The Smell of the Classroom

There is a specific smell in training rooms that never changes, whether the walls are adorned with 1997 calendars, heavy wooden furniture, or 2026 LED screens and plastic chairs. It is the smell of anticipation mixed with the fear of being left behind. For me, the classroom was not just a physical space with tiles and desks—it was the workshop where I learned the first lesson of the digital craft, attending various courses or presentations of new technologies. For nearly three decades, I have watched from the perspective of a student as entire generations of entrepreneurs crossed the threshold of that room, driven not by a passion for technological conquest, but by the primal instinct of economic survival. From the hum of the CRT monitors’ transformers to the sterile silence of data centres, the story is not about machines, but about the person trying to tame a new tool.

Looking back, I notice that every technological leap was met with the same deceptive promise of absolute simplicity. We were repeatedly told that the new interface would make everything easier, that the magic button would replace hours of apprenticeship, that the software would think for us. But the eye of the person who works with raw material—whether it is untreated leather or source code—knows that surface simplicity is often a trap. When you hide complexity behind a user-friendly interface, you do not eliminate the weight of the tool; you only move it from your hand into the shadow of the system, where you can no longer control it. True mastery does not lie in pressing a button, but in understanding what happens behind it.

In that room, people did not come to become engineers or programmers. They came with hands calloused from real businesses, minds burdened with profit and loss calculations, seeking a lever. Whether it was a floppy disk with data in FoxPro in 1997 or a subscription to an AI agent in 2026, their fundamental question remained merciless and pragmatic: How much does this tool cost? Who will operate it? And who will bear the burden when it fails? They understood, perhaps faster than the inventors, that technology is not a saviour, but a capricious employee, and the real cost is not the licence, but the dependency it creates.

Above and beyond business calculations, there is an unwritten law of history: any technological peak, no matter how civil it may seem at first, is inevitably absorbed by structures of power. From the servers that store our data to the colossal energy infrastructures that power algorithms, digital sovereignty has become the new battlefield. Those who believe they are adopting a simple productivity tool often discover, all too late, that they have become nodes in a global network of dependency. Legislation, data location, and human verification are not just bureaucracy; they are the last lines of defence for those who refuse to be mere passive consumers of their own economic destiny.

But before we talk about the cloud, sovereignty, and hallucinating algorithms, we must return to the origin of this relationship. We must remember the moment when the machine was not yet an abstract service, but a physical, heavy object that you could touch and had to learn step by step. The story I tell here is not a nostalgia for a bygone era, but a map for navigating the present. Because, although the screens have changed and commands have been replaced by prompts, the psychology of the person sitting in front of the unknown has remained exactly the same. Everything began with a silence, a cool room, and a cursor blinking on a green or absolutely black background.

Transparency Note: Article written with AI assistance (Qwen). Judgements, polemical positions, and perspectives belong entirely to the author.

Read more: From MS-DOS to the Complex AI Algorithm: The User Experience

A decade of accelerating ruptures. Ten defining characteristics that will enter the history books. And, at every chapter, the Romanian condition alongside its historical parallels — because our trajectory is not an exception to the rule, but a concentrated mirror of it, repeated with uncomfortable fidelity.

A note on perspective. This essay is written from Romania — a country of nineteen million people on the eastern flank of the European Union, bordering Ukraine to the north and east, the Black Sea to the south-east, and five other states in between. Romania joined NATO in 2004 and the EU in 2007. It has one of the fastest internet networks in Europe and one of the lowest rates of EU structural fund absorption. It has produced global technology companies and exported several hundred thousand doctors, engineers and programmers to Western Europe over the past two decades. It is, in other words, a country of persistent paradoxes — which makes it an unusually instructive lens through which to examine a decade that was itself full of them.

Introduction: The Decade of Multiple Crises

There are decades that pass. And there are decades that break things.

The decade 2016–2026 broke things. Not uniformly, not simultaneously, not with the same instrument everywhere — but it broke. Historians writing about it will likely reach for the term "polycrisis" — coined by the political theorist Johan Galtung in the 1970s and revived by economists Charles Goodhart and Manoj Pradhan in 2022: not a single crisis with a single cause and a manageable resolution, but multiple structural crises that overlap, amplify each other, and render ineffective the remedies that worked when crises arrived separately.

The pandemic that locked the world. The war that returned to Europe. Artificial intelligence beginning to reshape the nature of work itself. Democracies fragmenting from the inside. Climate that ceased to be a warning and became a weekly weather event. Economies exiting the era of near-zero interest rates and rediscovering inflation. All of this in the same decade, sometimes in the same year.

History books will see 2016–2026 as a period of accelerated transition — the end of a long cycle of relative stability that had held since 1991, and the beginning of something whose name we have not yet found. Perhaps a new multipolar order. Perhaps prolonged disorder. Perhaps, with luck and better choices, a reorganisation towards something more robust.

