Rizea also recalls the visits that the Securitate officers would pay to her before her arrest.

Elisabeta Rizea: “There was a wooden footbridge, not a cement one and the Securitate officer had his boots on. And when I was hearing boots, my heart started pounding ready to break out of my chest. I told myself: now they’ll grab me and I’ll get shot. That’s how I felt, why lie about it? I was raising the wick on the lamp, and they came in and asked me about them. I was telling them I don’t know, I don’t know anything. And I told them nothing, it didn’t work with me. I was swearing on the bible and cross laid out on the table. I was taking the cross in my hand and swore on the Holy Gospel. Colonel Arsenescu was there, just like Toma Arnautoiu, there were some doctors too. People with book learning, all of them. And I swore I would never betray them. That’s what I did.”

Over 200 years ago, Irish philosopher and statesman Edmund Burke said that for evil to triumph it is enough for good people to do nothing. In the case of Elisabeta Rizea, it was precisely good people who supported evil ones. Neighbours kept an eye on her and reported to the Securitate everything she was doing in her courtyard. She was jailed, and was released in 1963, managing to survive the political regime that scarred her existence.

The impact that Elisabeta Rizea had on Romanian public opinion was great, especially between 1990 and 2000. This could be seen from the place she got in the ranking made by Romanian public television for the TV contest called Great Romanians. She came in 58th. When there was a proposal to build a monument of the anti-communist national resistance, Elisabeta Rizea was the first name on the list, and got the most support from Romanian civic organizations.

In 2003, at 91, Elisabeta Rizea passed away, and left a trace of dignity in history. It is a small example of how a person can be tormented, but never defeated.

This was a US attempt to aid its Soviet ally in the struggle against the coalition led by Nazi Germany of which Romania was part at the time. However, the American raid also targeted Bucharest, where they were attempting to destroy the main railway station switches. This resulted in a few thousand innocent civilians getting killed, mostly refugees from northern Moldavia. Writer Mihail Sebastian wrote in his diary, in his entry of 8th April 1944:

“Yesterday afternoon I went to the neighbourhood of Grivita. From the railroad station to Basarab Boulevard, no house was left unscathed. The view was harrowing. They were still taking out the dead from under the rubble, three women were wailing, yanking their hair and rending their clothes, mourning a smouldering corpse freshly taken out of the rubble. It had rained in the morning, and the entire neighbourhood was smelling of mud, soot, burned wood. An atrocious, nightmarish view. I couldn’t get beyond Basarab, I went back home with a feeling of disgust, horror and powerlessness.”

The official toll was 2,942 dead and 2,126 wounded. The social memory was also deeply touched by these events. Conductor Emanuel Elenescu, talking for the Oral History Centre of public radio in 1994, recalls the feeling on April 4th, 1944.

Emanuel Elenescu: “A passive defence exercise had been scheduled a week before, for 10 o’clock. As the people were undisciplined, they couldn’t be bothered. The sirens went off to announce it was over, and people went about their business. Around 1:30 or 20 to 2, the alarm sirens went off again. People didn’t pay any heed, they thought it was the exercise. I was on Popa Tatu Street, close to the radio building, and I met my mother and brother, who were eating at a buffet close to Buzesti Square. After the sirens stopped, we heard airplane noise. Since I had a good musical ear, I realised that it wasn’t the usual, it was the noise of very heavy airplanes, it sent chills down your spine. It’s as if the sky was trembling. I said: “Mom, let’s get to a shelter, this is a real alarm!” We went into a grocery store on Grivita Boulevard, and the bombing started. There were three waves. The shelter was quaking, it felt like an earthquake. These were Liberators, Flying Fortresses, they had machine guns in the front and the rear, both. When we got out, Matache Market was full of dead people. A tram still standing was leaning against a house, and the rail was bent. All the dead people were untouched by the bombs, all died from the shock wave. They all had blood on their faces, they were bloated too. At the moment of the explosion, a vacuum forms, and people imploded.”

Public radio got relocated, and Emanuel Elenescu recalls how it continued its broadcasts as the American raids also went on.

