‘One day, I sat after reading the tragedies of Orestes1 and of Erotocritos2 and I wondered. I resolved that I too should make a history of the things that had happened to me.’ Pie-maker, shoemaker, and later cup-bearer (paharnic),3 Dimitrie Foti Merişescu (Mirişescu), a young petty boyar born in 1797 in Colentina and brought up in the Biserica cu Sfinţi (Church with Saints) quarter of Bucharest, decided to write about the adventures of his life. His memoir, presented in thirty-six leaves of manuscript, written in Romanian in the transitional alphabet,4 but with some dialogue in Greek and Bulgarian, is striking for its humour, its irony, and above all the unusual stories it contains.
Travels of Dimitrie Foti Merişescu cc. 1817–1820. Made by Michał Wasiucionek.
On the last page of the manuscript, the author writes: ‘20 September 1817. Dimitrie Merişescu, 20 years of age. Dălhăuţi.’ The inscription might lead us to assume that the text was composed around then, especially as the events narrated are close in time to 1817, but the handwriting points rather towards the middle of the nineteenth century, a period characterized by such literary products. Merişescu’s manuscript is unusual, and may be a re-transcription of his initial notes, as in places the writing has been corrected with a chemical pencil or amended with interventions above the line.5
This chapter concentrates on the value of memoirs for knowledge and interpretation of identification, belonging, and allegiance. Dumitrache gives us a good example of how the literature of the time could impress someone so much that he sat down at his writing desk to recount his own day-to-day life. Orestes, Erotocritos, and perhaps also Telemachus helped him to put his everyday experiences into a literary form, encouraging him to give them meaning, to rewrite his past as a narrative, perhaps with the thought that his memoir would be read by someone. His narrative is no more than a backward look on a life spent in the vicinity of the ‘great ones’ of the time and ending somewhere on the margins of anonymity. Following the thread of the story, I have tried to supplement the picture with other documents of the period (private archives, images, other memoirs), focusing on the way in which Dimitrie (also referred to as Dumitrache and Tache in the journal and in the documents) Merişescu constructs an identity for himself, making use of clothes, consumption, education, and manners.
Two circumstances made possible the appearance of a journal like that of Dumitrache Merişescu: the enhanced valuing of education and the birth of a new literary genre. The enhanced valuing of education as a form of social advancement took place around the turn of the century, enabling a considerable number of petty boyars, merchants, and artisans to emerge from collective anonymity. The rise of the memoir, a literary genre that had been almost non-existent in Wallachia and Moldavia before 1800, coincided with investment in education and gave anonymous individuals the courage they needed to believe that their memories would be of use to someone, someday.6
Dumitrache Merişescu is a ‘little man’ who writes his memoir and leaves notes about his time. But, as I have pointed out, the first half of the nineteenth century saw the birth of a literary movement favourable to memoirs, and which encouraged Teodor Vârnav, Elena Hartulari, Ioan Solomon, and Scarlat Dăscălescu to write theirs.7 All these authors belonged to the so-called ‘middle class’, in other words, the social category including merchants, petty boyars, and the holders of minor administrative positions.
It is his style that differentiates Dumitrache Merişescu from all the others, because he recounts his memories in a heroic manner, considering his deeds to be worthy of a veritable epic. His writing is nonetheless simple and direct, laced with verses and popular songs that were in circulation at the time.8
Such ego-documents appear here and there in the Ottoman and Balkan worlds. They constitute inestimable testimonies for the historical reconstruction of processes of identification and representation of a population caught between various regional origins and linguistic, political, and social borders.9 Dumitrache Merişescu and his ‘history’ might be part of a wider trend flowing across the Ottoman world, linking him to figures such as Osman-Aga of Temeşvar,10 Hanna Dyâb,11 and Markos Antonios Katsaitis.12 The trend continued through the nineteenth century, as literature flourished and others wrote about their lives and experiences.
Education
The young Dumitrache was educated at the church school of the Biserica cu Sfinţi quarter in Bucharest, where he lived and learned from others. This education reflects a world of linguistic diversity: Dumitrache speaks and understands Romanian, Greek, Bulgarian, and Turkish. His memoir is written in a vernacular Romanian, which would appear to be a kind of ‘Balkan’ or ‘Phanariot’ variant, into which are mixed words and expressions borrowed mostly just as he heard them. Even though he could speak Greek, the Greek dialogues in his memoirs are transliterated using the same Romanian transitional alphabet; he rarely writes using Greek script. He may also have been a pupil at the Princely Academy of Saint Sava in Bucharest. A boy named Merişanu is listed in 1812 among the pupils there. His classmates would have included a string of Greeks and Bulgarians who had come to receive an education in the Greek language in Bucharest.13 Having attended the Academy might be an explanation both for his linguistic knowledge and for his reading.14 On the other hand, given his tendency to boast, would Dumitrache Merişescu not have taken care to make at least a passing mention of his time at this prestigious institution?
Erotocritos and Orestes are two prominent characters in the Romanian popular literature of the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, influencing local behaviours and tastes, as well as inspiring poets and minstrels. It was also possible to read of Telemachus and his educational journeys: Fénelon circulated in manuscript, translated and copied countless times in various miscellanies.15 And Dimitrie Merişescu underlines the role played by his reading in leading him to write down on paper adventures that he considers equally (or almost equally) spectacular and worthy of being remembered. But this reading came later, when he had already returned from his travels and had made his home in Moldavia, trying to find a purpose in his own life.
Who is Dimitrie Merişescu
The life and career of this Dimitrie Foti Merişescu may be reconstructed with difficulty, after extensive research in the archives of Wallachia and Moldavia. Some details are divulged in his ‘history’: ‘I was born in the year 1797, baptized by Ioan Hagi Moscu.16 My father traded in cattle. In the autumn, he slaughtered them at the shambles in Colentina. He was known as Cupar17 Foti Merişescu.’ We also learn that he had an uncle, Paharnic Manolache; several brothers, Anastasie, Ioan, and Niţu; several sisters, one of whom was called Păuna; and a series of other uncles, aunts, and cousins of both sexes. In the autumn of 1814, when he starts his story, his mother had died and his father had remarried and was on his estate of Dălhăuţa, near Focşani, where he owned a vineyard. Manolache the paharnic and epistat (superintendent) of meat supplies for the city of Bucharest18 seems to have been a man of some wealth, as, according to the manuscript, he had ‘a threshing mill with hammers in his garden with the wheel turned by the water of the Dâmboviţa.’ Working in the cattle trade, the family of Foti Merişescu were in close clientelary and commercial relations with Ioan Hagi-Moscu. This connection leads me to think that Foti and Manolache had come from south of the Danube, from somewhere in the region of Epirus. They had probably arrived sometime in the 1780s, when Ioan Hagi-Moscu first appears in the records in connection with trading deals. They seem to have become acclimatized very quickly, marrying and integrating in the local petty boyar class by buying the boyar titles of cupar and paharnic. Who is Dumitrache Merişescu? The answer would tell us about an entire category marked by high social mobility and a capacity to adapt according to the changing context. All I can say for now is that our hero, born in Bucharest of Epirot parents, bears the identity of his religious confession: Orthodox Christian.