Romania will be present in these books. Not at the major chapters — there we will appear in parentheses, unless something spectacular occurs. We will be at the bottom of the page, in the footnotes, in the grey-shaded case study boxes. The example that illustrates how a difficult road can be made even harder than it needs to be, when choices are consistently mediocre and reform is perpetually deferred — after the elections, after the crisis, after the next "after".

This essay follows ten major characteristics of the decade 2016–2026 and, at each, deepens the Romanian condition with concrete historical parallels. Romania's history is, among other things, an exceptionally rich archive of repeated crises, missed opportunities and partial adaptations. To ignore it is to fail to understand the present. To understand it does not guarantee change — but it improves the odds.

A necessary methodological note: historical parallels are not determinism. This essay does not argue that Romania is condemned to repeat the same errors indefinitely, that there is some immutable "national character", or that change is impossible. It argues something more precise and more verifiable: that institutional structures tend to reproduce themselves unless deliberately altered; that problems unresolved by one generation return to the next in different forms but with similar mechanisms; and that understanding the mechanisms — not accepting the fatalism — is the necessary condition for change. History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes — and the rhymes have a logic that can be anticipated, if you know how to read it.

Article 13 of 10 (the third postscript) — ‘The Technological Twilight of the Romanian Lands’

Previous articles: 1–12. Articles 10, 11, and 12 outlined nine scenarios for 2050. This article—which the author had declared in the afterword of Article 12 he would not write—proposes three more, anchored in the 1907 Peasants’ Revolt and the Romanian Stalinism of the 1948–1964 decades. Two moments of violent fracture—one on the eve of the First World War, the other in the heart of the 20th century—that radically reshaped, in different ways, Romanians’ relationship with land, state, and their own labour.

I. Flămânzi, Botoșani, 23 February 1907, Noon

The village of Flămânzi lies twenty-five kilometres north of Botoșani, on the gentle hills of the Moldavian Plateau, where the broad interfluves slope gently towards the deep valleys of the streams feeding into the Siret River. In a normal February, these hills should have been white with snow. In the winter of 1907, the snow was absent. The hills were black, muddy, with patches of frost in the shaded valleys where the sun only reached for a few hours a day. The slopes were bare, deforested by generations of forced clearing to expand the arable land—that land which, through the rent they paid on it, kept the people living here on the edge of famine, never quite beyond it, but never comfortably within its bounds.

Gheorghe Todiriță, fifty-two years old, the village’s bell-ringer (the man who rang the tocsin at the church gate on Sundays when the priest decided to gather the people), sat in his cottage at noon, eating cold polenta left over from the morning. Beside him, his wife, Ileana, was opening a sack of spring seeds. It was three-quarters full. It had been fuller in autumn—but November had brought the rent collector for the overdue payments, and some of the grain had gone to him. This was not absolute poverty—Todiriță was not the poorest man in Flămânzi. There were families who had lived that autumn on potato peels and beetroot mixed with bran, and who now, in this dry February, sent their daughters to gather dried chicory roots from the fields, because the boiled weeds with salt could stave off hunger for a few hours. Todiriță was better off than that. But Todiriță knew that if the rent collector came again with demands before spring, the distance between him and those who ate chicory could shrink suddenly.

A half-hour’s walk away, at the Mirceni estate, Moise Weinglass—the chief rent collector for a conglomerate of estates totalling several thousand hectares of arable land in Botoșani County—was signing, at that very moment, a financial report for the absentee owner in Bucharest. The report showed that the rents for 1906 had, despite the partial drought, been paid in full. That the collection of arrears was proceeding. That the livestock inventory was up to date. Moise Weinglass was a man of fifty, with a proper ledger, a clean desk, a good-quality oil lamp on his table, and a small but real collection of books in Yiddish, German, and Romanian arranged on a shelf above his desk. He was not a monster. He was a link in a chain—at the end of which stood the absentee owner, and above the owner stood the financial structures of post-1866 Romanian modernisation, which demanded rent, rent, rent from the land of Moldavia to finance the selective industrialisation of Wallachia.

The connection between Todiriță and Weinglass was the rent—a fixed price per cultivated hectare, negotiated once every few years, non-negotiable in practice because Todiriță had no one else to compare with and nowhere to go if he did not accept. The land was not his. It had not been his before 1864—when serfdom and corvée labour were still in place. It had been his, formally, since 1864, through Cuza’s rural law—but it had been insufficient land, given without animals, without inventory, without affordable credit, and soon suffocated by a rental market in which large owners systematically gained more than the small freeholders.

Four days later, on 27 February 1907, three hundred peasants gathered in front of the town hall in Flămânzi. No one had ordered the gathering. There was no union organisation, no active socialist cell, no agitator sent from Bucharest or Iași—a narrative the conservative powers would later construct because it was more comfortable than the truth. The truth was simpler and more terrifying: the people had gathered because they had nothing left to eat. Hunger has no agitator. Hunger is its own political discourse.

