Historical Similarities

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.