101303 Turcica 50 00 09 Vintila-Ghitulescu.Indd
CONSTANŢA VINTILĂ-GHIŢULESCU “I BELIEVE IN STORIES”: THE JOURNEY OF A YOUNG BOYAR FROM BUCHAREST TO ISTANBUL IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY “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, shoe-maker, and later paharnic,3 Dumitrache Merişescu, a young petty boyar born in 1797 in Colentina and brought up in the Biserica cu Sfinţi district of Bucharest, decided to write about the adventures of his life. His memoir, presented in thirty-six pages Constanţa Vintilă-Ghiţulescu is PI of the ERC project LuxFASS at New Europe College, Institute for Advanced Study, Bucharest and Senior Researcher at the Nicolae Iorga Institute of History, Romanian Academy. My special thanks for the English translation of this study are addressed to Dr. James Christian Brown (University of Bucharest). This study was supported by the project Luxury, Fashion and Social Status in Early Modern South-Eastern Europe (LuxFaSS), with number ERC-2014-CoG no. 646489, financed by the European Research Council and hosted by New Europe College, Bucharest. The first version of this paper was presented in the European Travel Cultures Seminar, University of Amsterdam, under the title “From Bucharest to Constantinople, with love and commerce: The journey of a young boyar, from 1815 to 1817”. I would like to express my gratitude to Wendy Bracewell and Alex Drace- Francis for their enthusiastic and useful comments. 1. Voltaire’s play Oreste, translated into Romanian by Alecu Beldiman under the title Tragedia lui Orest, published in Buda in 1820.
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