Emanuel Elenescu: “In the evening I had a broadcast on the radio, I was playing with the orchestra. I went to the radio station, everything was down to the ground, there was nothing we could do. There were daily alarms, even though the bombing had stopped. Since we couldn’t broadcast, we got an order from Marshal Antonescu to disperse. We got dispersed to Bod, a village in southern Transylvania. It was a Saxon village, there were few Romanians, and the village was 2 km away from the emitter there. We put together a makeshift studio in a pub held by a Saxon by the name of Schuster. I had one, sometimes two broadcasts a day, live. It was still business as usual. Whenever we heard in German “Achtung, achtung!”, we knew the first waves of bombers were arriving. One day, I was conducting Tchaikovsky’s Pathetic Symphony, and I heard a sound like kettle drum. I looked at the drummer, he looked at me. It was the sound of American bombers flying at low altitude over Bod, right above the village, they were about to bomb Brasov. It was either a mistake or a lugubrious joke made by a sound engineer, who didn’t tell us that we were under alert. And everyone ran off into the fields.”

Professor Olimpiu Borzea, in 2001, spoke to the Oral History Centre as an eyewitness to events as well.

Olimpiu Borzea: “In April and May I went on a tour of hospitals around the country. I went to Socola, then Vaslui, and from there to Bucharest, to Elisabeta Hospital. After that I moved to the Franciscan Street, there was a Catholic school there and dorm room buildings. When they started dropping bombs, they took us to the basement, and you could hear the bombs. A soldier kept complaining, and I told him to shut up, I said: “What kind of a fighter are you, even these young girls, the nurses, don’t complain as much as you do.” He didn’t know how to use a thermometer, he used it at the wrong end. The poor nurse came and told him: “You have a fever, you’re burning up.” And put the thermometer back. I asked to see it, and saw it was broken. I gave him mine, and it turns out he didn’t have a fever at all.”

The American raids fell within the logic of the war, that of destroying or demoralising the enemy. However, it was the civilians who paid the highest price, even though they had no say in the conflict.

In the interwar years, radio broadcasting was an absolutely groundbreaking phenomenon both as a press institution and in terms of technological progress. Radio reporters were in the middle of the main events shaping the 1930s and the history of this new invention qualifies it as a reliable source in the process of studying contemporary history.

Fascist and authoritarian right-wing regimes coming to power all over Europe in the late 30s, massively relied on the radio as a means of propaganda, in a bid to gain legitimacy and consolidate their position. The same things happened in Romania too, after the National Radio Broadcasting Corporation had been set up in 1928. Politicizing was one of the main challenges this institution had to overcome, because the rise to power of right and left wing totalitarian regimes affected its objectivity and equidistance.

The numerous recordings stored by the Oral History Centre in the Romanian Radio Broadcasting Corporation between 1990 and 2000 have confirmed the difficulty of keeping a balance between the pressure exerted by the communist regime and the employees’ work ethic. However, the main events, such as the assassination of Iron Guard head Corneliu Zelea Codreanu in 1938, were given proper coverage in news bulletins. In 2001 Professor Olimpiu Borzea recollected how he learnt about the event from a radio broadcast:

“It was on November the 29th, the eve of St. Andrew. I remember being in the big hall of the Theology Academy, where the intellectual elite of Sibiu used to gather. That was my second year of study in a state-of-the art, modern school. I left the classes that day and made it for the Cheese Market downtown Sibiu, when I heard in the speakers outside, ‘Attention, attention! A group of Ironguardists have been shot after trying to flee custody!’ We were all stunned by the news. What? we said. And it seemed that everybody froze on the spot in the market that day!”

Vasile Blanaru got a job at the Radio in 1938. He first worked in the Radio Drama Department, then held various management positions. In 1999, he talked about the presence of the fascists in the institution.

“The Iron Guard members in the Radio Corporation made up a separate service. It was part of an Iron Guard branch that also included the legionnaires in the Culture Ministry, in printing houses and in the Country Guard. There were five or six sections in all, and they were all headquartered in the Radio Broadcasting Corporation building, on Esculap Street, near Berthelot Street. I headed this service until after the rebellion. And in this capacity, and also as a political representative, I took part in the meetings of the Board of Directors, chaired by Nichifor Crainic. A government order was issued, under which Jews were no longer allowed to work in public institutions. I was also the head of the Salaries Department, and I made this proposal: if we fired someone from the Radio, we should pay them at least their salaries for 6 months. Only one Jew working at the Radio was fired, and he received his six-month pay.”

Another important event was the murdering of Prime Minister Armand Calinescu by the Iron Guard, on September 21st, 1939. After the assassination, the perpetrators announced their deed on the public radio.