The mayor came out onto the steps. He spoke. He promised to send a report to the county. The people threw stones. The mayor went back inside. The next day, the gathering had grown to six hundred people. They entered Weinglass’s estate. They took what was in the warehouse—wheat, corn, seeds. They did not kill anyone. They did not set anything on fire. They took food and returned home with it. It was a revolt, but for now, it was a disciplined madness.

The revolt spread southward within days, like a field fire, across the Moldavian plain, through the counties of Botoșani, Iași, Roman, Vaslui, Neamț, Bacău. By mid-March, it had crossed the Carpathian Mountains into Muntenia. On 12 March, in Vlașca County, manor houses were burning. On 15 March, in Teleorman County, a sub-prefect was taken hostage by a crowd of several thousand people. On 17 March, in Ilfov, cavalry troops fired into the crowd for the first time. By 28 March—when the last fires died down in Oltenia—the official death toll was 419. The real number, according to later historians’ estimates, was between 11,000 and 14,000. The liberal government of Sturdza had been dismissed during the revolt; the conservative government of Cantacuzino that followed had ordered the army to suppress the uprising. The army suppressed it.

Gheorghe Todiriță did not die in the revolt. He lived until 1921, when pneumonia finally took him at the age of fifty-six. He lived to see the 1921 agrarian reform—which finally gave him land. Five additional hectares, free of rent. He died before he could see that those five hectares were not enough without capital, without machinery, without cooperatives. He died without knowing that his son, Vasile, would be absorbed into the collective in 1953, and that his land would become everyone’s, meaning no one’s, meaning the state’s.

This is the opening scene of this article. Not in a palace, not at a negotiating table, not in a council of ministers. In a cottage in Flămânzi, with cold polenta, a three-quarters-full seed sack, a rent collector twenty minutes’ walk away, and black fields on the horizon. With people who, four days later, would break a fragile equilibrium that had lasted, with all its tensions, for almost forty years since Cuza’s reform.

This article—which its author had declared unnecessary in the afterword of Article 12—proposes three more scenarios for 2050, anchored in two moments that defined Romanians’ relationship with their own labour and their own land: the 1907 Revolt and the Stalinist collectivisation of 1949–1962. These are the moments when the ‘top-down’ transformation—that of Cuza, of Carol I, of the 1921 reform—clashed with the ‘bottom-up’ transformation and shattered against it. Their lessons are different from those of the previous articles. They are harsher.

Article 12 of 10 (the second postscript) — ‘The Technological Twilight of the Romanian Lands’

Previous articles: 1–11. Articles 10 and 11 outlined six scenarios for 2050. This article proposes three more, anchored in the period of Cuza’s abdication (10–11 February 1866) and the immediate months that followed—a six-month interval that, more than is recognised, defined the structure of the modern Romanian state.

I. The Princely Palace, Bucharest, the Night of 10–11 February 1866, 4 a.m.

Snow had fallen over Bucharest all day on 10 February. It had begun at noon and settled over the tin roofs of Calea Mogoșoaia (the future Calea Victoriei) in a layer of about ten centimetres by midnight. On Strada Doamnei, in front of the princely palace, two sentinels from the Domnitor’s personal guard stamped their feet every fifteen minutes to keep warm in their boots. The snow had stopped. The sky had cleared. Above Bucharest, a few frozen stars glinted.

At 4 a.m. on 11 February 1866, a sound heavier than the sentinels’ stomping echoed from the direction of the main gate. A group of about twelve men in Romanian officers’ uniforms—Colonel Constantin Pilat, Major Anton Costiescu, Captain Dimitrie Lecca, plus ten others of various ranks—approached with steps that made no attempt at discretion. The sentinels, who had received instructions an hour earlier via a civilian courier from Ion C. Brătianu, stood aside. The gate opened without a sound.

The officers climbed to the second floor of the palace. The corridor was lit by a single oil lamp, which, in the memories of some participants, danced nervously in the draft from a slightly ajar window at the far end. They reached the door to the Domnitor’s bedroom. Colonel Pilat knocked once, sharply.

Alexandru Ioan Cuza, forty-five years old, ruler of the United Principalities since 24 January 1859—exactly seven years and seventeen days—was asleep. Or rather, he had woken at the first noise. He had sat up in bed, in his long Dutch nightshirt, his hair dishevelled, one eye more open than the other. Next door, in the adjacent room, Maria Obrenović, the Serbian princess with whom Cuza had been living since 1863 in a public adultery that had, in a way, exhausted the entire political class (his wife, Elena Cuza, had retreated to Iași with their two adopted children), had also awakened. Maria did not leave her room. According to recollections, she stood pressed against the wall, her ear to the door, trembling.

Cuza called out. ‘Who’s there?’

‘The provisional government of Romania, Your Highness. We ask you to open the door.’

‘The provisional government?’ Cuza hesitated for a moment. Then he got up, put on his robe, and opened the door. In front of him stood Colonel Pilat, holding a piece of paper.

