Article 4 of 10 — ‘The Technological Twilight of the Romanian Lands’

Previous articles: ‘The Map of Powers in 1780’, ‘The Anatomy of Tribute’, and ‘Furnaces Across the Mountains’.

I. A December Night in Râmnic, 1778

At two o’clock in the morning, the printing press of the Râmnic Bishopric smelled of three things at once: black ink made from resin smoke and linseed oil, dampened paper to better receive the imprint of the type, and beeswax candles—not tallow, because tallow, as it melted slowly, gave off a smoke that clung to the freshly printed pages and stained them.

Deacon Mihail Popovici, engraver and typesetter, wore a leather apron blackened by fifteen years of trade. With a fine bone quill, he placed the final letters of a page that would open the Menaion for the Month of December—the second volume in a series of twelve liturgical books that Bishop Chesarie of Râmnic had envisioned in 1776, immediately after his enthronement. It was an editorial project the likes of which had never been seen in the entire history of Romanian printing. Twelve Menaia, one for each month of the ecclesiastical year, printed in Slavonic-Romanian ecclesiastical font, with red titles, ornate initials—a complete translation from Church Slavonic into Romanian, revised by scholars from Râmnic and the Metropolitanate of Bucharest.

Popovici worked by the light of three candles placed in a brass candelabrum. There were too few—he knew that—but the printing press could not afford more for a single night. Beeswax was expensive; the candelabrum itself had been a gift from Bishop Chesarie two years earlier, when Popovici had finished engraving the copper plates for the Anthologion of 1776.

On the press—a massive wooden device, made by a local carpenter from an oak tree felled twenty years earlier at Cozia—Master Radu Călin turned the threaded screw with a hand crank. Each sheet was pressed between two forms for a moment, then removed, placed to dry on ropes stretched between the ceiling beams. With every press, there came a deep, damp creak of waterlogged wood, like a cart on a frozen road.

That night, in the Râmnic printing press, thirty sheets were printed per hour. In a week, a thousand sheets. In a year, the Râmnic press produced between twelve and fourteen books—a modest rate compared to the great European printing houses. But compared to what was being done in 1650 on the territory of present-day Romania—under the coordination of Metropolitan Varlaam, in the printing press at Trei Ierarhi in Iași—it was a fivefold increase. And compared to 1500, when there was no printing press at all on the territory of present-day Romania, it was nothing short of a civilisation.

This Râmnic printing press—which we will use as a guiding thread for this article—was not an isolated case. It was a symptom. A symptom of a pre-industrial Romanian world that nevertheless had its own density. It was not industrial England. Nor was it Habsburg Banat. But neither was it an intellectual graveyard, as some 19th-century historians tried to describe it.

This article is dedicated to that density. What existed in the Principalities in 1780? Not what did not exist—we have already spoken about that. But what did exist, concretely, in the houses, markets, workshops, printing presses, hospitals, and academies of the Moldo-Wallachian world at the end of the 18th century.

This is an inventory. It is, at the same time, a form of respect.

Article 3 of 10 — ‘The Technological Twilight of the Romanian Lands’

Previous articles: ‘The Map of Powers in 1780’ and ‘The Anatomy of Tribute’.

I. The First Pour, Oravița, the Winter of 1719

Master Johann Schrenk stood before a stone wall radiating heat like a bread oven at white-hot intensity. It was 3 February 1719. Overnight, snow had fallen. The men working on the furnace’s upper platform—four Saxons from Selmecbánya, two Swabians from the Rhineland, a taciturn Slovak with calloused hands—had shed their thick coats. In the minus-six-degree cold outside, they stood in shirts stained with soot and sweat. In front of the furnace, it was summer. A summer that smelled of sulphur, of burning charcoal, of molten iron—a sweet, intoxicating scent that men learned to breathe without fainting only after a few months.

Schrenk glanced at the red-sand hourglass in his hand. Twelve minutes until the pour. This was the second attempt in three days. The first had failed—part of the iron had solidified in the runner, the mould had cracked, and nearly a full day’s labour had been lost. The men had looked at him in silence. The master, at forty-two, had long since learned that a worker’s silence cut deeper than any insult.

Below him, in the furnace’s firebox, a small, red-haired man—a Wallach from the Târnava Valley, hired for his muscles, not his skill—supervised the bellows, powered by a waterwheel mounted on the Oravița River. The blast had to be constant. A single interruption, and the temperature would drop; the iron ore, hauled here by horse from the northern mountains, would not melt into liquid pig iron but turn instead into a slaggy paste that would destroy the furnace’s refractory lining.