Vasile Blanaru was there when the legionnaires went on air: “I happened to be in the Radio building that particular day. Miti Dumitrescu, Traian Popescu and Moldovanu, together with 6 members of the squad that shot Armand Calinescu down in Cotroceni, came upstairs in the broadcasting studio, where the orchestra was performing. They were armed, they had weapons, pistols and grenades. They were really well armed! The orchestra got up, and one of them, Traian Popescu, said on the radio that a team of legionnaires executed the enemy of the people, the whole story. They put behind the door all their weapons, their grenades and pistols, and went downstairs, at the police constable of the Radio Corporation, and gave themselves up. I saw them myself going to give themselves up.”

The Romanian Radio and Television Broadcasting Corporation was a hot spot during the legionnaire rebellion of 21-23 January 1941, when General Ion Antonescu, with support from the army and Nazi Germany, removed the Iron Guard from power. Engineer Gheorghe Crisbasanu was in charge of the Bod emitter in 1934. In 1997, he recalled those moments:

“I came by car to Bucharest, and they stopped me at the gate, barred my access to the stations, so I couldn’t bring weapons to the legionnaires. And then the colonel in charge told the sentinel to call the head of the guard formed by the legionnaires to talk to him. He came over, with his entire guard, about 12 people in all, unbelted their pistols, and they were taken straight to jail, to Brasov. And then I got permission to get into the yard, after I got checked for the weapons they believed I had on me.”

The Romanian Radio Broadcasting Corporation was free on 23 August 1944, but alas only for a short time, as history would have it. Communism came and enslaved it for several decades.

There are few individuals in Romanian history who have been so disliked as King Carol II, and even fewer who made themselves the object of such abhorrence. In politics King Carol has been criticized by both leading figures of Romanian democracy, such as Iuliu Maniu, and by the far right. King Carol II was a vainglorious and authoritarian figure, and reactions to his autocratic rule were quick to pile up. 10 years after his ascension to the throne, Carol II left Romania in a state of agony, bereft of big chunks of its territory in the east, west and south. Carol II was the type that would declare open conflict even to members of his own family. One of them was his brother, Prince Nicolae.

The fourth born of King Ferdinand and Queen Marie, Nicolae was baptized by Tsar Nikolay II of Russia himself, who would be executed by the Bolshevik Government in 1918. Although he received the education of a prince who would one day claim the throne of Romania if the occasion demanded it, Prince Nicolae obstinately turned down every opportunity to get more involved in politics and take the path of royalty, and the opportunities were quite a few. Historian Ioan Scurtu explains that one of the main features of Prince Nicolae was his complete lack of ambition towards becoming a monarch. Ioan Scurtu:

“Prince Nicolae was the second son of the six children Queen Marie and King Ferdinand had during their marriage. Prince Nicolae had no royalty ambitions. He had no intention to take the throne, even when Prime Minister Marghiloman suggested Prince Nicolae be proclaimed heir to the throne in 1918, when Carol married Zizi Lambrino and was on the brink of being written out of the lineage. Later on, in the regency period, between 1927 and 1930, Queen Marie insisted that Prince Nicolae be appointed first regent so that he should be the de facto leader of the Royal House of Romania. But, as I’ve said, Prince Nicolae had no such ambition”.

In any family, it is commonplace to see brothers quarrelling, and the Royal Family was no exception. In the case of Carol and Nicolae, historian Ioan Scurtu says there are two reasons accounting for their rivalry. The first was Carol’s chronic arrogance. Carol wanted everyone around him to swear blind allegiance to him and to everything he did, even to his own personal choices and to his love life. Ioan Scurtu:

“On June 6th, 1930, when Carol returned to Romania from his self-imposed exile, Prince Nicolae welcomed him back with arms wide open and hugged him in public at Cotreceni Palace. I think the conflict between them is rooted in a more personal matter, namely Prince Nicolae’s marriage to a woman who was not royalty, something that was frown upon by the Royal House of Romania. Carol sought to bring his brother Nicolae back “on the right path”, although he himself was living with his partner Elena Lupescu, who was far from the stuff of nobility and whom in the end he did not marry. Nicolae however did marry Ioana Dolete-Saveanu in December 1931. Responding to Carol’s suggestion, Interior Minister Constantin Argetoianu asked the Mayor of Tohani village, where the civil marriage was performed, to bring forth the civil registry. He summoned his private notary and asked him to copy every record of all the marriages except that between Prince Nicolae and Ioana Saveanu”.