The Context of the Narrative
In the first three decades of the nineteenth century, Moldavia and Wallachia experienced two major occupations that were of great importance for their history, contributing to the dissolution of the old political system and the promotion by a new generation of a new institutional structure. The simple people, the populace, the mob were far from the effervescence of political ideas, but rather experienced the occupations with emotion and with collective fears. Here is how Tache Merişescu describes the entry of the Russian army in 1806, as he recalls it, having been around ten years old at the time:
In the autumn of 1806, the Muscovites came. There were also Turks in Bucharest, at Radu Vodă [monastery] in the tower were Arnauts and Oltenians19 (why I do not know). There was great fear in Bucharest, for the Turks were with the Turkish pasha of Giurgiu. I remember that women with yokes frightened the Turks. They said they fled without saddles and without harness, but we children and the bigger ones among us, we went out by the Street of the Outside Market, just where the Moşilor Market is held. The Muscovites came by the Colentina road. They were in a long line, and it seemed to us that the end would reach as far as Pantelimon. There were Cossacks with long lances, there were dragoons. It seemed to us that they had two heads, they had swords in their broad hands, and on the ground there was a great stream in green coats, up to the horses’ heads. And they fired the guns one by one as the line went on to Pantelimon, but something more beautiful had never been heard before … and they beat their drums, the Cossacks sang, the dragoons with trumpets and the chasseurs, slowly, the whole line. Perhaps the whole of Bucharest had come out into the fields, to watch. It was almost night when they entered the city. We boys all went along to the music of the dragoons because they came into Bucharest. We heard the officers: ‘na prava, na leva, cistka.’20
The people of Bucharest were impressed by the great parade put on by the Russian army, which was to linger on Wallachian and Moldavian territory for over six years, imposing rules, values, and ways of thinking, often by force. Only the French threat, with Napoleon’s advance towards Moscow, forced the Russians to make peace with the Ottoman Empire and to leave Moldavia and Wallachia in great haste, as Dumitrache Merişescu writes:
In 1812, I watched the beyzade21 Dumitrache Moruzu playing cirid22 with the Turks called mürahas, and Generals Kameski and Sovorofu who drowned at Râmnicu-Sărat … The Russians were returning to go into battle against the French. The women went with them as far as Colentina. Some women were hiding under the bridge. We boys yelled and called to them: ‘To Colentina, Plumbuita, to the soldiers.’23
And so the high Turkish, Greek, and Russian officials spent their time playing cirid on the waste ground, waiting for Napoleon. And when he came closer, their differences became easier to resolve. The wars in Europe, and especially the fronts opened up by Napoleon, were of interest to everyone. If the deacon Ioan Dobrescu in the Batiştei district of Bucharest could afford to curse the French emperor under his breath, categorizing him as ‘the bad part’ (a play on ‘bon part’, ‘Bonaparte’),24 politicians paid good money for any sort of intelligence that would offer them more or less accurate information about the progress of events. For example, in 1812, The bulletins of the French army regarding the conduct of military operations on the Russian front, printed in Wilna (Vilnius), a city which by the date of the seventh bulletin (16 July 1812) was in the possession of the French army, arrived in Bucharest.25
When Tsar Alexander I and Sultan Mahmud II arrived at a peace agreement, the president of the Divans Vasilii I. Krasno-Milashevich26 asked the metropolitans to have bells rung, to summon Christians to church, and to offer prayers of thanks for the end of the war.27 The same day, 10 July 1812, coincidentally or not, a certain Bishop Gherasim wrote to a priest in Bolintin, near Bucharest, to hold a service of blessing in his church, which had been ‘polluted by the pagans’.28 After six years of Russian occupation, the army that had been received with fear, but also with some hope of salvation from the hands of the ‘pagan’ Turks, was now itself seen as belonging on the side of those without any law. It may be added that all those mentioned by Dumitrache Merişescu in the passage cited above died tragically in the turmoil of the wars: the Russian general Arkadi Suvorov drowned in April 1811, during the crossing of the River Râmnicul Sărat, and his fellow general Nikolai Mikhailovich Kamensky succumbed to fever, also in April 1811, in Odessa, while the beyzade Dimitrie Moruzi, grand dragoman and negotiator of the Peace of Bucharest, was hanged at Schumla (Shumen) by Ahmed Pasha’s janissaries, on the orders of the sultan, for his lack of diplomatic ability in the peace negotiations.29
In the Shadow of Ioan Hagi Moscu
Dumitrache Merişescu is no more than a minor character in a world of major figures dominating commercial, political, and diplomatic relations. From this position in the background, like a veritable puppet-master, Dumitrache brings into his narrative important personalities of his time: Ioan Hagi Moscu, Grigore Brâncoveanu, Grigore Băleanu, Ioan Caragea, Costa Foru, Dimitrie Moruzi, Alexandru Suţu, Manouk Bey,30 and Iancu Jianu all made their mark on the period.31 His life proceeds in the shadows of history, changing direction according to the destinies of the great. As has already been mentioned, his father was a ‘Greek’ or a Vlach from the Balkan peninsula, who, together with his two brothers, came to Bucharest in the wake of the merchant Ioan Hagi Moscu, originally from Salonica.32 In fact, the careers and wealth of the Foti Merişescu brothers flourished (or withered) under the protection of this merchant, who became a high office-holder and later a significant figure in Balkan and southeast European diplomacy.
Anonymous – Grand ban Grigore Brâncoveanu (1764–1832), 1830–1832, National Museum of Art, Bucharest.
Right from the beginning, Dumitrache Merişescu makes it clear that he was baptized by Ioan Hagi Moscu, while a few pages later he adds the equally precious information that Anastasie, another brother, ‘stayed with his godfather and relation Hagi Moscu, also in Bucharest.’ It was in the autumn of 1814. At that date, Ioan Hagi Moscu was a notable personality in the political life of Wallachia, being in the entourage of Prince Ioan Caragea and temporarily occupying the office of grand vistier.33
Ioan Hagi Moscu was an important supplier of information to the Habsburg Empire, and also of hay to the Austrian army. For this reason he was twice involved in litigation on financial and diplomatic matters with the court in Vienna.34 In the Austrian reports, Ioan Hagi Moscu, agent and banker in Vienna for Prince Nicolae Mavrogheni (1786–1790), is portrayed in dark colours as a ‘parfait canaille’, driven only by ‘point d’argent’.35 On 23 December 1810, the French Consul in Bucharest, Ledoux, writes: ‘Hagi Moscu, un des principaux boyards de la Valachie, le plus éclairé et le plus considéré […] est très-dévoué à la France’.36 Count Louis Alexandre Andrault de Langeron, general of the Russian army of occupation, confirmed the habit of the merchant Hagi Moscu of selling information both to France and to the Ottoman Empire, after he managed to intercept Ledoux’s letters. ‘I had long considered him a traitor,’ writes Langeron, expressing his desire to arrest him and interrogate him ‘severely’ to find out not only ‘the secret of his understanding with the Turks and with the French,’ but also the name of the person who was informing him regarding the Russian army. According to Langeron, General Kutuzov, the commander of the Russian army, had not had the courage to take such a measure, ‘for fear of somehow offending Napoleon,’ and when General Kamenski dared to arrest him, ‘he found nothing,’ and had to apologize.37
Two levels of clientelary relations may be traced here, and their value may be measured in terms of the ‘gifts’ that passed among the members of each group.38 What Ioan Hagi Moscu offered was important, costly, inestimable, but not at all visible: information. Navigating with ease through empires, thanks to his commercial activity, proficient in the languages of the nations, Ioan Hagi Moscu sold, together with fashion and luxury, the latest news from the empire of Vienna or from the Ottoman seas. I have insisted on this figure because he helps us to understand the expeditions and wanderings of his godson and protégé Dumitrache Merişescu through the world of the well-born. A first characteristic of this group is the solidarity that is manifested in material and clientelary support. Even if he does not say so explicitly in his memoirs, Dumitrache often talks of interventions in his favour by those who have the same ‘mobile identity’: Epirots, Greeks, Serbs, Orthodox Christians, always on the move.
Journeys Through the Deeper Reaches of a Country
We know little today about the deeper reaches of the world of the past, about the journeys and shared destinies that are lost in the broader history of a country. Dumitrache Merişescu raises the curtain and allows us to penetrate what we may call the banality and promiscuity of daily life. He proves to be an ‘outsider’ discovering with curiosity the world that he meets. His memoirs are constructed as a travel journal,39 penetrating through various temporal and social layers, through diverse worlds linked by confessional solidarity and clientelary networks.
Pavel Đjurković (1772–1830) – Portrait of Caragea Vodă (Wallachia, 1812–1818), [1824], National Museum of Art, Bucharest.
Dumitrache’s journeys all start from an apparently convivial meeting that ends badly one autumn day in the open air at Filaret in Bucharest: ‘One autumn day, we made a decision together. We bought a loaf from Babicu and roast meat from Furnu, and autumn garlic. We went over to Filaret, and we were eating, and drinking must.’ The bitter grape must goes quickly to the heads of the seventeen-year-olds, who start fighting. After hitting one of his friends on the head with a brick and seeing the blood flowing, Dumitrache takes fright and flees into the unknown, throwing himself, in fact, into an adventure. Heads hanging in a noose, hands, noses, and ears cut off, corpses left in full view: these are the images that pursue him, that feed his fears and hasten his steps:
No one chased me, but it seemed to me that they would catch me and take me to Prince Caragea and put me on the stake, because often on Saturdays they put thieves on the stake. I watched and I took fright; on Saturdays, too, in the prison, they cut off the hands of some of the guilty people with a cleaver, they cut off the noses and ears of others; with their hands tied behind them, they could only shake their heads.
Such images imprint themselves in the mind of the traveller, and settle in the memory of an adolescent, setting out on the journey of life. In the same period, Teodor Vârnav, on his arrival in Bucharest, reports: ‘The first thing that filled me with amazement when I arrived on the edge of Bucharest was this: two people impaled alive on stakes, and likewise another hanged by the neck.’40 This eye-witness report is from May 1813, when the young Teodor Vârnav arrived in Bucharest as a child of twelve to be entrusted for his education to the merchant Constandin Lada. Internal documents confirm the intransigence of the system of justice set in motion by the administrative ability of the Phanariot prince Ioan Caragea, and all the more severe in the circumstances of a plague epidemic.