‘Mr Cuza, you are requested to sign this act of abdication. No blood will be shed. You will not be harmed. But you must sign.’

Cuza looked at the paper. He turned his head towards Maria’s room. He turned back to Pilat. He looked at the other officers who had filled the corridor. None were unknown to him—he had promoted some himself. Costiescu, two years earlier, he had decorated for his service in the 1864 Administrative Reform.

‘With what ink shall I sign?’ Cuza asked. ‘I have no ink in my room.’

Colonel Pilat took from a pocket of his tunic a small silver inkwell. He had brought it with him. That was how prepared the conspiracy was.

Cuza signed, in three minutes, at the desk in his bedroom, the act by which he abdicated the throne of the United Principalities. He asked permission to take a few clothes from his wardrobe. He dressed. At 6 a.m., in the dawn of 11 February 1866, a conspirator’s cab was waiting for him at a side gate of the palace. By 10 a.m., he was at Cotroceni, under discreet guard. By the end of the day, he was on his way to the Austrian border, via Curtici. On 26 February, he was in Vienna. On 15 March, in Paris. Seven years later, he would die of tuberculosis in Heidelberg at the age of fifty-two. He would never see Romania again.

And in his wake, in Bucharest, the ‘Lieutenancy of the Prince’—a provisional regency of three members (Nicolae Golescu, Lascăr Catargiu, Colonel Nicolae Haralambie)—was installed, tasked with quickly bringing a foreign prince to the now-vacant throne. Eighty-nine days later, on 10 May 1866, a young German named Karl Ludwig Eitel Friedrich Zephyrinus Ludwig von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, aged 27, would step down from his carriage at Băneasa. Sixty-one days after that, on 1 July 1866, he would promulgate a Constitution inspired by Belgium’s 1831 model. Forty-eight years later, in October 1914, he would die at Sinaia, leaving behind the longest and most reformist reign in modern Romanian history.

All of this was decided—more than is recognised—in that February night of 1866, with fresh snow on Bucharest’s rooftops, with Cuza signing at his bedroom desk, with Maria Obrenović trembling in the next room, with the silver inkwell that Colonel Pilat had taken from his pocket.

This is the opening scene of this article. Not a victory. A moment of rupture that produced, in cascade, six months of institutional reshuffling. And these six months are the lesson we now extract, in 2026, for three possible future scenarios.

Article 11 of 10 (postscript) — ‘The Technological Twilight of the Romanian Lands’

Previous articles: 1–10. Article 10 outlined three scenarios for 2050—re-Phanariotisation, internal Habsburg model, inclusive modernisation. This article proposes three more, anchored in the events of the pre-Cuza and immediate post-Cuza period (1848–1866). Not as a replacement for the first three, but as an expansion of the map.

I. Palermo, October 1852

The room on Via Meli, on the second floor of a yellow house with green shutters, looked out over a small piazzetta where, early in the morning, a Sicilian woman with her hair tied under a black scarf sold lemons and oranges picked the evening before. The air smelled of the sea and fried fish—Palermo was two hundred metres from the port, and the morning wind carried, even in October, the scent of sardines frying in olive oil from the taverns by the docks.

In this room, at a walnut table with legs scratched by generations of tenants before him, a man of thirty-three was writing. His name was Nicolae Bălcescu. That evening, he had two things on the table: a thick notebook of French paper, half-filled with his small, slanted handwriting, and a glass of water with lemon that he had not touched for an hour. He coughed rarely, but when he did, it was a deep, dry cough that ended with a small spot of blood on his handkerchief. Tuberculosis had been consuming him for almost four years. The doctors in Paris had told him, a year earlier, to go south ‘for the warm air.’ Palermo was the farthest south he could afford—and, as it would turn out thirteen weeks later, the last south he would ever know.

He was writing The Romanians Under Michael the Brave. The book would remain unfinished. The manuscript would be published, long after the author’s death, by Alexandru Odobescu in 1877—a quarter of a century after this evening. Bălcescu had no way of knowing this. He wrote for a reader he would never meet. He wrote, as he had all his life, on trust.

What did he believe, in October 1852? He believed, against all evidence, in things that would happen. He believed that the Romanian Principalities would unite into a single state. He believed that the peasants would be enfranchised. He believed that a modern civil code would be created after the French model. He believed that compulsory education would be established. He believed that a national army would be organised. He believed that a fair fiscal cadastre would be introduced. He believed in all of this even though—when he wrote—Cuza was an obscure Moldavian militia colonel, the union was opposed by three major European powers, the Organic Regulations were still in force, and he, Bălcescu himself, was exiled without the right to return.

Twelve years later, on 26 August 1864—almost twelve years to the day from the evening we describe—Mihail Kogălniceanu, Bălcescu’s friend in exile, would, as minister under Prince Cuza, enact the rural law that enfranchised over 400,000 Wallachian and Moldavian peasant families. Almost the entire programme of 1848, the entire programme of exile, the entire programme from the room in Palermo, would be implemented.