When Schrenk lowered his hand—the agreed signal—the Benedictine monk brought in specially to bless the first successful pour (if it were to be successful) began the prayer. This was no mere formality. Saxon masters had a reputation for pragmatism, not superstition. But the monk was there for Sebastian Hentzler, the inspector sent by the Aulic Council in Vienna, who recorded everything in a leather-bound ledger.

The clay runner, cracked with heat, opened. A sudden orange light burst forth, casting the men’s shadows against the workshop walls. The stream of molten iron flowed—heavy, sluggish, like hot tar—into the sand moulds. Ten seconds. Fifteen. Twenty. Schrenk counted silently in German, his lips moving slightly.

Fifty-eight seconds later, the runner emptied. Lying in the sand moulds, red as embers, were the first industrially cast iron pieces on the territory of what is now Romania. They were not works of art. They were six cannon barrels, commissioned by the imperial arsenal in Timișoara for the Danubian garrisons.

That same day, 160 kilometres away as the crow flies, in Bucharest, Nicolae Mavrocordat, the first Phanariote ruler of Wallachia, began his second reign. He was busy negotiating with the Porte for a new level of mucarer—the tribute paid to the Ottomans. They were pouring money into sacks. Not iron into moulds.

160 kilometres. Two worlds.

The Anatomy of Tribute: How the Principalities’ Wealth Was Drained Toward Constantinople and the Phanar

Article 2 of 10 — “The Technological Twilight of the Romanian Lands”

Previous article: “The Map of Powers in 1780.”

I. A September Night in Iași, 1795

In the treasury house of Iași, a few hundred paces from the princely court of Alexandru Callimachi, a single tallow candle flickered. It was past midnight. A senior clerk of the vistiernic — the high treasurer — was counting the coins for the third time.

This was not carelessness. It was procedure.

Sacks of money — Turkish piasters, Venetian ducats, Maria Theresa thalers, a few smuggled Polish louis d’or — had to be counted in three separate sessions, by three different men, at different hours of the night. After each count, the total was recorded on a slip of paper, sealed in an envelope with wax, and the seal placed in a walnut-wood box. The next morning, when the vistiernic sat down for the final reckoning, the three envelopes were opened in his presence, along with that of a gramatic (a junior clerk) and a representative of the Metropolitan Church. If the three figures matched, the money was released. If they did not, the process began anew.

This was the haraci — the tribute. The word comes from Arabic, via Turkish: harāc, the tax levied on non-Muslims. On that September night in 1795, the sum in question was one that contemporary observers could only greet with a bitter smile: sixty-five thousand piasters. In a good year, this was half the Moldavian treasury’s annual cash income. In a bad year, it was more.

A weary clerk counted the coins for the third time by the light of a guttering candle. In three days, a Turkish escort would arrive to take them away. Two weeks later, the sacks would be unloaded in the courtyard of the Imperial Divan in Constantinople, before the officers of the Grand Vizier. And after that, the peasants of Moldavia would be summoned for the autumn tax — four, five, sometimes six levies in the same year — to replace in the treasury exactly what had just crossed the Danube.

This is the image that opens our story. A clerk counting coins at midnight. A sack of money bound for Constantinople. A procedure triple-checked, lest a single piaster be missing when the Porte’s eyes fell upon it.

In the first article, I called tribute the “institutional infrastructure” of the Principalities. Here, we dissect it. Not as metaphor. As extractive mathematics.

A Map of Powers in 1780: The world our great-great-grandparents inhabited

Article 1 of 10 — “The Technological Twilight of the Romanian Lands”

I. A post road, an October morning

In the autumn of 1786, an imperial official named Franz Josef Sulzer was crossing the customs post at Turnu-Roșu in a carriage that smelled of freshly greased leather and Austrian pipe tobacco. His notes—published a few years earlier in Vienna under the title Geschichte des transalpinischen Daciens—are among the few detailed accounts of what the road between Sibiu and Bucharest looked like at the end of the eighteenth century. Sulzer was no romantic. He was a former officer turned jurist, a man who measured things.

What he measured that morning was an invisible yet palpable boundary at every turn. In Sibiu, he had left behind a city with a public clock, oil lamps lit on some streets, a postal service that ran to a printed timetable. In Câineni, the first stop beyond the mountains, the horses waited for him in a thatched stable, and the toll collector demanded money before departure, 'in case something should happen on the road.' Sulzer noted the smell—dung burning instead of wood, because the wood was sold at the market in Râmnicu. He noted the sound—the ceaseless creaking of an ungreased axle, which no one seemed to notice. He noted the gesture—how, at every inn, the innkeeper bowed three times before touching the glass, then drank his wine with his eyes on the road, as if expecting at any moment someone he could not refuse.