By jumping over fences and bypassing the alleys of the city, Tache arrives in the fields, beside the Bulgarian carts that were then gradually departing after feeding the people of Bucharest with their vegetables. Slowly but surely we enter another reality that is relatively little documented: that of the Bulgarian vegetable traders brought by the Russians during the occupation of 1806–1812. While some of them made their base in Cioplea-Dudeşti, others were scattered among the villages around the capital, with the intention of supplying the city with fresh vegetables.41 Later, Prince Ioan Caragea renewed their privileges, encouraging them to settle, to build homes, to send their children to school, to learn Romanian, to build churches. It was the children of these Bulgarians that were among Tache’s classmates at school. From them he received turnips and learned Bulgarian: ‘The boys of the Bulgarians were at school. They gave us turnips when they came to school. We asked: “What do you call such and such?” And they told us all [the words], and we showed them the slate because they were wooden-headed.’
After all sorts of wanderings among the ‘ugly’ villages of the south, ‘without gardens or trees,’ as he writes, he manages to slip into the porch of a Bulgarian house in Olteniţa. His first encounter, his first Platonic love, his first insertion into the Bulgarian minority introduces us into the routine of everyday life. It is an opportunity for the author to delve into introspection and above all to explore a definition of the ‘self’. It is the first time that these adolescent analyses who he is in relation to those he meets and how he relates to them. The ‘Bulgarians’, and notably the women of the community, enable to him to narrate his own identity.
The son of a small merchant turned boyar, Tache speaks from the perspective of a ‘petty logofăt’,42 thus superior from a social point of view, but also from the perspective of the ‘outsider’ in a different hierarchical position from the Bulgarian vegetable sellers, simple people who eat millet polenta with their fingers (and whom, on top of that, he considers to be ‘wooden-headed’). Such a socially constructed distance is accentuated by the veneer of education that our protagonist has received. Everything differentiates him from those around him. In the first place, he is distinguished by his clothing. Costume is central to the affirmation of one’s identity, for the maintenance of social pride and the statement of social distinctions, obvious to a hierarchal society. Tache Merişescu asserts his pre-eminence with the help of his clothes on every possible occasion. And such occasions are numerous in the course of his travels. Describing the wonder and curiosity of the Bulgarian women who surround him one early October morning, in the village of Olteniţa, he writes:
They all kept looking at me to see what I was. I was dressed in a cotton anteri43 with a felt sash, I was wearing a red çaksır,44 my tall boots were from Tsarigrad, yellow, I had a fez and a cap like a Cossack one and I always wore my fermene.45 It also had a little bit of wire embroidery on it, and I tied a white neckerchief around my neck.
Next, he stands out through a control of the body, which shows the acquisition of norms for eating at table, integrating the use of the knife and the fork, something quite unknown to peasants, and even to market traders and petty boyars:
Păunica prepared polenta. It was made from millet. She turned it out on the table and cut it in pieces. She also poured the milk that was in the cream dishes. She put cows’ cheese too. She said to me: ‘Eat up, dearie.’ I answered that I had eaten the bread [azima] from the string. I tried the polenta and I could hear it. I wanted to eat, but it really made a grinding noise between my teeth. She put it in milk. She said it was good that way. I tasted it with a wooden spoon, but it stuck to my mouth, as I wasn’t used either to millet polenta or to a wooden spoon. At home and in everyone’s home there were tin spoons and plates also of tin, ladles and large and small bowls, also of tin. At Easter and Christmas they brought out silver onto the table. There were also porcelain plates, but they weren’t used about the house.
The extract highlights two different worlds: the young petty boyar from the urban world of Bucharest, dressed cleanly and according to the boyar fashion, with carefully studied manners and for whom millet polenta smells of poverty, of provincialism, of vulgarity (in the older sense of pertaining to the masses, to the common people).46
These two elements, clothes and good manners, characteristic of a certain social stratum, recur in the narrative and are amplified when the author comes into the presence of people who are his superiors from a social point of view.
Journeys Into the Feminine Universe and the Mysteries of Love
His stay in the village of Olteniţa, with its largely Bulgarian population, is his first initiation into the feminine universe and the mysteries of love.47 Dumitrache Merişescu, the seventeen-year-old adolescent, penetrates the world of flirtation through the intermediary of play: blind-man’s-buff and the corăbiască (a slow dance in which the dancers join hands in a circle). These games are his first initiation into the mysteries of love. Although he claims, as does Eufrosin Poteca in his memoirs,48 to have had experience with girls through his sisters and cousins, embraces, caresses, risqué talk, and sexual allusions scare him, excite him, and arouse him, so that ‘Platonic love’ turns to ‘fire’. This ‘Platonic love’, as he characterizes it, contains a considerable dose of fear, due to loss in translation and in the assimilation and processing of information. The girls speak to each other in Bulgarian, and when one of them, ‘a plump49 girl’, comes out with: ‘We’ll have to work on this lad before he understands us,’50 the young man finds all his senses reactivated: ‘I fell silent for fear after what the Bulgarian girl had said.’ Without giving away the fact that he understands Bulgarian, Dumitrache joins in the game, while the girls make risqué jokes at his expense—‘Hey, where did you find him, sister? Give him to me!’ They ask him for money, stare constantly at him, tear him to pieces with their words and threaten him—‘Guard the lad, girls, because our Bulgarian men have a devilish temper.’ The ‘fire’ turns into a terrifying blaze when the girls start to sing: ‘Hurry, Iană, to the clearing / Let’s dig up a plant / The poppy plant / To give it to the man / For him to go to the devil.’
Over and above these scenes of passing flirtation, Dumitrache describes the bucolic love he experiences at the side of the peasant woman Păuna among the haystacks and grapes of autumn, with nowhere to go.
Love in a Time of Plague
The events of Dumitrache Merişescu’s narrative take place in the years of the terrible plague, whose arrival coincided with that of the Phanariot prince Ioan Caragea. While another contemporary observer, Ioan Dobrescu, described the ravages of the plague that descended over Wallachia, and especially over Bucharest, as a punishment for the sinful Christians who had come to be ‘worse than the pagans’, taking delight in Voltaire and the French language,51 Tache described it from the perspective of a wandering adolescent:
I left the village [of Olteniţa], but not by the road, because there was a guard because of the plague. There was smoke and rubbish around the houses. If by chance someone lost something on the road, no one would take it, and there weren’t even thieves. On the one hand fear of falling ill, and on the other the severity of Prince Caragea: the stake, the gallows, cutting off of hands, cutting off of nose and ears, nailing of ears, even for petty boyars. I saw even the sameş52 of Craiova displayed at the gate of the courtyard. They had dressed him in boyar clothes [but] he was only in his indoor slippers and condemned for fraud.53
The fear was recurrent and any ‘sign’ turned into a hysteria, which moreover was fed by the images encountered in the visible zones of the community. Another episode shows us how fragile was the stability of this world and what terror could be induced by any kind of epidemic:
On Friday morning the overseer left me in the house. There was a bottle of raki, there was salmon and roe. He ate and said that he hadn’t got ill. I took the bottle, I drank the raki. I ate the roe too; as I was unaccustomed, I got dizzy. I started to vomit. The Gypsy went upstairs and said that I was stricken. There was a great uproar. They heard that I was at home and that perhaps I had taken ill. There was fear in the whole courtyard. The boyar, in the end, prepared his horses and went to the court. He was the vistiernic.54 He ordered the gates to be kept shut and a Gypsy at the gate. The overseer did not enter the house.
The episode takes place in the house of the great boyar Grigore Băleanu, where Dumitrache Merişescu, godson, client, and protégé of the grand vistier Ioan Hagi Moscu, had become a houseboy, responsible for the cage of canaries. The unruly servant helps himself to the bottle of raki, to the roe and salmon, while the household overseer is not around; ‘unaccustomed’, as he puts it by way of excuse, he vomits, and scares everyone around him. The alarm is given, the gates of the mansion are locked, the ‘stricken’ person is isolated, the servants and the ladies of the house wait, petrified, on the lookout ‘like mice’ to see if it is time to flee. Only Dumitrache, once recovered, resumes his walk along the veranda ‘to see what had happened.’
Votive portrait of Grand ban Grigore Băleanu (+ 1842), Church of St. John the Baptist, Băleni village, Dâmboviţa county. Photograph by Marius Păduraru.
The Băleanus were one of the most important boyar families of the period. Grigore Băleanu held the office of grand vornic, and was constantly in the company of Prince Caragea.55 Madame Băleanu56 spent her time with Lady Caragea, keeping her company in the quiet of their country house in Băneasa. In the presence of the prince, these boyars, high office-holders, were obliged, for reasons of prestige, to display a degree of luxury at least equal to that displayed by the ruler and his court. Dumitrache Merişescu enters into the world of this noble boyar; he is accepted within the intimacy of the private quarters because he carries with him the name of his protector Ioan Hagi Moscu. Moreover, Dumitrache finds another protector in the person of the nanny, Kyra Fotini, a ‘Greek’ and a ‘Tsarigrad woman’ as he describes her—in other words, another important link in the network that connects those with this type of ‘mobile identity’.