Bălcescu would not live to see it. He died in Palermo on the night of 29 November 1852, at thirty-three, with a Sardinian Chamber of Commerce three streets away where no one knew his name. He was buried in a cemetery where his grave would be lost in the following decades. There would never be a Bălcescu tomb where Romanian generations could come to lay flowers.

And yet, what he wrote in his final months—his correspondence with Ion Ghica, Ion C. Brătianu, C.A. Rosetti, Kogălniceanu, the Golescu brothers—would form, on the scale of history, one of the most striking political paradoxes of the 19th century. A dying exile wrote the programme that would transform a country he would never see again.

This is the opening scene of the present article. Not at a government. Not in Parliament. Not in a factory. But in a yellow room in Palermo, with the smell of the sea and lemons, with the dry cough of a thirty-three-year-old man who believed in what was to come.

Article 10 of the series formulated three scenarios for 2050—re-Phanariotisation, internal Habsburg model, inclusive modernisation. All three were anchored in the structures of the series. All three remain valid.

This article proposes three more, anchored in the Cuza period—in the decade 1848–1866 that transformed, in just eighteen years, a dual Phanariote province into a modern state. Three scenarios that our history has already played out once. Three scenarios we could play again.

Article 10 of 10 — ‘The Technological Twilight of the Romanian Lands’

Previous articles: 1–9.

I. A Blacksmith’s Workshop in Botoșani, March 2026

The forge has been closed since 2019. The large steel door, once painted a shiny blue, is now rusted through to the iron beneath. The lock is new—placed there by the master’s eldest son, who visits on certain Sundays to check that everything is as his father left it. Inside, in the semi-darkness, the scent of burnt coal and mineral oil, of iron beaten red-hot, still lingers six years after the last fire was lit—a smell the son recognises in any corner of the world he visits, just as others might recognise the perfume of their mother or their first love.

The master—his father—had passed away in October 2018, at the age of 74, in a cardiology hospital in Iași, his hands resting on the sheet, fingers already thin, no longer resembling those that, five decades earlier, had forged railings for town halls, horseshoes for racehorses, master keys for banks, and once, a control rod for a Fiat tractor for which spare parts could no longer be found on the Romanian market in 1985. He had built the forge from nothing, in a courtyard on the outskirts of Botoșani, with an anvil inherited from his own father, two hammers, a bellows, a pedal-operated forge (later, a three-phase current network he had dragged himself from the street pole), and a determination that his son, now 43, finds impossible to replicate.

This evening, in March 2026, the son unlocks the door with a new key and steps inside. He has his four-year-old son with him. The boy—Ștefan, after his grandfather—looks at everything with wide eyes. He is more often in big cities—Cluj, Bucharest, once Munich, where his father had a three-month software contract for a Danish firm—than in workshops like this. The forge is, for him, a strange room full of objects he has no words to name.

‘Dad, what’s that?’

The father looks. On the large anvil, covered with a black cloth that was once white, lies a hammer with a beech handle, last used by the master in the summer of 2018.

‘It’s a hammer, son. For beating iron.’

‘Why isn’t iron being beaten?’

The father does not answer immediately. In the yard, on a stick tied to the aluminium gate, a stork can be seen against the cloudy sky of Moldavia, preparing to take off. Somewhere on Cuza Vodă Street in Botoșani, a car radio plays South American music. The master, if he were here, would have been beating iron until dark. The son, who is now a programmer at a firm with a Danish contract, wonders—as he does every time he visits this workshop—who could still, in this town, do what his father did.

He lifts the boy into his arms. He takes him to the anvil. He places the small hand carefully on the cold metal.

‘This is iron. Your grandpa used to beat it here. With the hammer. He made things out of it—gates, fences, keys, horseshoes. Tomorrow, maybe, a man will come to reopen the workshop. Or maybe he won’t. We don’t know yet.’

The boy pulls his hand back. The anvil is cold.

‘Do you want to beat it too, Dad?’

The father smiles. ‘I don’t know, son. I don’t know.’

This is the opening scene of the final article in the series. Not in Bucharest, not in the Phanar, not in Reșița, not in Nevyansk. But in a workshop closed for three seasons, in March 2026, in a town in Moldavia. With an anvil waiting. With a boy who does not know the names of things. With a father who has a contract with a Danish firm but no answer to his child’s question.

This article is dedicated to the future. Not because the future can be predicted—it cannot—but because, after 245 years of history covered in the previous nine articles, we have an obligation to ask: what comes next? Three scenarios for 2050. Three possible directions. With the signals of each already visible in 2026, if we know how to see them.

Article 9 of 10 — ‘The Technological Twilight of the Romanian Lands’

Previous articles: Articles 1–8.