The other source of rivalry between the two brothers had to do with Nicolae’s political choices. Ioan Scurtu says this aspect inflamed Carol and kept the conflict alive. Ioan Scurtu:

“The second cause of the conflict is tied to the political choices of Prince Nicolae. He got very close to the Legionnaire movement, which in April 1936 held a Congress that approved the set up of the famous death squads, entrusted with taking out their political opponents, including Elena Lupescu. To make things worse, Prince Nicolae publicly expressed his sympathy towards the legionnaires. Against this backdrop, the Legionnaire Movement published a manifesto extolling Prince Nicolae and his standpoint against this “young madam” who was seen as a bane for the country. In April 1937, at Carol’s initiative, a gathering of the Privy Council decided to cast off Prince Nicolae from the Royal Family. It was a very sensitive issue, because Nicolae was accused of marrying a member of the lower class, in other words, he had breached the statute of the Royal House”.

The end of the war also marked the end of the Romanian dynasty, with King Carol II already in exile since 1940. He was later joined by the other members of the Royal Family. Nicolae was the one who took the first step towards reconciliation with his brother. Ioan Scurtu:

“Although he had been banned from the Royal House, although Carol had had an extremely bad attitude towards him, Prince Nicolae was the only member of the Royal Family to attend the funerals of Carol II. Neither his son Michael I, nor his sisters or other close relatives did that. Prince Nicolae was an interesting character in Romanian politics. He was not at all interested in replacing Carol as King of Romania, though he resented Elena Lupescu’s involvement in politics.”

The rivalry between King Carol II and Prince Nicolae did not go as far as the one between the King and Corneliu Codreanu, the head of the Iron Guard, which ended in Codreanu’s assassination. But the whimsical king did not shy from using against his brother all the tricks he could possibly use in order to impose his will.

On April 4th, 1944, a few hundred American bombers took off from Foggia, in Italy, to survey the Romanian air space and bomb targets of economic importance. This was a US attempt to aid its Soviet ally in the struggle against the coalition led by Nazi Germany of which Romania was part of at the time. However, the American raid also targeted Bucharest, where they were attempting to destroy the main railway station switches. This resulted in a few thousand innocent civilians getting killed, mostly refugees from northern Moldavia. Writer Mihail Sebastian wrote in his diary, in his entry of 8th April 1944:

“Yesterday afternoon I went to the neighbourhood of Grivita. From the railroad station to Basarab Boulevard, no house was left unscathed. The view was harrowing. They were still taking out the dead from under the rubble, three women were wailing, yanking their hair and rending their clothes, mourning a smouldering corpse freshly taken out of the rubble. It had rained in the morning, and the entire neighbourhood was smelling of mud, soot, burned wood. An atrocious, nightmarish view. I couldn’t get beyond Basarab, I went back home with a feeling of disgust, horror and powerlessness.”

The official toll was 2,942 dead and 2,126 wounded. The social memory was also deeply touched by these events. Conductor Emanuel Elenescu, talking for the Oral History Centre of public radio in 1994, recalls the feeling on April 4th, 1944:

Emanuel Elenescu: “A passive defence exercise had been scheduled a week before, for 10 o’clock. As the people were undisciplined, they couldn’t be bothered. The sirens went off to announce it was over, and people went about their business. Around 1:30 or 20 to 2, the alarm sirens went off again. People didn’t pay any heed, they thought it was the exercise. I was on Popa Tatu Street, close to the radio building, and I met my mother and brother, who were eating at a buffet close to Buzesti Square. After the sirens stopped, we heard airplane noise. Since I had a good musical ear, I realised that it wasn’t the usual, it was the noise of very heavy airplanes, it sent chills down your spine. It’s as if the sky was trembling. I said: “Mom, let’s get to a shelter, this is a real alarm!” We went into a grocery store on Grivita Boulevard, and the bombing started. There were three waves. The shelter was quaking, it felt like an earthquake. These were Liberators, Flying Fortresses, they had machine guns in the front and the rear, both. When we got out, Matache Market was full of dead people. A tram still standing was leaning against a house, and the rail was bent. All the dead people were untouched by the bombs, all died from the shock wave. They all had blood on their faces, they were bloated too. At the moment of the explosion, a vacuum forms, and people imploded.”