Here, the young merchant’s son has the occasion to undergo a new initiation into the mysteries of love, which he will then describe under the influence of Erotocritos. The stage set this time is quite different: the mansion in the centre of the city houses a young lady, ‘beautiful as the wick of a candle’, as he says when he meets her for the first time. But before entering upon the mysteries of love, it is only right to offer some information about the young lady who lets herself be courted by an ordinary adolescent, far below her in the social hierarchy.
Zoe Băleanu’s destiny was that of many of the daughters of great boyars, important playing pieces in matrimonial strategies directed by the heads of their families. Married in 1811–1812 to beyzade Matei Ghica, son of the ban Costache Ghica, Zoe was quickly deserted by her husband. Suffering from tuberculosis, young Matei set out in search of health, following his father, who was in the service of the Ottoman Empire, now to Vienna, now to Istanbul. After waiting for three years, Zoe Băleanu, accompanied by her grandmother, Zoe Brâncoveanu, applied for and, after many petitions and hearings, obtained a separation.57 The divorce trial was a very curious one: her application was rejected in the first instance by Prince Caragea, who ‘ripped up’ the metropolitan’s report, but was approved several weeks later. The British consul in Bucharest, William Wilkinson, stated that it was only a divorce of convenience because the girl’s father, Grigore Băleanu, had found a better match: ‘Her father, who was the chief instigator of her sudden resolution, had negotiated the second marriage, because it suited his own interests.’58 This assertion by Wilkinson, who was shocked by the libertinage of the Romanians, comes in support of the narrative of young Dumitrache Merişescu.
Nanny Fotini pulls all the strings of this story played out in great secret, behind locked doors and under cover of darkness.59 Under various pretexts, Dumitrache is called to keep the young lady company, although the boyar Băleanu had fired him after his first day of work, categorizing him as a ‘bungler’. While every morning he leaves by the garden gate, hidden from the gaze of others, into the light of day, nanny Fotini strives to find various roles in which to bring him back to the mansion: nephew, passing Leipzig merchant, servant from the palace. Any hesitation on the part of the young man results in his being severely berated by the nanny with: ‘Ghiezi, gide, pusti!’—in other words he is told that he must be a sodomite not to like such a beautiful young lady.60
The evenings are whiled away in games of cards for kisses or blind-man’s-buff, sweetened by pastries and various conserves, triggered by the darkness, ending under the covers:
The boyar stayed for dinner at court. The mistress had been at Băneasa with Lady Caragea for about four days. Evening came. I kissed the nanny’s hands and asked what I was to do. She said: ‘Sopa, pidi mu.’61 She showed me which way to go, is to anangeo.62 She lit lights all around. In our room it was dark. The young lady found me even in the dark … We started playing, playing … I had got the hang of it like a bear at the honey trough. The nanny came with candles. She said: ‘Ti kanite esis?’63 As an answer we burst out laughing. The nanny pretended she didn’t understand. She said: ‘Pinases.’64 I answered: ‘Den pino.’65 ‘Katalava. Esi, kori, pinases.’66 She answered: ‘Okhi.’67 We got back to our games. I was about the same age as the young lady. ‘Come into the yard.’ She didn’t know where I was because she asked me: ‘Pu tha kimithisis?’68 I shook my head. ‘Kathise edo eos avrion ki avrion si orminevo.’69 I answered with silence. Miss Zoiţa said: ‘Nene, ela na se filiso.’70 She came and she kissed her. The nanny said to me: ‘Why don’t you kiss her?’ I took her hands and I kissed them. The nanny had things to do outside. She came and went. It was late, but I didn’t feel it, I didn’t think of anything. She gave me the young lady’s indoor slippers, we ate pastries and laughed. The nanny went outside and opening the door she said: ‘Ela agligora!’71 As she went out I heard her locking the door with a key from outside. I went to bed with my clothes on because I was in a trap. Thinking, I fell asleep.
It was late when nanny Fotini came. The candle was running out. She woke me and said to me: ‘Plai su kala, enia su.’72 I kept quiet and undressed, but the covers were not for the likes of me, because my feet were unwashed and my stockings torn. I said [to myself]: ‘Nene katarisi ta chorapia! Ti khali ekhon.’73 I heard: ‘Enoia sou, pidi mu.’74 I thought that Kyra Fotini was going to bed too, because the quilt was of cotton with long pillows and three small ones. I crossed myself and got into bed. She took the candle; she went and locked the door from outside. Late. In the dark, the nanny came and she got under the covers. For a moment I thought that it was Kyra Fotini. ‘To khava su, nene Taki.’75 It was morning when we heard the door opening. When we saw the nanny we pulled the quilt over our heads, but Kyra Fotini said: ‘Sikothite, agligora!’76 Zoiţica left. She was in a dressing gown. I pulled on my çaksır, I got my boots onto my feet. She invited me to leave by the garden gate and to come in by the [main] gate, to go straight to the overseer. If he asked me, to say I was coming from home: ‘I’ll be there too, so you don’t make a fool of yourself.’
I went out, she locked the little gate. It wasn’t yet fully day. I went round to come in at the [main] gate. I didn’t meet anyone I knew. The gate was half unlocked, because the butler had gone to the market. I went straight to the overseer. Kyra Fotini was waiting. Since I had just come, I bid good morning.77 I kissed the hand of Kyra Fotini. She said: ‘Pou ise pidi mu apo[p]se? Thios iti porni?’78
While he spends his nights by the side of Zoe Băleanu, during the day Dumitrache wanders the alleys of Bucharest, meeting friends, eating pies (bogaci, from the Turkish poğaça) and rolls (simiți, from the Turkish simit), frequenting the house of a famous courtesan, Marghioala, going to the service at the Metropolitan Cathedral on Saint Demetrius’s day, bathing in the public baths, going on various errands for the young lady, dropping in at home only to change his shirt.
A Princely Wedding
Young Dumitrache’s job for one day as a houseboy provides the reader with the opportunity to enter the house of a great boyar with a position at the princely court. It is an eyewitness report from inside, laying bare the foundations of the sumptuous lives of the nobility, lost on the paths of obligatory wastefulness. The early years of the nineteenth century saw the decline of some important boyar families, who met their end in the defiant aura of appearances, and the emergence of new lineages founded upon the lucrative hedonism of money. The occasion of a wedding was used to highlight the prestige of the family by way of luxury. The planned marriage between the daughter of the grand vornic Grigore Băleanu and one of the numerous beyzades in the entourage of Prince Caragea—perhaps even one of the prince’s own sons—provides us with an opportunity to observe close-up the fever of purchases that were indeed significant from a financial point of view.
The ‘supplier’ of the Băleanu family was Constantin Costa Foru, a ‘Leipzig merchant’ with an important place in the luxury market of Bucharest.79 We may imagine him arriving at the mansion in Băneasa accompanied by his journeymen Gheorghe Furculiţă and Dumitrache Merişescu, with a cart loaded with boxes. With quill and inkwell hanging from his belt, with his ledger prepared for the entry of goods bought on credit, for the addition of more and more merchandise, the desired lace and other trimmings, with his carriage (braşoveancă)80 ready to dash back to the shop for unexpected requests, Costa Foru skilfully directs the transaction … The picture is inspired by the account offered by Tache Merişescu, journeyman for a day:
They all went to the shop and began to choose stuff: lace, trimmings, and so on. I watched. They loaded us up with boxes and packages. We went home and they placed them in a carriage sent from Băneasa. We made a big parcel and climbed into the carriage. We carried the boxes into a salon. They announced us and Kyra Fotini came out with Mistress Zoiţa […] They chose, they put aside. They said to bring such and such too.
Costa Foru, following the instructions of the future bride and of nanny Fotini, returns to his shop to bring even more goods. Dumitrache, turned into a Leipzig merchant in a day, for the day, continues his account: ‘He filled the salon with merchandise. A large number of ladies came out; it might have been a fair. They chose; they bargained. I, the Leipzig merchant, moved boxes with and without purpose. Only Gheorghe Furculiţă could stop me, because he was senior in the shop.’
Judging by ledgers of merchandise and ladies’ correspondence, the fashion was relatively mixed in the autumn of 1814. The predilection was for French style, as regards the form of garments, combined with a preference for precious oriental fabrics. In the salon of the Băleanu house in Băneasa, the boxes that the Leipzig merchant Costa Foru unpacked contained shawls and Lahore headscarfs (one alone cost around 600 Groschen),81 lace, Holland linen, satins, English cloth, konduras (shoes) and çaksırs, brocade and damask, earrings with rubies and emeralds, diamond rings, floral brooches and aigrettes, clasps and slippers, bonnets and ribbons, anteris embroidered with wire, fermenes trimmed with ermine, ibrișim thread, kerchiefs, sashes, fezzes and shalwars. Merchandise brought from India, Damascus, Moscow, Livorno, Vienna, Paris, London, and Venice decked the bride from the banks of the Dâmboviţa. Luxury was the bridge connecting merchants, princes and boyars, kings, chancellors, emperors, and viziers. The petty artisans worked from dawn to dusk in their various workshops in order to satisfy customers on a daily basis.