A hundred kilometres, and a technological age, separated the two worlds.

This is the opening scene of our series: not a map, not a table, not an institutional diagram, but a post road in 1786, measured in smells, sounds, and gestures. Because the question we attempt to answer over the next nine articles—why we fell behind and what that means for 2050—cannot be separated from the question of what it meant to live inside that gap. Sulzer, in 1786, sensed it with his nose before he put it on paper. Our great-great-grandparents lived their entire lives within it.

Initial title: From Primăverii to the Theatre, with Four Children and a Notebook of Grievances

A July walk through a small Romanian city, or on how a town deflates beneath the feet of its own children

We set off at about half past five in the afternoon. The hour was chosen because, in July, Botoșani[^1] has two faces and neither belongs to it: at midday the tarmac breathes like a frying pan left on a switched-off hob, while late in the evening, around nine, a false quiet settles in, of the sort in which every car that passes down Strada Primăverii seems to be crossing your sitting room. Half past five was, as my father used to put it, the hour at which "the sun packs up its tools". He spoke of the sun as though of a workshop colleague finishing his shift, and those words come back to me every time I decide to leave the house in summer. My father was a car mechanic and he had his own way of measuring the world: in spanners, in stroke, in millimetres of play. A great many fragments of this vocabulary have dissolved into the way I look at cities. The millimetres I sometimes look for in the kerbs of Botoșani's cycle infrastructure. I don't find them, but that's a separate conversation, and one I'll come to soon enough.

We had agreed to start out from my flat on Strada Primăverii and walk, at a Sunday-afternoon pace, to the Mihai Eminescu Theatre.[^2] It wasn't Sunday; it was a plain Wednesday. But we each had one reason more to go, and several reasons fewer. The one reason more was a play we wanted to reach early, to secure good seats on the left of the auditorium where the acoustics swallow less. The reasons fewer were, in turn, the fatigue, the humidity in the air, a piece of political news that had spoilt the morning for all of us, and, further down, a refusal to take the car once more for less than two kilometres. That, I think, was the initial decision from which the rest flowed: a small form of resistance, in which I did not want to contribute yet another vehicle to the already thick air of the town.

The friends arrived one by one. Andrei with Ilinca, his daughter of eleven, holding a skateboard she is not allowed to ride in the places she would like to ride it. Mihai with Tudor, a tall boy of thirteen, already almost one metre seventy, with an adolescent's stride. And Cristi with Sara, ten years old, her hair caught up in a high ponytail, on a folding bicycle she guards as she would an exotic object. The fourth pair was me and V., my son, sixteen years old, who over the last month has grown again so that his trousers now sit short on his ankles. I saw him each evening at supper, and yet that growth I only registered on stepping out into the street, when I looked at him properly and was startled, as though only now was I seeing him as he was.

Four men between forty and fifty, four children between ten and sixteen, eight pairs of shoes of eight different kinds and eight different walking rhythms. These were, in short, the conditions of an urban design experiment which no designer in Botoșani appeared to have anticipated.

End of the Line: How a Romanian Town Lost Two Trade Routes and Gained a Railway Station. Being a chronicle of five centuries of commercial geography, one catastrophic infrastructure decision, and a tunnel that has never carried a single passenger

Editor's note for international readers: Botoșani (pronounced approximately boh-toh-SHAN) is a city of roughly 80,000 to 90,000 people in north-eastern Romania, close to the borders with Ukraine and the Republic of Moldova. It sits in the historical region of Moldavia — not to be confused with the independent Republic of Moldova to its east. For most of the medieval period, it was one of the most important commercial hubs in south-eastern Europe. Most people outside Romania have never heard of it. This is, in part, what this article is about.

Begin with what is known.

In November 1871, the railway arrives. It arrives and does not quite arrive. It reaches Leorda, hesitates, then pushes on to Botoșani. Forty-four kilometres of track from the junction at Verești. End of the line. The station building is designed by a local engineer named Elie Radu — a Botoșani man who had built bridges and roads across half the country. He designs his own city's station with his own hand. He builds, in other words, the architectural monument to its own marginalisation. Small irony. No moral attached.

The town celebrates. Naturally.

Only a certain Armenian merchant — call him Hagigian, for the name matters less than the gesture — a certain Armenian merchant with a cloth shop in the old commercial quarter stands in his doorway and watches the locomotive with an unease he cannot name. He is not against progress. He is not a fool. He is simply a man who knows that his goods arrive from one direction and depart in another, and that this locomotive does not serve either.

