If we wanted display the history of the Romanian people in the form of a map drawn in relief withmountains, hills, plains, valley, precipes and waters, with rovers and seas, them, Stefan (Stephen) the Great and the Holy and his reign would be the Everest Peak. His entire reign bere the mark of his personality and his activity either political, strategical, cultural, human, moral or religious deserved only superlatives. Never had there been any ruler before this coronation the equak his grandeur, no matter how blessed by God he might have been.
Stephen the Great appeared on the political stage as a result of painful efforts of the Romanian people in order to survive in a very confused and confunsing period: Constantinopoles, the fortress of Christianity had been taken down and the Christians all over Europe and serious resons to werry. The Turks had reached Europe and Kept entering deeply the territories >>>>>>>>

Ion Ghinoiu - He is presently the Scientific Secretary of the Institute of Ethnography and Folklore (Bucharest) and has been at the Institute since 1967. He is also Associate Professor since 1991 at the University of Bucharest where he lectures in Ethnography-Folklore in the department of Sociology and Social Assistance. His Ph.D. was awarded in Geography at the University of Bucharest in 1978. His main fields of interest are customs and feasts, mythology, the ethnology of habitation, ethnographical cartography, and the taxonomy of popular culture. He is widely published in these fields including one hundred scientific studies, The National Atlas of Geography, and Days and Myths: Calendar of the Romanian Peasant 2000. >>>>>

We all should ask ourselves why Avram Iancu has remained so famous, so unique, in the collective memory of the Romanian people and especially of the Romanians from Transylvania. It is true that to a certain degree that his very dynamic style, in a time when the Romanians from Transylvania were forced to be passive he was a very vocal and boisterous symbol of activism. But in the meantime, we should not delude ourselves or try to create myths. He was able to preserve for a limited period of time the liberty of those who depended on him and he was able to repel forces that were superior in number and means to his own. But finally he was defeated, he was publicly humiliated and few of his ideals were fulfilled. In other words if we will analyze only the real facts, trying to judge Avram Iancu in terms belonging to the “real politick,” we will be unable to understand the aura of heroism, almost sanctity that accompany his name and personality. What distinguishes Avram Iancu and makes him almost totally unique in Romanian history (as far as I know only one single Romanian personality could be put in this company and that is Dr. Iuliu Maniu) is the fact that he refused to make moral comprises. He strongly believed that his people were right and have a undeniable right to an existence with dignity and a right to assert their personality. >>>>>>

This chapter draws partly on Dina Iordanova’s 2001 seminal work on Balkan culture, film and the media, “Cinema of Flames”. Her study, together with other similar attempts to cope with, as yet, unacknowledged, unrevealed facts of culture in this area of Europe, is a must today, in the ludicscape of contorted or just delayed truths, or only half-truths, in the grip of a genuinely post-emotional connoisseur, whose task remains that of ludicizing a world and letting in the bitter taste of apocalypticism. The account on Iordanova’s unique contribution to the understanding of the geopolitical perimeter we call the “Balkans’, translates smoothly in my recent work on the the notion of Ludic and a paradigmatic ludicscape as the apogee of a (Ludic) Postmodernism with its regime of excess, and whose expert managing of a certain jocularity was, no doubt, quite beneficial for those for whom, in Bakhtin’s own words, “the rhetorical dispute is a dispute where claiming victory against the opponent, rather than acknowledging the Truth becomes crucial”.

In my thesis on Ludic, I insisted on the mechanism by which a certain, indispensable today (as always) ideological construction of the real is obtained by managing, that which is distorting and eventually annihilating subjectivities destined, otherwise, to serve a genuine dynamic in history; so it is all to do with loss and false pretensions, with unnecessary cynicism, self-inflicted parody and self-denigration in good old Brunian fashion – see Giordano Bruno’s portrait of the Manipulator, required to have immersed and have indulged himself into the shallow waters of temptation, for then, and then only, is the Manipulator in perfect control of its victim. Ludic is, and will remain, the ultimate replacement, agent provocateur, and expert into self-deprivation and ‘stoic’ (sic) (pseudo)resistance. This paper will attempt at relating my theory on ‘Ludic’ with Dina Iordanova’s view on the Balkans..