We do not know how Zoe Băleanu looked as a bride when, in the Advent fast of 1815, she was married to beyzade Dimitri Caragea. Dumitrache Merişescu simply notes: ‘The wedding was splendid. The prince himself with the princess were their godparents.’
For the poor Leipzig merchant, the young lady’s wedding meant only ‘bitterness’. Intruding into the intimacy of the Băleanu family’s mansion, Tache Merişescu had made so bold as to believe in the phantasms of Erotocritos, falling ‘head over heels’ in love with the young mistress Zoe Băleanu. ‘Zoi mu’, ‘pidimu’, ‘beautiful as the wick of a candle’, the poor adolescent never comes to the end of his compliments addressed to the young lady who accepts him in her company only ‘because she was bored of being shut indoors.’ And then, when for reasons of policy she has to marry, she has no backward glance to spare for the young man who had kept her company at night, kissing her hands, pampering her, caressing her, singing to her now in Greek, now in Bulgarian, giving her lace trimmings and many, many ‘tearful sighs’.
On the Road to Tsarigrad
When Mistress Zoe and Dimitri Caragea have to leave for Tsarigrad, where he is to occupy the post of capuchehaia (diplomatic representative of the prince of Wallachia), Dumitrache Merişescu has a place in their suite. Thanks to the intervention of nanny Fotini, Dumitrache is appointed page (yedecli) in the beyzade’s court. For all the goodwill shown by the merchant Costa Foru, the adolescent is considered far too old to start an apprenticeship. His new job makes the boy arrogant and full of himself beyond all limits: ‘I went about like a spinning top; I went in and out without a care. I was unstoppable, of course, as the beyzade’s page.’ And when he receives his livery too, he becomes full of himself to the point of paroxysm:
The head tailor of the palace came. He made me two suits of clothes, two page’s caftans and a cüppe82 and biniş,83 shoes with meşti.84 He brought two donlucs85 to tie round my head. When I was dressed, I was full of myself. […] He also gave me the hanjar86 of a big boss. Hey, Dimitri. That’s what he called me. It seemed to me that I was as grand as the beyzade.
His arrogance lasts until the cold of the Christmas fast. Under pressure from the Porte, Prince Caragea sends this beyzade, his son or close relative, away to Constantinople, where he is to be capuchehaia and guarantor, as was the usual practice:
With a suite of Arnauts, we set out with the beyzade’s carriage. They were all mountain ponies. Arnauts before and behind. Boyars and the Vodă, with beating of drums and with their suite, took us out on the Mogoşoaia Road. We were in a cart, sitting in disorder. It was in the Christmas fast. There was a cover over us. We threw ourselves into the bottom of the cart. After escorting us as far as Colentina, the beyzade went on faster.
The journey to Tsarigrad was made along the post roads, in convoy, or by other well-known roads in order to avoid highway robbery, which was prevalent in the period. Moreover, the plague was still lurking, and quarantine obligatory.87 And so Tache bumps along in post carts, keeping Kyra Fotini, the native of Tsarigrad, company, passing through Brăila, Măcin, and Hârşova, met by pashas, smoked and aired so as not to take the plague back to where it came from. At Hârşova, the young mistress feels more and more ill, so ‘the lady came to bring her medicine.’ Since her state of health worsens, or perhaps as the consequence of a political plan carefully laid by Prince Caragea, so as not to leave his children in the hands of the Turks, the young mistress and the beyzade return to Bucharest. However, the convoy, ‘with Turkish guarantees,’ goes on to Varna and Mesembria (Nesebar), and from there they are loaded onto boats and escorted to Caragea’s houses in Therapia, to the recurrent and prolonged sighs of Kyra Fotini, who repeats fearfully: ‘Ah, my dear, my dear, whatever anyone says, what do we care?’
Fotini’s worries are only too real in an Empire in which suspicion and fear occupy a central place. Those generally known by the name of ‘Phanariots’ have the most vulnerable position, living in grandeur or squalor, always in fear of losing their own and their families’ heads. Nikolaos Soutzos, another beyzade, attentive to expectations and diplomatic games in Arnavutköy, on the shores of the Bosphorus, notes: ‘God only knows how much caution was needed even about children’s amusements in the harsh and bloody time of the reign of Sultan Mahmud.’ He then tells how, while improvising a dance in the dark and without music, he was seen by the bostangi-başa (chief of police), who was passing by sea, and summoned to the chancellery of the police in Istanbul. Or how young Aleco Vlahuţi came to lose his head because he was seen in the window of a house in Therapia with a shawl wound around his head, not knowing that turbans had just been banned.88 The research conducted by Matthew Elliot and Maurits H. van den Boogert89 backs up what Nikolaos Soutzos observes with regard to the codes of dress and behaviour that were obligatory in the Ottoman Empire and especially in Istanbul. An additional factor was the insecure status of these Phanariots, who were made use of and rapidly eliminated as soon as a question mark arose concerning their loyalty.90 There were moments when Prince Caragea’s prospects hung in the balance, and these can be glimpsed in Merişescu’s memoirs, when fears turn into rumours that smother the truth.
Kyra Fotini has experience of princes and sultans, but Dumitrache is far too young to sigh or to be paralysed by fear. Under the protection of his yedecli’s clothing, and ‘not guarded by anyone,’ as he writes, he slips through the alleyways of the city. One day, he meets a Serbian cloth merchant whom he knows from Bucharest, who advises him to leave Therapia as ‘envoys have been sent to Bucharest because the prince has not paid the tribute for five years and the Turks will slaughter you.’ The information scares the young yedecli, and if until then he has sometimes sighed in expectation of seeing the young mistress, the prospect of his head being cut off prompts him to give up love for more practical concerns.
The Sümbüllü Khan (Zumbul han) was where Christian merchants from southeastern Europe, merchants from the Principalities, and ‘Braşov merchants’ stayed.91 As presented by Merişescu, the khan appears to be a veritable fortification, which closes its gates during the night. The rooms have ‘two rows of beds’ one on top of the other, so that the resident has to ‘climb up stairs’ in order to get into bed. The rent is not too high, and for this reason ‘many merchants stay there’ and all the rooms are occupied. Another important reason is that it is largely inhabited by ‘German sudiţi’, protégés of the Habsburg Empire or of Prussia, who benefitted from the intervention of these two consulates in the interests of the safety of their merchants. Indeed, the Serbian merchant who helps Tache is just such a ‘German sudit’. He advises him to quickly change his clothes and to obtain documents in order to be able to survive in Istanbul.92 Shutting himself inside the khan for fear, Tache emerges only when he has changed his appearance: ‘he made me German clothes, he bought me a hat and gave me a German passport, to show to the Turks if they asked me.’
What sort of identity did Dumitrache Merişescu buy for himself? What did this ‘German passport’ look like? Dumitrache does not offer any kind of information, but we may note his transition from the status of homo ottomanicus to that of ‘German’,93 in other words, ‘Frank’.94 Moreover, Dumitrache never pronounces the names of those he encounters. What name does this Serbian merchant bear? And what of the uncle whom he will meet a few pages further on? Or the other members of the group of merchants ‘hidden’ in the Sümbüllü Khan? Who were they? What languages did they speak? How did they manage to understand each other? Was there a common language specific to merchants? These are questions that remain unanswered as we read the narrative of Dumitrache Merişescu.