If Nobody Says Good Morning to You

Translated and adapted from the Romanian by the author. Cultural notes appear inline where necessary for an international reader.

The Scene

It was March 1965, the Great Lent was under way, and Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej had died.[^1] Lică[^2] was eleven years old and had come home from school in tears. Not genuine tears — he was crying from fear, from imitation, from the dull pressure a regime exerts on children through teachers and classmates and the general atmosphere of a day that demanded grief. At home, his father — a man with calloused hands and the word-economy characteristic of his generation — looked at him for a moment and slapped him. Not hard. But precisely.

"Don't cry for nothing. That man never wept with us over our dead on the bier."[^3]

Then he set him to work making small baskets. Little things, woven from thin scalded reed, with a single handle — nothing more. Their size was calculated for the food carried to church to be blessed on the eve of a feast.[^4] The work was not difficult, but it required attention: the reed had to be scalded for exactly the right amount of time, or it would snap when bent; the handle had to be firm without being inelegant. It was craft, not chore.

Lică's father did not explain further. He said one sentence: "Be useful, so the village knows you."

And that was the whole philosophy of the day.

I have thought of that scene every time I heard the saying that Lică remembered from a great-great-grandparent — a man whose name even Lică could no longer recall precisely: "If you set out in the morning and nobody says Good Morning to you, you might as well not have woken up." It is not an aphorism. It is not a school maxim. It is an observation pulled directly from the texture of rural communal life, without philosophical pretension, yet with a precision that any philosopher might envy.

[^1]: Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej (1901–1965) was the Communist leader of Romania from 1947 until his death. His passing on 19 March 1965 was the occasion for state-mandated public mourning — schools, workplaces, and public institutions were expected to perform visible grief. He was succeeded by Nicolae Ceaușescu, under whose dictatorship Romania remained until 1989.

[^2]: Lică is an informal Romanian diminutive of the name Lica or Vasile, common in rural northern Moldova (the historical region in north-eastern Romania, not to be confused with the neighbouring Republic of Moldova). It signals affection and familiarity.

[^3]: "Dead on the bier" (morții de pe năsălie): the bier is the wooden frame on which a coffin is carried to church and to the cemetery. In Romanian Orthodox village tradition, the community gathers for the entire funeral process, which can last several days. The father's point is stark: the party leader had never shared in their real losses, so no real tears were owed.

[^4]: Food blessed at church (mâncare de ajun dusă la sfințit): in Romanian Orthodox practice, certain feast days — particularly those during the Great Lent and around Christmas and Easter — involve bringing food to church for a blessing before it is eaten. The baskets carrying this food are small, carefully made objects that pass through a ritual circuit: from home, to the altar, back to the table. They are simultaneously practical and sacred.

From the Armchair to the Hour of Magic: Habit as a Form of Knowing.

An essay on attention, provincial towns, and the people who choose to leave the house.

"Ernu excavated the everyday, Teodorescu articulated the province, Lungu ironised inertia, Braniște photographed the interior void. Neill maintained a habit, Collins measured a flywheel, Clear mapped a mechanism, Sullivan observed a shift in attention. Each saw the same thing through a different window."

Where This Begins — Or: How a Man in an Armchair Wrote a Manifesto Without Meaning To

Before I write anything of my own, I need to give the floor to someone else. Cristian Stăncescu published a short text on cojocarupetru.info — something between a Friday evening diary entry and an inadvertent provocation. It carries no philosophical pretensions. It cites no one. It is simply the account of a man who went out and found something there.

I reproduce it here in translation, because it is the foundation on which everything that follows rests.

"Oh, there's nothing to do in this Botoșani of ours!" — How many times have you heard that? Do you say it yourself? Let me ask in return: what are you doing to have something to do in Botoșani? Sitting in the armchair, watching your favourite series, waiting for something to happen — a miracle, perhaps — that's unlikely to work. You searched online for something you were interested in, didn't find it, and gave up, didn't you?

Go out. Walk around. Step into a café. Find the shade of a terrace. Socialise. You'll discover there's a public speaking and leadership club — Toastmasters Botoșani. You'll find that people gather at the "La Mâțe" café to discuss ideas and meditate, not merely to order coffee. You'll learn you can play backgammon and chess in the park, that you can learn to dance and feel the rhythm of Latin American music in your body, that you can learn to paint, to sing, to sew, to... Everything begins with wanting to step outside your little box.