I. Padeș, 23 January 1821

Snow covered the hills of Mehedinți. On the edge of the village of Padeș, in a narrow valley between Bibicelu Hill and the beech forest, a crowd of about two thousand people had gathered since eleven o’clock in the morning. It was not an ordinary gathering. Most of them were armed peasants—with old muskets, axes, scythes, clubs—who had come from the villages of Gorj and Mehedinți at the call of a man they knew only by reputation: Tudor Vladimirescu, a sluger (innkeeper), former Russian soldier, a man of Craiova and the Gorj region.

At one o’clock in the afternoon, an old priest—Father Ioan from Prejna—read, with a voice that cracked several times in the middle of sentences, a text that Tudor had composed himself and dictated, two days earlier, to a logothete from Cerneți. The text would remain in Romanian history as the Proclamation of Padeș. It began with words that no one in the entire 18th century would have dared to utter in public:

‘To all the people of the Romanian Land, to all those who dwell in the towns and villages of this country, greetings!'

‘Brothers, inhabitants of the Romanian Land, of whatever kin you may be. No rule forbids a man from meeting evil with evil!'

The priest read louder and louder, as if the frozen air had cleared his voice. The crowd listened in silence. Most of them probably did not understand the exact meaning of each phrase. But they understood that something was being declared. That someone, at last, was openly saying that the evil of the treasury and the Greek ispravnici (district governors) had to be stopped. That the Romanian peasant, in his frozen village of Padeș, Prejna, or Cloșani, had the right to say: enough.

Tudor was a short man, with small eyes, an unkempt beard, and a scar on his forehead from a sabre wound in 1807 during the war with the Turks. He had little education—he could barely write—but he had an extraordinary memory for numbers and justice. He was forty-one years old. In four months, he would be killed by emissaries of his former ally, Alexandru Ipsilanti (the younger—not to be confused with the elder, the former Wallachian ruler; he was the leader of the Greek Hetaeria, who wanted to use Tudor’s uprising to trigger a general anti-Ottoman insurrection). He did not live to see the results of his work. He did not live to see that Phanariotism would indeed end. He did not live to see that 1821 would become, in an unexpected way, the zero hour of Romanian modernisation.

This is the opening scene of our article. After eight articles in which we described a pre-industrial world, a Phanariote world, a Levantine world, a world that resisted modernity with its tightly woven structure—we open Article 9 with the moment when that world breaks. Under Tudor Vladimirescu’s feet, in the snow of Mehedinți, on 23 January 1821, something new begins.

This article follows that arc—from Padeș to the Great Union, from the Organic Regulations to the Malaxa factories, from the first technical schools to the first planes built in Brașov. A century of compressed modernisation. A century in which Romania tried to do, in one hundred years, what England had done in three hundred and France in two hundred. It did not fully succeed. It succeeded, perhaps, to the extent of 60%. And that 60% is all that gives us, to this day, the mental categories of a modern country.

Article 8 of 10 — ‘The Technological Twilight of the Romanian Lands’

Previous articles: Articles 1–7.

I. Crossing at Turnu-Roșu, 12 April 1824

The large carriage with four horses, ordered in Sibiu two weeks earlier and delivered to Câmpulung with a three-day delay, passed through the customs at Turnu-Roșu at eleven o’clock in the morning on 12 April 1824. The weather was cold for late April—the passengers in the front carriage pulled their sheep-leather coats closer to their necks, and the coachman—a tall Moldavian with a black beard, specially brought for this journey from the estate at Golești—had to stop from time to time to warm his hands.

In the rear carriage travelled Constantin Radovici Golescu, better known by his family name, ‘Dinicu’—the name he signed with and used at the Court in Bucharest. Forty-seven years old, with a rounded belly from a life of boyar feasts, but with lively eyes, hands that still knew how to hold the reins on the road, and a head that had begun to go bald at the crown. Beside him sat his eldest son, Ștefan—thirteen years old, with gold-rimmed glasses his father had bought him in Sibiu a week earlier, his eyes tired from reading. Opposite them sat Dinicu’s younger brother, Radu, who was to spend only a short time in Vienna before returning home.

Dinicu Golescu was not, in 1824, the richest or most politically influential Wallachian boyar. The Golescu family—tracing its genealogy, which he himself had studied since his youth, to an old boyar lineage of Argeș attested since the 15th century—owned a large estate at Golești (over 3,000 hectares), a respectable manor house, and several hundred families of serfs on the land. Dinicu himself had, a generation earlier, been mare vornic (great chamberlain) under Ioan Caragea and Alexandru Suțu (the last two Phanariote rulers of Wallachia), then a country commissioner in the armistice commissions with the Turks. He was not a pure intellectual—he was a man of administration and decision. But at forty-seven, he was doing something that, twenty years earlier, he would not have believed possible.

