Romania

Előszó

Romania a photographic memoir All places have their own particular way of surprising the traveller. A fulfilling journey sometimes depends on the apparently minor details - on the harmonious rather than the spectacular aspect of a landscape; on the serenity rather than the splendour that envelops one of the world's hidden corners, discovered by chance; on the gentle charm of the provinciai settlement rather than the stifling monumentality of the conurbation. At the core of our memories, we rediscover the tranquillity that enveloped us when we arrived in places just as pure and wild as on the first day of creation, the warmth of locals always ready to teli of legends, the savour of unique traditional recipes, the picturesque ancestral customs. It is from the accumulation of these and other similar impressions that the pure essences of an unforgettable journey are distilled. This album might be regarded as the "chronicle" of such a journey: it does not attempt to convince you that Romania is the "paradise" of the Balkans, but merely to show you that, to the attentive eye, shards of ineffable beauty reveal themselves here. If you are travelling to Romania for the first time, you will do well to give up any kind of preconception and prepare yourself for surprises, discovering wonders you will never have anticipated. Romania is that place where the Danubius (or Danube), the sacred river of ancient times, finishes its journey, emptying into the Black Sea after traversing 1,075 kilometres of Románián territory. The Román legions once crossed the Danube on their way to Dacia, the realm of the "immortal" Getes, or Dacians - the ancestors of the modem Romanians - who worshipped Zalmoxis. After the Romans defeated the Dacians, the south of this territory became a Román province, named Dacia Félix (in other words,"Fruitful Dacia"). The ethnic mix of Dacians and Romans provided the basis for the emergence of the Románián people, which has been called "an island of Latinity in a Slavic sea". It is to be wondered just how it was possible for a language of Latin origin, like Italian, Spanish or French, to flourish in a part of Europe that has been reckoned the domain of the Slavic languages par excellence. Any journey through these regions will reveal to you continually different facets of Romania, almost as if its metamorphoses were inexhaustible. A Romania with the perfume of the Levant; a Romania that preserves the memory of the "little Paris" epoch; a Romania of churches; a sub-Mediterranean Romania, in the vicinity ofthe Danube; and a Romania of Carpathian mountain peaks are just somé of the facets that this astonishing land is waiting to reveal to you. Today, as Europe transforms itself and searches for a new identity, a journey through Romania yields us significant revelations. Beyond the hesitations that accompany adoption of the norms for harmonisation imposed by the Eli, we shall discover in Romania a land that has always been conscious of its European identity and is endowed with a culture undeniably rooted in European values. Vissza