Many signals have been sent from what Misha Glenny called “The Balkans”, one denomination used through several templates to define a disputed location: “the realm of ruins”.” maze of conspiracy”, “the empire of illusions”, “a house of wars”, “the city of the dead”, “prisons of history”. These are, of course, Glenny’s ironical positionings of the Balkans, suspended somewhere in the nowhere between Europe and Asia, in “the center of some sort of imaginative whirlpool” where “every known superstition in the world is gathered” (Glenny, xxi). This internalized image could be followed into a drastic, this time, although reluctant to

For thousands of years, the legend of great flood has endured in the biblical story of Noah and such Middle Eastern myths as the epic of Gilgamesh. Few scientists believed that such a catastrophic deluge had actually occurred. But these Bible „stories“ for some scientific people appeared to have a real sense. Considering that the religion and science has to work together, two distinguished geophysicists have discovered an event that changed history; a sensational flood 8,600 years ago in what is today the Black Sea.
Not only in the Bible we found stories about the flood but also in the ancient clay tablets excavated from the ruins of biblical Nineveh more than a hundred years ago revealed a much older version of the same flood legend. Archeologists searched the length and breath of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Mesopotamia for evidence of such a flood, to no avail. Then, as earth scientists made new discoveries about the history of rapid climate change, they learned that the Mediterranean Sea had once been a desert and 5,000,000 years ago, the Atlantic Ocean burst through

The town fades away
in the driving mirror –
dogs and birds
abandoning their cartridge box.
It’s misty. Nudes with edelweiss armlets
watch over the varnishing
tank cars have dissolved the bas-reliefs
on the sacred radome.
We sit on the side of the artesian well
ejecting in the air
champagne tachyons,
your beret over your eyes
and long term tins
sharing out to the suspects…
The town is a purgatory,
a sulphur spiral
a large-scale, magic sleep extends its liquid >>>>>>>

The cultural relationships between Eastern and Western Europe in the Middle Ages could also be demonstrated by the Byzantine and Romanian sacred music. In this sense, the descent of the Gregorian music from the Byzantine music makes self evident, by derivation, the connecting bridge between Eastern and Western Christianity, at least since the 6th century till our times. As a matter of fact, without anticipating, the Thracian origin of the Byzantine, Romanian and Gregorian sacred music symbolically express the same spiritual and cultural unity of the Eastern and Western Romanity, as it was in the past and, hopefully, as it might be in the future.

Unfortunately, the Great Schysra of 1054 has also created musical borders, between the Byzantine and Gregorian sacred music, so to say between the Eastern Orthodox and Western Catholic Christianity. For the time being, theologically speaking, the Byzantine and Gregorian music are strongly validating the Eastern Orthodox and Western Catholic Church identities. In other words, the sacred music identifies by itself the Church to which it belongs. Probably for that reason, the musical identity of the „Uniate Churches“ is totally invalidated by the Gregorian sacred music, but incontestably validated by the Byzantine sacred music, especially in Romania. Such undisputed musical reality proves that organically, historically and spiritually all these Uniate Churches are belonging to the Eastern Orthodox Churches where they were separated from by political means. Anyway, the musical territories are ethnically and religiously very hard to be conquered. It is almost impossible. They might be irenically harmonized but never destroyed.

The Byzantine sacred music is the traditional and official music of the Eastern Orthodox Church.