Public radio got relocated, and Emanuel Elenescu recalls how it continued its broadcasts as the American raids also went on:

Emanuel Elenescu: “In the evening I had a broadcast on the radio, I was playing with the orchestra. I went to the radio station, everything was down to the ground, there was nothing we could do. There were daily alarms, even though the bombing had stopped. Since we couldn’t broadcast, we got an order to disperse from Marshal Antonescu. We got dispersed to Bod, a village in southern Transylvania. It was a Saxon village, there were few Romanians, and the village was 2 km away from the emitter there. We put together a makeshift studio in a pub held by a Saxon by the name of Schuster. I had one, sometimes two broadcasts a day, live. It was still business as usual. Whenever we heard in German “Achtung, achtung!”, we knew the first waves of bombers were arriving. One day, I was conducting Tchaikovsky’s Pathetic Symphony, and I heard a sound like kettle drum. I looked at the drummer, he looked at me. It was the sound of American bombers flying at low altitude over Bodu, right above the village, they were about to bomb Brasov. It was either a mistake or a lugubrious joke made by a sound engineer, who didn’t tell us that we were under alert. And everyone ran off into the fields.”

In 2001, professor Olimpiu Borzea spoke to the Oral History Centre as an eye witness to events as well:

Olimpiu Borzea: “In April and May I went on a tour of hospitals around the country. I went to Socola, then Vaslui, and from there to Bucharest, to Elisabeta Hospital. After that I moved to the Franciscan Street, there was a Catholic school there and dorm room buildings. When they started dropping bombs, they took us to the basement, and you could hear the bombs. A soldier kept complaining, and I told him to shut up, I said: “What kind of a fighter are you, even these young girls, the nurses, don’t complain as much as you do.” He didn’t know how to use a thermometer, he used it at the wrong end. The poor nurse came and told him: “You have a fever, you’re burning up.” And put the thermometer back. I asked to see it, and saw it was broken. I gave him mine, and it turns out he didn’t have a fever at all.”

American bombing raids fell within war’s logic, that of destroying or demoralising the enemy. However, it was still the civilians who paid the highest price, even though they had no say in that conflict.

Around the 1900s Romanian intellectuals were looking for a model to solve the rural problem. The rural population accounted for more than 80% of Romania’s population and had to be helped to prosper economically and thus to contribute to the development of society. Most Romanian intellectuals had already embraced the idea of achieving emancipation by cultivating national identity, a project in which culture played a major role. However, a minority thought it wise to give priority to the economy and social emancipation. Under the influence of socialism and Marxism the progressive intellectuals had to fight no only their Conservative adversaries but also those who shared their ideas but not their solutions.

The national ideology was stronger, although around the 1900s both nationalism and socialism were in full swing. Sociologist Calin Cotoi with the Sociology Faculty of the Bucharest University believes the lack of support for the socialist idea is the result of the force of national ideology in a society that only later embarked on the path of modernisation. The rural issue did not turn into what socialism had hoped, in the sense that it was in fact national ideology that assimilated socialism and not the other way round.

The two great ideology trends that militated for the emancipation of peasants were Marxism and Poporanism, a name derived from “popor”, in English meaning people. The two trends did not find common ground for dialogue, on the contrary. Thus socialism, which was rather fragile, did not have a big influence on the rural population and political decision makers. At the level of ideas, the two ideologies used concepts which were much too abstract for their target group.

Marxism was represented mainly by Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea, or Soloman Katz by his real name, a refugee from Russia. The author of several books, including “Neo-serfdom”, a Marxist analysis of the economic situation of the peasants, Gherea was one of the most influential Socialist leaders. His opponent was also a refugee who came from Bessarabia, Constantin Stere. He brought from Russia the ideology of Narodniks also known as Narodnichestvo which he transformed, together with literary critic Garabet Ibraileanu into Poporanism. Sociologist Calin Cotoi explains:

Calin Cotoi: “Most Romanian Socialists, except for a small minority of French-Belgian orientation, were influenced by the Russian ideology called Narodnichestvo, which can be translated as “peopleism”. But the Romanian Narodniks did not want to be taken for Russian Narodniks. The Romanian poporanists always tried to distance themselves from the Russian Narodniks, and this was valid both in the case of Gherea and Stere. Although Constantin Stere’s books drew extensively on the writings of the Russian thinker Nikolay Mikhaylovsky, they only cited the German neo-positivists such as Eduard Bernstein, Karl Kautsky and Karl Marx. Their entire bibliography is German”.

The Romanian poporanists and the Narodniks had something in common: they chose a 3rd way of economic development, which was neither capitalist nor Marxist. The relationship between intellectuals and peasants was essential and the most important objectives were to take the economically advanced West as a reference point and overcome the contradictions between progress and tradition. Sociologist Calin Cotoi will next talk about the similarities and differences between the Romanian poporanism and the Russian Narodnichestvo.