With his new appearance, Dumitrache steps out on a new journey through the passages of the Bezisten in search of cheap merchandise, gaping as often as not at what he saw, following and helping the merchant in order to repay his ‘debt’: ‘Wherever he went, I [went] with him too and carried a box containing silk thread, woven silk, and whatever he bought for Bucharest.’ In the evening, after the gates of the khan had shut and the night watchmen had set out on their rounds, the merchants would gather in a coffee-house to pick up useful information, watch the karagözlük,95 take coffee and tobacco, and forget the worries of their journeys. The coffee-house was, together with the inn, one of the most important places of socialization, where information, gossip, and rumours spread and were shared. Here Dumitrache finds out that Prince Caragea has ‘fled to the German land of Beci [Vienna],’ that the suite and baggage of the capuchehaia from ‘Bogdania’96 have been taken by the vizier, and that the young page has been declared missing and is being searched for. In the coffee-house they tell jokes, they make comments, they pass on stories. Here, one of the merchants has a laugh at the expense of the ‘pretty’ page taken by the Turks to be their ‘boy’. And the merchant adds: ‘Damned be the Turks!’ Given the widespread folklore around the theme of Turks’ being sodomites, it is not difficult for poor Dumitrache to imagine himself caught in the embrace of a janissary and to take fear: ‘I kept quiet and listened.’97
‘Turks’ is a generic name, as Palmira Brummett shows in her study of travel narratives.98 Dumitrache does not stop to offer details, but merely expresses succinctly what other travellers say about the ‘Turks’. The ‘Turks’ encountered by Dumitrache are aggressive and capricious (belâlı), ferocious, ‘accursed’, sodomites.99 Thus he categorizes a group without pausing to consider individuals, whom he avoids. Indeed, interaction between the two worlds was almost non-existent: Tache observes from a distance the watch (kulluk) crossing the city, the ‘capricious’ janissaries ready to start a fight, the crowds in the alleyways, but he never approaches, out of fear, out of lack of knowledge.100
However, the coffee-house is also the crossroads where different travellers’ journeys intersect with one another. Being a place of meeting and socializing, one day the coffee-house brings together Tache and one of his uncles, a brother who had remained in the Ottoman Empire while Foti sought his fortune beyond the Danube. And so a new adventure begins, and a new identity is proposed: ‘The next day, I crossed to Pera, to the monastery administrator (díkios), and he got for me a passport as a German sudit.’ His apprenticeship in the cotton trade now begins. For a year and a half, he travels to well-known and less well-known places, from Smyrna to Venice, from Ostrov to Salonica, from Mount Athos to Jerusalem, with boxes containing cotton, lining material, castambol, alaca, and silk thread. The adventure ends in Alexandria, when his uncle dies unexpectedly of the plague, leaving a ship loaded with stacks of cotton and a helpless nephew in the hands of the consulate. The consulate intervenes by virtue of the right it held over its subjects, the sudiți, and confiscates the entire cargo, giving Tache seven hundred lei and sending him to Galaţi on board the galleon Altar Saneli. He disembarks in the Moldavian port after being away for almost two years, with a knapsack containing prayer beads, musk, rose butter, Turkish delight, and Indian carobs. It is September 20, 1817.
The last sentence of the memoir is a sort of profession of faith: ‘Consequently I believe in stories.’ In other words, if all these things happened to me, a mere mortal, then all stories ought to contain a grain of truth.
Post-Journey Destinies
Except that the adventures of Dumitrache Merişescu do not end here: Dumitrache Merişescu wrote down only a part of his life experiences in the manuscript. It is possible that there are other manuscripts that I have not yet found. In the absence of a sufficiently informative catalogue, research in the Romanian archives is largely a matter of luck and perseverance. As soon as I began to read the memoirs of this young man, I embarked on a search for any other traces of him that might remain in the archives. More adventurous than practical-minded, Dumitrache drifted between Galaţi and Focşani, working as a cavaf, in other words, making and selling cheap shoes. Later, he connected himself to the beyzades Alecu and Iorga Sturza (1822), just when their father Ioniţă Sandu Sturza became prince of Moldavia (1822–1828). For a time he was becer at the princely court: an official position involving supervision of the palace kitchen. Prince Ioniţă Sandu Sturza raised him to the rank of paharnic, and at the same time offered him the hand of a young girl from the princess’s entourage.101 The rank did not bring him any great wealth. Most likely paharnic Dumitrache Merişescu was not as good at exploiting the privileges that his rank offered as he had been at adventurously pushing himself into various clientelary networks. In 1829, Dumitache is reported in the vidomostia (catalogue) of the boyars of Moldavia to be poor, without an estate, living in Târgul Petrii (today’s Piatra Neamţ).102 However, later, in the middle of the nineteenth century, paharnic Dumitrache Merişescu appears to have been a wealthy local boyar with close connections to the educated Moldavian elite.103
Nor did Zoe Băleanu have a very happy destiny, although at least she was never to experience poverty. Her marriage to beyzade Dimitri Caragea lasted till 1818, when Prince Ioan Caragea took refuge in Pisa, accompanied by a numerous suite of clients and beyzades, after first taking care to see that his accumulated wealth was stowed in safety, mainly in banks in western Europe. The princely flight must have come as a heavy blow to the grand vornic Grigore Băleanu, but he got over it quickly, and found for his daughter perhaps the best match available: Ştefan Hagi Moscu, the son of the rich boyar, merchant, and banker Ioan Hagi Moscu.
*
As Maurits H. van den Boogert has asserted, ‘the complex nature of Homo Ottomanicus’ contains several constants and a series of variables.104 I enumerate them here in order to see whether Dumitrache Merişescu could be admitted to the ‘species’ of homo ottomanicus, together with the other candidates analysed both by van den Boogert and in the volume dedicated to this subject coordinated by Meropi Anastassiadou and Bernard Heyberger.105 Born in the Ottoman Empire, of Orthodox Christian parents, Dumitrache was an Ottoman subject, and it was as such that he set out on the roads of the Empire. As part of the social group of merchants, Dumitrache spoke Romanian, Bulgarian, Greek, and Turkish, an essential ability for any merchant in the exercise of his occupation. Similarly, he was very well integrated both in urban and wider Balkan commercial networks, which facilitated his access to information and connections. In other words, he may be considered a true homo ottomanicus. But if in retrospect, Dumitrache Merişescu speaks of himself as being a ‘Christian’, born in Bucharest, of Christian parents, payers of taxes to the Phanariot prince Caragea, and thus to the Grand Signor, others attribute more precise identities to him. For example, ten years later, in the catalogue compiled by the Moldavian authorities (1829), Dumitrache is recorded as the son of ‘Fotachi Merişescu the Greek’.106 In the middle of the nineteenth century, his Balkan origins had not yet been lost sight of, despite his integration in the network of the local Moldavian boyar class. Constantin Sion writes in his 1856 registry of the boyars of Moldavia, that Dumitrache is a ‘Bulgarian shoemaker’ who has ‘settled in Moldavia with the help of the Sturza family.’107
Dumitrache Merişescu’s destiny is, however, much closer to that of the figures studied by Christine Philliou—Dionisyos Photeinos or Stephanos Vogorides, for example—without, of course, attaining their degree of visibility. Belonging to a family of southeast European merchants who had taken refuge for various reasons in Wallachia, Merişescu may be numbered among those ‘entering the service and culture of phanariots.’108 Dumitrache began his career under the protective wing of his patron, Ioan Hagi Moscu. When this patron was no longer there, he tried to find a place in another clientelary network under the patronage of another influential family: Sturza. His entire career in the administration of Wallachia or Moldavia was connected to the progress through time of his chosen patrons, and he advanced or fell behind along with them.
Voltaire’s play Oreste, translated into Romanian by Alecu Beldiman under the title Tragodia lui Orest, published in Buda in 1820.
The poem Erotocritos by Vincenzo Cornaro had significant circulation and echoes in Romanian culture. See the most recent edition prepared by Eugenia Dima, Poemul Erotocrit a lui Vincenzo Cornaro în cultura română. Versiunea lui Alecu Văcărescu (Iaşi: 2014).
A minor official rank open to members of the boyar class.
The transition from the Cyrillic to the Roman alphabet for Romanian involved a long period (1840–1860) when the letters of the two were mingled.
The manuscript is preserved in the Central National Historical Archives in Bucharest (Fond Manuscrise, no. 1773), and bears the title Viaţa lui Dimitrie Foti Mirişescu de la Colentina, scrisă de el însuşi la 1817 (The life of Dimitrie Foti Mirişescu from Colentina, written by himself in 1817). For a critical edition see Dimitrie Foti Merişescu, Tinerețile unui ciocoiaș. Viața lui Dimitrie Foti Merișescu de la Colentina scrisă de el însuși la 1817, ed. by Constanța Vintilă-Ghițulescu (Bucharest: 2019).
Note in this connection the importance of memoirs in England and France and the enthusiasm generated around such writers as Menetra, Rétif de la Bretonne, and Samuel Pepys. For the Ottoman Empire, Dana Sajdi has brought the genre back into discussion with her recent book The Barber of Damascus: Nouveau Literacy in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Levant (Stanford, CA: 2013).
See Teodor Vârnav, Istoria vieţii mele. Autobiografie din 1845 (Iaşi: 2016); Ioan Solomon, Amintirile colonelului Ioan Solomon, [first edition 1862] (Vălenii de Munte: 1910); Nicolae Iorga, ‘Un cugetător politic moldovean de la jumătatea secolului al XIX-lea: Ştefan Scarlat Dăscălescu’, Analele Academiei Române, Memoriile Secţiei Istorice, XIII/I (1932), 1–60.
For this type of writing in the Ottoman Empire and the relation between ordinary people beginning to write and the birth of a literary genre, see also Dana Sajdi, ‘A Room of His Own: The ‘History’ of the Barber of Damascus (fl. 1762)’, MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies, Crossing Boundaries: New Perspectives on the Middle East, 3 (2003), 19–35.