He was travelling. Not to Constantinople, as boyars traditionally did for political negotiations or luxury purchases. Not to some monastery on Mount Athos for a pilgrimage. But through Central and Western Europe: Sibiu, Cluj, Oradea, Buda, Vienna, Trieste, Milan, Verona, Padua, Venice, Geneva, Bruges, Brussels, then a slow return. A journey planned for seventeen months, with over forty stops, in which he would see—‘great and wonderful things, which I have seen and will see, and which I deem necessary to show my nation,’ as he would later write in his journal, published two years afterwards.

‘Însemnarea călătoriei mele făcute în anul 1824, 1825, 1826’—printed in Buda in 1826—is among the most important documents in the history of modern Romanian culture. It is the moment when a Wallachian boyar, formed in a Phanariote-Oriental culture, records, step by step, the shock of contact with European modernity. It is the eye of Ienache Cocorascu from Article 3, but stronger and more authoritative—for Golescu was a great boyar, not merely a Moldavian chamberlain.

‘In Sibiu,’ he writes on the second day of the journey, ‘I saw a market where cattle, sheep, and pigs are sold by weight, age, and breed, according to a printed schedule on paper, which every buyer has in advance. I saw a lantern at every street corner, lit by a paid man, with oil. I saw a school for girls, in which the girls learn—do I say this correctly?—they learn to write and to calculate, like the boys. I do not understand how such a thing is possible, but it is so.’

The shock accumulates. In Vienna, Golescu would see the Ringstrasse, the university, the great hospitals, the opera. In Milan, mechanical workshops and the first steam-powered spinning mills. In Verona, an orphanage with a technical school for orphans. In Padua, doctors who performed systematic autopsies for research. And returning—tired, with new glasses bought in Milan—with a conviction that would become the driving force of the rest of his life: that his country had fallen behind ‘by a century and more,’ and that something had to be done.

This is the Romanian boyar of the 1820s. Not the most common type—the most common was the boyar who still wanted to buy an office in the Phanar. But this was the type that would make history. From his generation and the one immediately following—the sons of Golescu, the younger Văcăreștis, the Bibescus, the modern Ghicas—would emerge the first modern Romanian elite, the one that would create the Organic Regulations, organise the revolutions of 1848, and bring about the Union of the Principalities in 1859.

This article is dedicated to that transformation. Who were the Moldo-Wallachian boyars in 1780? How did they live? What did they read? Why did they not become an industrial bourgeoisie on the model of the Prussian Junkers, the English gentry, or the Russian dvorianstvo? And how did they transform, between 1780 and 1859, into a modern political class?

Article 7 of 10 — ‘The Technological Twilight of the Romanian Lands’

Previous articles: Articles 1–6.

I. A Village on the Bârlad, an October Evening in 1782

Vasile Ailenei returned from the fields with his legs caked in mud up to his knees and the smell of smouldering stubble clinging to his clothes like an extra shirt. Beyond the village—Vetriș, a hamlet of forty-three households (fumuri) on the left bank of the Bârlad, some five kilometres from the market town of Vaslui—the sun had already dipped behind Costangalia Hill. It was six o’clock in the evening. At the sheepfold in Podgoria, the dogs barked at something unseen. At the wooden church by the crossroads leading to Muntenii de Sus, the bell tolled for Vespers.

In the farmyard—a house of wattle and daub with a porch facing east, a thatched roof of rye straw, a small vestibule towards the street—Ileana was already preparing dinner. The fire in the hearth had been lit at five o’clock with kindling of osier; over the embers she had placed an earthenware pot in which, with heavy bubbles, the polenta simmered. The millet had run out a week ago (it had been a poor autumn harvest on the Bârlad, and they hadn’t managed to buy more), so that morning, at the water mill of Ștefan Poștașul, she had ground eight kilograms of maize—a crop that the village of Vetriș had only begun to adopt in the last five or six years.

The children—three who had survived; two others buried between 1778 and 1780, one from dysentery, the other drowned in the Bârlad during the spring thaw—were huddled around the hearth. The eldest, Neculai, ten years old, played with an iron nail he had found near the blacksmith’s, twirling it between his fingers as a Levantine jeweller might have done with a golden needle. The middle one, Costache, seven, dozed. The youngest, Sultana, four, hummed softly something she had heard from an old woman at the village well.

Vasile Ailenei—thirty-eight years old, an age at which Konstantinos Mourousis’s Constantinople was only just entering maturity, but at which a Moldavian peasant was already old relative to his village’s life expectancy—washed his hands at the trough in the back yard. The water was cold. The smell of smoke was everywhere. Under the porch, the old dog Grivei wagged his tail slowly, without barking, as he did every evening at this time.

‘Did you bring firewood?’ Ileana called from the kitchen, without turning around.

‘Half a cartload. The rest tomorrow. It’s too heavy alone.’

‘Ilie from Toader’s said he’s coming tomorrow with his oxen. You give him a oca of wine.’

‘I will.’