Calin Cotoi: “It’s interesting to place the Romanian case in this Russian context because, in my opinion, poporanism was the beginning of the modernisation of Romanian society. Poporanism had two dimensions: a theoretical one, related to Constantin Stere and his disputes with the Marxists, and a dimension similar to Narodnichestvo, which included fragments from the cooperative farms movement, the emergence of banks and of rural loans. Transplanting Narodnichestvo into the Romanian environment was like transplanting a movement from an imperial context into the context of an emerging nation. This is fundamental in understanding the differences between the two movements”.

VF The peasant uprising of 1907 was the illustration of the diagnosis the Romanian socialists unsuccessfully tried to establish for Romania in the 1900s.

Proof of their belief is the great number of icons and frescoes representing weapons as a major social reality. Images of soldier saints, defenders of the Christian faith, painted on church walls in the 16th century, document the presence of various types of weapons used by the Romanian armies of the Middle Ages. Experts in mural painting have made amazing discoveries. Here is curator and medieval weapons expert Carol Konig.

Carol Konig: “We have spotted a harquebus in a fresco at the Voronet monastery. It was a major discovery for us, as nothing had been known about this very interesting weapon until 1978, but we know that it was exactly the type of weapon in use at that time in Europe. It was on a matchlock, a mechanism widely used in the Western world. There was no representation of that weapon in the Romanian principalities, as none of them was preserved to present times. However, we have plans and documents about those weapons and today we know exactly what they looked like. So our conclusion is that the painter depicted exactly the weapons used by the armies of his time.”

Of all the medieval weapons, the saber was conveying the strongest religious symbolism. The military saints painted on church walls appear with their sabers, as the main element of their mission, of the battle they were waging against unbelief. The main prototype is that of Archangel Michael – commander of the heavenly armies against the fallen angels – who is carrying a saber. That weapon had a mystical form; its long blade and horizontal guard suggested a cross. And as sabers were made out of steel and had flexible blades, they were standing for another two powerful symbols of Christianity; the toughness of this faith and the believers’ unflinching stand against unbelief. The blade’s flexibility mainly stood for the human soul in an all-out struggle against temptation. Carol Konig has described the characteristics of this weapon as they appear in the picture of a soldier saint on the walls of the Curtea de Arges monastery, in southern Romania.

Carol Konig: “The most representative weapon in use at that time was the saber, a sharp implement very reliable in any battle, as it could be used for both cutting and thrusting. Sabers were double edged, with a straight blade, and that’s the difference between a saber and a sword, the latter had a single-edged curved or straight blade. I was particularly impressed by its hilt, typical for that time, proving that type of saber was a replica of a real one, in use when the fresco was painted. Another weapon that appears in the fresco is the spear. Medieval soldiers used to fight with spears and javelins. The spear was an infantry weapon; it was longer and its tip came in various forms – triangle, leaf etc. The javelin was shorter, had a hardened tip and was particularly in use with the cavalry. Its metallic parts were smaller in order to cut through the enemy’s armour.

But the weapon of choice of the Romanian soldiers was the longbow.

Carol Konig: “Another weapon you could find in paintings or frescoes is the longbow. Armies in the Romanian principalities were fitted with longbows, sabers, or javelins if they were cavalry units. However the longbow remained the weapon of choice, being used in all the main battles the Romanians fought. The victory in the battle of Posada in 1330 was possible thanks to the archers. And in 1395 at Rovine, Mircea the Old relied heavily on archers who helped him get a resounding victory against Turkish sultan Bayezid. The Romanians were expert at firing these deadly weapons. Alexander the Kind, another Romanian ruler sent 400 warriors, most of them archers, to beef up the Polish troops in the battle of Marienburg in 1422. And archers from the Romanian principalities made a name for themselves all across Eastern Europe. Almost all soldier saints have longbows, but the one in this fresco is of an Oriental type. Here you can see the quiver for the arrows, just like it was back then. For defence, soldiers wore breastplates, spaulders and faulds. The breastplate presented in this fresco is not exactly what they used back then; this one is more adorned, with a lot of details. I believe the medieval painter was a little bit creative here. But even so, it is clear that a real breastplate, one that fitted the medieval armies, served as a model.”

The medieval principalities inhabited by Romanians are known to have developed their own weaponry. There was a certain type of saber used mainly in Moldavia. It was mentioned by famous ruler Stephen the Great in a letter to Italian manufacturers in Milan, when he ordered ten sabers of that kind. The manuscript is still on view in a museum in Istanbul, which also displays three of these sabers, one of which is known to have belonged to the great Moldavian ruler.