See Fatma Müge Göçek, East Encounters West: France and the Ottoman Empire in the Eighteenth Century (New York:1987); Bekim Agai, Olcay Akyıldız, Caspar Hillebrand (eds.), Venturing Beyond Borders—Reflections on Genre, Function and Boundaries in Middle Eastern Travel Writing (Würzburg: 2013).
See Frédérick Hitzel, Prisonnier des infidèles. Un soldat ottoman dans l’Empire des Habsbourg (Arles: Sindbad-Actes Sud, 1998).
See Hanna Dyâb, D’Alep à Paris. Les pérégrinations d’un jeune Syrien au temps de Louis XIV, translated by Paule Fahmé, Bernard Heyberger, Jérôme Lentin (Arles: 2015).
See Katsaitis, ‘Călătorie’, 391–494.
Paschalis M. Kitromilides, The Enlightenment as Social Criticism: Iosipos Moisiodax and Greek Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: 1992).
Camariano-Cioran, Academiile Domneşti, 281. The Merişanu recorded in 1812 at the Princely Academy in Bucharest could be our Dumitrache, who is able to speak Greek and some Bulgarian. However he could also be another member of one of the two families—Merişescu and Merişanu—, which were relatively numerous at the time.
BAR, Fond Manuscrise, MS 342, which contains Întâmplările lui Telemah, fiul lui Odisefsu (The adventures of Telemachus, son of Odysseus). Constandin Stănescu writes that he began his transcription of the journeys of Telemachus on 20 June 1772 and finished on 2 August 1772, ‘at the urging of and with all expenses paid by’ the grand paharnic Iordache Darie, at the time ispravnic of the land of Neamţ. Another note shows the changing ownership of this miscellany, which on 15 October 1778 came into the possession of protopresbyter Enache of Târgul Ocna and his son Ioniţă (BAR, Fond Manuscrise, MS 343, f. 2v and f. 106.v). Similar notes can be found on other manuscripts of the tales of Telemachus, offering information about the forms of reading in Romanian society before the spread of printing. For the importance of such annotations in studying the self, see Konrad Petrovszky, ‘Marginal Notes in South Slavic Written Culture. Between Practising Memory and Accounting for the Self’, Cahiers du monde russe, 58 (2017), 483–502. The first printed translation into Romanian (from Italian) of the Adventures of Telemachus appeared in 1818, through the efforts of Petru Maior in Buda.
In other words, Ioan Hagi Moscu was his godfather.
Assistant to a paharnic. Cupar and paharnic were two lesser boyar ranks of little importance. Entry into the boyar class brought with it privileges, including access to official posts in the administrative apparatus and exemption from certain taxes.
Urechia, Istoria romanilor, XI, 259, 350, 396.
Arnauts, originally Albanian mercenaries, formed the princely guard. The Oltenians referred to here are panduri, mercenaries recruited from among the population of Oltenia.
More correctly: Na pravo. Na levo. Za chest’! (Left, right! For honour!).
Beyzade, from Turkish, son of a prince.
A Turkish game, played on horseback and involving throwing and catching a stick like a lance.
The Russian soldiers were billeted in the Plumbuita Monastery, in Colentina.
Ilie Corfus, ed. ‘Cronica meşteşugarului Ioan Dobrescu (1802–1830)’, Studii si articole de istorie, VIII (1966), 341.
BAR, Fond Documente Istorice, DCII/172, 173, 175, 176, 177.
Moldavia and Wallachia were headed by a president of the two Divans, directly appointed by the Tsar.
BAR, Fond Documente Istorice, MCCXLII/262, 10 July 1812.
BAR, Fond Documente Istorice, CMXXII/22.
Dimitrie Moruzi was the son of Constantin Moruzi, Prince of Moldavia (1777–1782), and brother of Alexandru Moruzi, Prince of Moldavia (1792–1793, 1802–1806, 1806–1807) and of Wallachia (1793–1796, 1799–1801). On his activity see Marinescu, Etude généalogique sur la famille Moruzi, 62–69. The episode is also narrated by the Greek historian Dionisie Fotino, Istoria Generală a Daciei, 225. Hurmuzaki, Documente, I2, 738, the report of Antoine-François Andréossy to the duke of Bassano, 25 December 1812, Constantinople, including news of Moruzi’s death and the confiscation of his wealth: ‘lorsque le Grand Visir donna l’ordre de sa mort, il dit: ‘Allez couper la tête à ce traître qui était vendu à la Russie’.
Manouk Bey was a very active and rich Armenian merchant. He built the Manouk Inn in Bucharest, still standing, where the peace accord was signed on 16/28 May 1812. See Ştefania Costache, ‘From Ruscuk to Bessarabia: Manuk Bey and the Career of an Ottoman-Russian Middleman at the Beginning of the 19th Century’, Cihannüma, III/1 (2017), 23–43.
Iancu Jianu was a famous brigand (haiduc) and boyar from the region of Oltenia.
Limona, Negustorii ‘greci’, 308.
On 3 July 1813, Ioan Hagi Moscu was appointed grand vistier and epistat of the Epitropy of Announcements. Two months later, he was ‘ex’ grand vistier, but nazir of the Office of Streets, in other words, he occupied an equally important position from a financial point of view. In November 1813, he obtained the post of ‘grand vornic of the city’, and in June 1814, he was again epistat, this time of the salt mines. (See Urechia, Istoria românilor, X/1, 231, 541, 833, 1040).
See Limona, Negustorii ‘greci’, 311–331.
Blancard, Les Mavroyéni, 768.
Urechia, Istoria românilor, X/1, 5.
Călători străini despre țările române în secolul al XIX-lea, vol. I, 349.
For example, a curious transaction in 1815 proves the value of the services offered in the context of these clientelary relationships. On 17 February 1815, Ioan Hagi Moscu sold to Princess Ralu Caragea the estate of Conţeşti in Dâmboviţa county, with a stone boyar house, a walled courtyard, a barn, a wooden church, a mill, and alehouses, for the sum of 115,000 thalers. A few months later, on 1 August 1815, Princess Ralu Caragea sold the same estate of Conţeşti in Dâmboviţa county back to him, but for 162,500 groschen (ANIC, Fond Documente Munteneşti, CLIII/ 14, 15, 16, 17).
On the definition of this literary genre, see Alex Drace-Francis, ‘Towards a Natural History of East European Travel Writing’, in Wendy Bracewell and Alex Drace-Francis (ed.), Under Eastern eyes. A Comparative Introduction to East European Travel Writing on Europe (Budapest: 2008), 1–26.
Vârnav, Istoria, 34.
For the Russian policy of colonization in this period, see Andrew Robarts, ‘Imperial confrontation or regional cooperation?: Bulgarian migration and Ottoman-Russian relations in the Black Sea region, 1768–1830s’, Turkish Historical Review, 3/2 (2012), 149–167.
The term denotes a clerk in a chancellery, but was also a minor boyar title.
Long, sleeved robe.
Wide trousers.
Short jacket worn over the anteri.
A series of rules of good behaviour circulated in the period, addressed principally to the middle category in society, as Anton Pann argues, probably influenced by Dimitrie Ţichindeal or Dositej Obradović. Until discovering this journal, I had not found any information about their impact on society. We know only that Şcoala Moralului (The school of morals), reworked by Anton Pann, went through numerous editions, the first being printed in 1830. (See Vintilă-Ghiţulescu, Patimă şi desfătare, 123–170.) It remains likely that the rules of good behaviour in the booklets reworked by Dimitrie Ţichindeal after Dositej Obradović were read and assimilated. For Dositej Obradović, see Wladimir Fischer, Dositej Obradović and the Ambivalence of Enlightement, in Harald Heppener and Eva Posch (eds.). Encounters in Europe’s Southeast. The Habsburg Empire and the Orthodox World in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Bochum: 2012), 217–230.
Similar episodes occur in the memoirs of Osman-Aga of Temesvar. See, Hitzel, Prisonnier des infidèles, 81–82.
Eufrosin Poteca was a monk who studied in Paris and Pisa in the years 1826–1828. For a time he taught philosophy at the Princely Academy in Bucharest, before ending up as archimandrite of the Motru monastery. His memoirs are constructed around his condition as a monk who often finds it impossible to overcome his passions. See Eufrosin Poteca, Scrieri filosofice, ed. Adrian Michiduţă (Craiova: 2008), 106.
The Romanian word (dolfană) also has connotations of prosperity.
In Dumitrache Merişescu’s rendering of the Bulgarian: ‘Ima malcu da rabota a da icdim.’
‘Cronica meşteşugarului Ioan Dobrescu’, 341.
Tax collector.