Today I accepted an invitation. At 18:45, I was at the place where the Piața Volantă — the Flying Market — takes place every Sunday. Irina Ghilian welcomed me and led me into a beautiful, warm, welcoming room. Some of the exhibits sat quietly in their places, ready to be admired and tried. Others were still finding their spot on the tables. Everything was arranged thoughtfully, by category.

The presentation began, and for me, the hour of magic began. Amway products, marketing programmes, water purification systems, supplements, vitamins... "I've shed fifteen years off myself!" I closed my eyes. What would it be like to shed fifteen years off myself? I became more attentive.

— How do you wash your fruit and vegetables? What products do you use?

— What water do you drink?

The demonstrations and explanations began. Did you know there are varieties of cherry grown exclusively for their vitamin C content? Acerola cherries! I felt like I was watching Teleenciclopedia. You know that feeling — when you don't want it to end?

I looked around the room and asked myself: where are all the people from Botoșani who say there's nothing to do here?"

— Cristian Stăncescu

That is Stăncescu's. From here, the text is mine.

Not because he gets anything wrong — quite the opposite. But good texts do what good doors do: they open and stop at the threshold. What follows is an attempt to step through.

The Building Stirs. Management Sleeps.

"Men care less for what they hold in common with others than for their own concerns." — Aristotle, Politics, Book II

Yield. "This building isn't performing! We should sell it!" Wrong. It is your management of this building — and of other buildings in the municipality and across the county — that is not performing. You and those you work with, your so-called "team", are either incompetent or acting in bad faith. The building stirs. It is waiting to be brought to life, to receive working people, to shelter them — warmth in winter, cool in summer, protection from wind and rain. What must decision-makers do? It is simple: think about every action concerning public assets and liabilities as though those assets belonged to you personally — cherish them, develop them. What stops them? Pride, self-interest, friendships and the party. No — not the party! The party never takes responsibility. — Cristian Stăncescu

[Translator's note — the source text]Cristian Stăncescu is a Romanian civil society commentator who publishes short, polemical observations on public administration, political culture and civic life — typically under 200 words, in the tradition of the Romanian journalistic "notă" (brief note). "Randament" — the Romanian word used as the title of the original piece — translates literally as "yield" or "return on investment", but carries a specific administrative register in Romanian: it is the language used by public managers when they declare assets unproductive and recommend disposal. Stăncescu turns the word back on the managers themselves.

The concrete scene: a building and an inverted diagnosis. Sometimes a short sentence cuts deeper than a hundred-page report. Stăncescu is not writing a case study. He is writing a correction — rapid, clear, almost violent in its precision. The first word of his response is decisive: Wrong. Not a qualification, not a polite amendment, but a complete reversal of the diagnosis. The problem is not the building. The problem is the person who framed the problem.

Citizens and... Others!

"A city's infrastructure is not a technical problem. It is a statement of intent towards its citizens." — Street observation, Botoșani, 2026

Citizens and... Others! Yesterday, the mayor of Botoșani municipality, whilst unveiling the new electric buses on which the dear citizens of Botoșani will henceforth be able to travel — on routes 101 and 102 only — announced that development is continuing! Routes 101 and 102 were perfectly adequate before, between ourselves! I spent the whole night on tenterhooks [translator's note: the Romanian idiom is "ca pe ace" — literally "as if on needles," equivalent to "on tenterhooks" or "on pins and needles"], kept awake by the World Cup matches, thinking about the journey I would make the following morning. Half past seven. The stop at "La Cornișa" ["The Cornice" — a local landmark name attached to a Chinese goods shop, itself a small marker of post-communist provincial commerce]. A green bus was just pulling away. Smart. New! I decided to take the Number 3 instead. Red. Dusty. It draws up. I climb aboard: the door tied shut with a piece of string, inside — an oven! The ticket: four lei [approximately 80 pence or one US dollar at current exchange rates]. — "Could you put the air conditioning on?" I venture. The driver presses something. The window on the right goes down a little. Inside... a picture of misery! I alight at the "End of Line 1" stop — a thoroughly modern stop, as can be seen from the photograph. A few steps further along, another stop, equally "modernised." "We continue... the non-installation!" That is what the campaign ought to be called. Ahh, if only they'd had a majority on the Local Council [translator's note: the "Consiliul Local" is the municipal deliberative body, directly elected, with authority over service contracts and public expenditure] — what oversight they would have exercised, what penalties they would have written into the service contract, which runs until 2028, what... anything! Forgive me! They do have the majority on the Local Council! Well, they won't be invited to the businessmen's galas! Citizens? Some are pleased (on routes 101 and 102), others...! We continue the non-installation! — Cristian Stăncescu