It was created during the Apostolical and Patristical ages of the Undivided Universal Church in the Roman Empire. The Byzantine sacred hymnography and music is an organic part of the Holy Tradition and also of the daily Divine Eastern Orthodox worship. The Octoechos of St. John of Damascus (+749) is the fundamental book of the Byzantine music. In his excellent Dictionary of Orthodox Theology, a summary of the beliefs, practices and history of the Eastern Orthodox Church (New York, Philosophical Library 1964, p. 137), George H. Demetrakopoulos of Kalamazoo, Michigan defining the Octoechos said that „it containes the eight odes of the St. John the Damascene. In it are included the services for every day, for eight weeks. These eight tones or odes are used throughout the year beginning with the first, one for every week. When they are all sung, they start all over again/This book is also called the Paraclitiki.“

Preliminary Considerations
Globalization is one of the most debated and hot topics today. The strong reaction people have at World Trade Organization meetings is one indication of that. Another one is the quantity of writing on the topic. According to internet resources every field of life is affected by globalization. Only Google - to mention just one tool of research - gives 6.560.000 entries for the word.
If globalization would not drastically affect people’s lives there would probably be less interest for it. Because of its implications in human life at all levels, those who are happy with it are quick to praise and preach it, whereas those who are unhappy and skeptical are quick to protest, warn and discourage.
In this presentation I will try to look at this phenomenon not so much from the point of view of its external manifestations that have to do with technology, economics, politics (Americanization for many), but from the point of view of its inner forces, drives, and characteristics. In doing that I will make an appeal to theology and metaphysics that can facilitate a new understanding and interpretation of it. >>>

WITH YOU
I am always with you
hidden within the light of withered eyelids
when the full moon
gets undressed on the threshold
of your overtranslucent window
in your left hand
when the sleeplessness
brings along the first grain of sweat
that you wipe (without success)
onto the rumpled bed sheet
before the volcano of light throws out
its morning
in the rejected thought I am
in the uttered voicelessness
afraid of being given effect,
into the postponing of the hug
until the worlds allure new geneses
I am everywhere
this is why I do not exist. >>>>>>

Towards the end of the year 2004, I thought of gathering several researches elaborated long time ago and therefore to form a sort of preliminary essay to some possible „elements of apocrypha cultural history“. The purpose of this action was not that of providing a savant bibliography with another title, bibliography that is already representative enough, but rather to show a way of looking at the mystery of survival of some cultures that, in a world that tomorrow might become disgustingly uniform, underlines still the right to variety, to the autochthonous answer, to the specific interrogation. By the nature of my major preoccupations, it was inevitable for me to reveal here „the Romanian case“ but, at the same time, I realized that this might become a model and an example of possible method when studying any culture of „Tiers-Monde“. Therefore, mutatis mutandi, these principles could be understandable and maybe they could help to the establishment of some potential solutions for Bucharest, Montevideo, Tunis or Delhi, meaning wherever the mechanisms presented here are found in various proportions.

The studies that form that small synthesis of cultural history were written and published in Romania between 1984 and 1989, in French, and they describe several „astral hours“ of literature at the Lower Danube (”the proto-Romanians“, „the Isihast Renaissance“ of the century XIV, the era of Brâncoveanu in literature and „the beginning of the prophetic Reconquist”). They represent fragments of a much larger research, but they have a certain autonomy of their own, and an existence of their own. Two of the cases are actually the first attempts (and the only ones at this time) of historiographical synthesis of the „definite period“ and, as a consequence, they have the value of „pioneer work“. The Romanian intellectual shall notice the cases where the conclusions of other savants are continued and to what extent they are developed and sometimes even surpassed. For the foreign savant, such themes certainly represent a strange matter. This potentially astonished attitude is first of all due to the method. In this work I tried to eliminate the „universalistic chronology“ and „the canonic periodization“ established by most of the „histories of various literatures“, (usually the European ones) and used, by extension and most of the times inappropriately, in the cases of all literary histories.

In my opinion, as regarding certain literatures (such as the Italian literature or the French literature), the concatenation of the „Middle Ages, Humanism, Renaissance, Baroque and Mannerism, Classicism. Encyclopedism, Romanticism and Risorgimento“ etc. is recommended because this sequence was actually ascertained with obvious proof in the regional evolution. The „extrapolation“ is not yet a solution because of the fact that, in other regions, including