A reversal of the usual custom: condemned boyars normally had first to be deprived of their rank and dressed in humble peasant clothes before the sentence was carried out. Vodă Caragea lets the condemned man’s rank remain visible, thus reinforcing the message that even a boyar is subject to punishment if he commits a crime.
Dumitrache Merişescu misidentified Grigore Băleanu’s office: he was actually grand vornic (justice minister), not vistiernic (treasurer). Christine Philliou describes him as a boyar of Armenian origin (Philliou, Biography of an Empire, 17). In fact, the Băleanu family took its name from the village of Băleni in Dâmboviţa county, the principle residence of the lineage. In the seventeenth century, when family names became stabilized, the boyars of Băleni turned their place of residence into a name, as in the cases of other boyar families. For example, the Brâncoveanu family, who are also mentioned in this study, took their name from the village of Brâncoveni in Olt county. For details on the Băleanu family see Ştefan Andreescu, ‘Familia boierilor Băleni’, in Mihai Dimitrie Sturdza, Familiile boiereşti din Moldova şi Ţara Românească. Enciclopedie istorică, genealogică şi biografică (Bucharest: 2004), I, 224–230.
Grigore Băleanu held the office of grand vornic (and sometimes grand logofăt) throughout the reign of Ioan vodă Caragea (Urechia, op. cit., 10/1, 35, 42, 262, 308, 432).
Maria Brâncoveanu, the daughter of Emanoil (read Emanuel) Brâncoveanu and Zoe Sturdza, married to Grigore Băleanu.
The divorce proceedings took place between 15 May and 2 June 1815, the application being signed by Zoe Băleanu and her grandmother, Zoe Brâncoveanu. If we start from the hypothesis that Dumitrache Merişescu indeed spent some time in the house of grand vornic Grigore Băleanu in the company of the latter’s daughter, then this must have taken place not in October 1814, but in October 1815, when she was divorced and free. (Urechia, op. cit., 10/2, 259–262).
Wilkinson, An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, 148–149.
Here nanny Fotini departs considerably from the model of the nurse Frusina in Erotocritos, who is very close to the principal character Aretusa (Dima, Poemul Erotocrit, 7–25).
Gr.: ‘Gehazi, goat, sodomite!’ Gehazi is a Biblical character who becomes a leper (2 Kings 5: 20–27). His name was often invoked in formulaic curses. ‘Pusti’ was a current term of invective directed at a man, its primary sense being that of ‘sodomite’. The translations of the Greek dialogue were made by Dr. Lidia Cotovanu, and Professor Peter Mackridge contributed further suggestions; I take this opportunity to thank both for their kind assistance.
‘Quiet, my dear!’
‘For a necessity’ (in other words, to relieve himself).
‘What are you (plural) doing?’
‘Are you (singular) hungry?’
‘I’m not hungry.’
‘I understand. Are you hungry, girl?’
‘No.’
‘Where will you sleep?’
‘Stay here till tomorrow and tomorrow I’ll direct you.’
‘Nanny, come and let me kiss you.’
‘Come on quickly!’
‘Take care and behave yourself.’
‘Nanny, wash the stockings. They’re pitiful.’
‘No worry, my dear.’
‘You weren’t thinking, Mr Tache.’
‘Get up (plural), quickly!
In the original, ‘Am calimeritu’, making a Romanian verb from the Greek ‘kalimera’, ‘Good morning’.
‘Where are you, my dear, this evening? An uncle or a whore?’ Prof. Mackridge considers the Greek ‘Thios iti porni’ to be ‘extremely problematic’. He suggests: ‘Uncle/divine or prostitute’.
He was a Greek, referred to as a ‘Leipzig merchant’ (lipscan) because of his economic connections with the German town. On material culture and circulation of goods see Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘Moving Goods Around, and Ottomanists too: Surveying Research on the Transfer of Material Goods in the Ottoman Empire’, Turcica, 32 (2000), pp. 435–466; Donald Quataert (ed.), Consumption Studies and the Ottoman Empire, 1550–1922. An Introduction (New York: 2000); Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘The Material Culture of Global Connections: A Report on Current Research’, Turcica, 41 (2009), 403–431.
A large covered carriage made in Braşov.
See the correspondence between two ‘Greek’ merchants concerning the sale of these shawls in Bucharest and Moscow (ANIC, Fond Documente Munteneşti, LXXVII/7, 9/17 December 1813).
long felt jacket.
sleeveless mantle.
leather slippers for indoor wear.
cotton cloths.
dagger.
On the plague and the sanitary measures in the Otoman Empire see Daniel Panzac, ‘Politique sanitaire et fixation des frontiers: l’exemple ottoman (XVIIIe–XIXe siècles)’, Turcica, 31 (1999), 87–108. See also Daniel Panzac, La peste dans l’Empire ottoman, 1700–1859 (Louvain: 1985).
Nicolas Soutzo, Mémoires du Prince Nicolas Soutzo, 55–59.
Elliot, ‘Dress Codes in the Ottoman Empire’, 103–123; Maurits H. van den Boogert, ‘Intermediaries par excellence? Ottoman Dragomans in the Eighteenth Century’, in Bernard Heyberger, Chantal Verdeil (eds.), Hommes de l’entre-deux. Parcours individuals et portraits de groupe sur la frontier de la Méditerranée (XVIe–XXe siècle), (Paris: 2009), 95–114.
On this topic see Philliou, Biography of an Empire, 18–21.
On this khan see Sophia Laiou, ‘The Ottoman Greek ‘Merchants of Europa’ at the beginning of the 19th century’, in Evangelina Balta, Georgios Salakidis, Theoharis Stavrides (eds.), Festschrift in Honor of Ioannis P. Theocharides. Studies on the Ottoman Empire and Turkey (Istanbul: 2014), 327.
See the measures taken by Sultan Selim III regarding the security of city, after the Ayasofya Mosque incident, on 17 December 1791. For more details see Betül Başaran, Selim III, Social Control and Policing in Istanbul at the End of the Eighteenth Century. Between Crisis and Order (Leiden: 2014), 2–3.
The term neamţ (German) was used generically for someone with European habits or clothing.
For the definition of what an Ottoman subject was considered to be, see Maurits H. van den Boogert, ‘Resurrecting Homo Ottomanicus: The Constants and Variables of Ottoman Identity’, Journal of Ottoman Studies, XLIV (2014), 9–10. See also Yeşil, ‘How to be(come) an Ottoman’, 123–139.
The karagözlük (Romanianized as ‘Caraghioslâc’, from Turkish karagöz) was much enjoyed in Wallachia too. It was performed as shadow theatre at the princely court and in great boyar households, but, together with the maskaralık, it was equally appreciated by the common people, and was performed as a puppet show in the open air in alleyways or at fairs. Because of its obscene language, the karagözlük was frequently banned in the early nineteenth century (See Contanţa Vintilă-Ghiţulescu, Patimă şi desfătare, 384–385). For the popularity of the shadow theatre in the Ottoman Empire, see Sajdi, The Barber of Damascus, 162–165.
The name of Moldavia in the Turkish documents.
Iordache Golescu (1768–1848) frequently refers in his plays to this practice. It is probably a legend arising from fear of the Turks, who were both in both ethnic and confessional terms ‘other’. (Golescu, Scrieri alese, 31, 32, 308).
Palmira Brummett, ‘You Say “Classical”, I Say “Imperial”, Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off: Empire, Individual, and Encounter in Travel Narratives of the Ottoman Empire’, The Journal of Ottoman Studies, XLIV (2014), 21–44.
See also Ambroise Firmin Didot, Notes d’un voyage fait dans le Levant en 1816 et 1817 (Paris: 1821).
Eldem, Foreigners on the Threshold of Felicity, 114–131.
Constantin Sion, Arhondologia Moldovei (Bucharest: 1973), 167–168. He was married with Smaranda Manoliu having as ‘god-parents’ the princely family following a local custom. See V.A. Urechia, Din tainele vieţei. Amintiri contimporane (1840–1882) (Iaşi: 2014), 4, 14, 27.
Alexandru V. Perietzianu-Buzǎu, ‘Vidomostie de boierii Moldovei aflați în țarǎ la 1829 (II)’, Arhiva Genealogicǎ, 1–2 (1994), 277.
Urechia, Din tainele vieţii, 27; See also ANIC, Fond Achiziţii Noi, MMCCCXLVII/1, 10 October 1856.
Van den Boogert, Resurrecting Homo Ottomanicus, 18.
Van den Boogert, Resurrecting Homo Ottomanicus, 16–17; See also Meropi Anastassiadou, Bernard Heyberger (eds.), Figures anonymes, figures d’élite: Pour une anatomie de l’Homo ottomanicus, (Istanbul: 1999).
See A.V. Perietzianu-Buzǎu, ‘Vidomostie de boierii’, 277.
Sion, Arhondologia Moldovei, 167–168.
Philliou, Biography of an Empire, 39.