This was an ordinary evening in an ordinary village in Moldavia in the year 1782. Neither richer nor poorer than average. Neither luckier nor more afflicted. A village among another 3,500–4,000 similar ones that made up, south and north of the Prut, Moldavia. A village in a civilisation that historians have long ignored, because it produced no written documents, raised no monuments, bore no dynastic names.

And this article is dedicated to that village. After six articles on geopolitics, technology, and diplomacy, we descend to the level of the table. What they ate. What they wore. How they lived. How they died. What they hoped. This is the most anthropological article in the series. It is, I fear, the longest in terms of the number of words it can sustain, because daily life cannot be summarised in the short paragraphs of political analysis.

A warning to the reader. We will be neither nostalgic nor contemptuous. We will try to see how it was—as far as we can see it through the eyes of collective memory, the few documents, and the ethnographic research that has survived. And at the end, as in the other articles, we will return to what this means for us, who still live, in modern but recognisable forms, in these same villages.

Article 6 of 10 — ‘The Technological Twilight of the Romanian Lands’

Previous articles: ‘The Map of Powers in 1780’, ‘The Anatomy of Tribute’, ‘Furnaces Across the Mountains’, ‘What Did Exist in the Principalities’, and ‘The Russian Model’.

I. A Morning in the Phanar, October 1785

The first call to prayer from the muezzin of Süleymaniye echoed at 4:37 a.m. in October 1785—pendulum-clock precision, for the muezzin had, in his upper room of the minaret, a German clock bought by his father in Vienna thirty years earlier. The sound, prolonged and modulated, rolled across the Golden Horn like a warm blanket, first touching the rooftops of the Phanar, then those of Galata, then the ships anchored in the harbour with their lanterns still lit.

In the house of Konstantinos Mourousis—dragoman of the Ottoman Grand Admiralty and a member of one of the four great Phanariote families—someone was already awake. The maid, Angeliki—a Greek woman from Chios, taken into service at the age of twelve, now thirty-six—lit the brass samovar in the ground-floor kitchen. The smoke from the charcoal rose lazily to the soot-stained wooden ceiling. In the inner courtyard, a Siamese cat—a gift from a French merchant with whom Mourousis had done business the previous year—meowed softly, demanding milk.

Upstairs, in the library overlooking the Golden Horn through three narrow windows, Mourousis himself—forty-two years old, with incipient baldness and tired eyes from a night spent with documents—prepared for his day. On his walnut desk, brought from Bohemia, lay: a copy of Encyclopédie, Volume VII (the letter ‘G’, with articles on grammar and geography), printed in Paris in 1757, open to the article ‘Grecs,’ which he had been reading for nearly a week with growing irritation (Diderot claimed that modern Greeks had ‘inherited nothing but ruins’—an insult Mourousis was preparing to refute in a memorandum to the Paris Academy); a Greek manuscript of Aristotle’s Analytics, in a Venetian edition from 1552; an Ottoman Turkish grammar book printed in Constantinople in 1729—among the few secular books to come from İbrahim Müteferrika’s first Ottoman printing press; and a manuscript translation of Rousseau’s The Social Contract, made by a friend from Corfu—a clandestine translation, for any printing press that officially published Rousseau in Ottoman territory would have been shut down within three hours.

Below the library, in the left courtyard, the servants were already moving. The horses were being saddled. At seven o’clock, Mourousis had an audience with the reis-ul efendi—the Ottoman foreign minister, in modern terms. A dignitary with whom Mourousis spoke, depending on the subject, in Turkish, Arabic, Greek, or French. At ten o’clock, he had a meeting with the French ambassador, the Comte de Choiseul-Gouffier—a learned aristocrat who had spent five years in archaeological research on the Greek islands and who was, technically speaking, under Ottoman protection as long as he remained in Constantinople. The discussion was to be about a delicate matter: the approval of a French expedition to document the ruins of Halicarnassus—an expedition the Porte suspected of being a cover for illegal archaeological looting.

All this took place, on that October morning in 1785, in a neighbourhood of a few hundred houses grouped around the Ecumenical Patriarchate, on the edge of the largest city in Europe—some said the largest in the world, if the comparison with London and Paris was not made too scrupulously. Constantinople had, in 1785, approximately 700,000 inhabitants. Paris had 650,000. London, 750,000. And Bucharest—40,000. One hundred and sixty kilometres from Reșița, but ten thousand kilometres from Constantinople in terms of civilisational scale.

This is the opening scene of our article. A great Phanariote, on an ordinary morning, preparing for a day of high-level dragoman work. With Diderot on his desk. With Rousseau hidden. With Aristotle open. With horses saddled for an audience at the Porte. He was not a provincial. He was not a backward subject. He was an inhabitant of the civilisational centre of the Levant—a centre that national historiography has all too often treated as a mere capital of oppression.

This article attempts to correct this methodological injustice. To show what Constantinople truly was in the decades 1770–1810. A rich, sophisticated, polyglot city with real attempts at modernisation—but with a technological blockage that historians still struggle to fully explain.