On the Old Archive of the Lăpușna County Court and on Its 2345 Documents from the 15Th–19Th Centuries
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article doi:10.17684/i11A163en DIACRONIA ISSN: 2393-1140 Impavidi progrediamur! www.diacronia.ro On the old archive of the Lăpușna County Court and on its 2345 documents from the 15th–19th centuries Petronel Zahariuc? Faculty of History, “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University, Bd. Carol I 11, 700506 Iași, Romania Article info Abstract History: On July 10, 1926, the First-President of the Lăpușna Court, judge Eugen Ionescu- Received April 23, 2020 Dârzeu and the regional manager of the Romanian Archives, L.T. Boga, signed Accepted May 2, 2020 the acceptance protocol for the old archive of the Lăpușna Court, which com- Published June 10, 2020 prised around 2,345 documents. During the inventorying process, L.T. Boga and the archivists in Kishinev typed several copies of an opis, of which one (copy Cuvinte-cheie: No. 3)—which I feature here—ended up in the collections of the Romanian Moldova Academy Library, probably from the archive of judge E. Ionescu-Dârzeu. Cur- Bessarabia rently, this collection was integrated to Fund 220 within the Kishinev Archives. villages Following a global appraisal of the documents published from this archive, I may medieval documents state that around a quarter of them (approximately 500) were edited, mainly by premodern documents L.T. Boga and by the editors of the collection Moldova în epoca feudalismului. It is the responsibility of present or future researchers to edit integrally or as abstracts, on a theme-based or chronology-based approach, other documents within this collection. Until the fulfilment of this desideratum, the critical editing of this opis introduces in the scientific circuit around 2,000 documents, as abstracts. This important archival work tool comprises unpublished information about the his- tory of Moldova, mostly of the regions left from the Pruth River, before and after 1812, concerning both the political and social history and the local history, the toponymy or the genealogy. 1. Introduction On June 6, 1926, the First-President of the Lăpușna Court—judge Eugen Ionescu-Dârzeu—found a treas- ure in the attic of the Palace of justice in Kishinev, hidden “in two chests and a briefcase.” When he opened them up, the judge did not find any coins, jewellery or precious attire—hidden there by the former Bessarabian administration—but several piles of parchments and papers, well preserved. He understood quickly—given that he was a diligent clerk, a renowned jurist and a worthy student of A.D. Xenopol (Toader et al., 2008, p. 131)—that he had discovered something far more valuable than any object: a significant part of the old archive pertaining to Bessarabia. Overwhelmed with indescribable emotion, the discoverer notified the establishment entitled to value the treasure: The Regional Directorate ofthe National Archives of Romania and its director, L.T. Boga. The Regional director of the National Archives of Romania was also a zealous clerk and he wished to enforce the directives of the central institution con- cerning the salvage of the archival heritage in Bessarabia. He was also an experienced archivist: following the union between Bessarabia and Romania he had organised quite successfully the Archive Directorate of Kishinev (Dascăl, 2017, p. 304–307). Hence, within a month, in one of the rooms of the Palace of Justice, L.T. Boga—helped by one or two palæographers of the Archives—inventoried the contents of the two chests and of the briefcase. Therefore, on July 10, 1926, he was able to sign the reception protocol for this impressive collection of historical documents, to be “preserved within the State Regional Directorate of Kishinev.” The document was typed in several copies, one of which (the third copy), without a signature, ?Email address: [email protected]. © 2020 The Authors. Publishing rights belong to the Journal. Diacronia 11, June 10, 2020, A163 (1–89) The article is freely accessible under the terms and conditions of the CC-BY Open Access licence. 2 Petronel Zahariuc ended up in the collections of the Romanian Academy Library, probably within the archive of judge E. Ionescu-Dârzeu, but there is no way of knowing how it had been purchased.1. From the very first moment, L.T. Boga understood the exceptional historiographic value of the “treas- ure” and he realised that he was in historiographic luck! Hence, for two years, the archivist L.T. Boga worked enormously to value as much as possible from this collection of historical documents. In this respect, he improved his knowledge of Romanian-Cyrillic palæography and of history of Romanians. He acquired the technique of editing the old Romanian documents, written in Slavic or in Romanian with Cyrillic characters. Hence, from 1928—in the newly founded journal “Arhivele Basarabiei” [Archives of Bessarabia] and in the older “Revistă a Societății Istorico-Arheologice Bisericești din Chișinău” [Journal of the Ecclesiastical / Historical and Archæological Society in Kishinev]— L.T. Boga published for a decade a very long series of papers, thus encompassing the entire historiographic treasure that he had encountered. Among the documents within the collection, L.T. Boga also inserted certain documents from others collection within the Archives of Kishinev. However, he failed to mention (though the editing technique of that period also required it) the fund or the collection from which he extracted each document item that he published. Only in the first paper—published in 1928 (Boga, 1928a, p. I)— the editor made a necessary mention: “a part of this material pertains to the rich donation made to the State Regional Directorate of Kishinev by Mr. Eugen Ionescu-Darzău ‹Dârzeu›, a member of the Appeal Court in Kishinev, the lucky discoverer of the documents at the Lăpușna Court. I express, again, my deep gratitude for the priceless gift made to our national history.” Afterwards, the editor made only twice a general mention: “these documents are preserved at the State Regional Directorate of Kishinev” (Boga, 1930a, p. 348) or “the records on borders, published in this volume, are preserved at the State Regional Directorate of Kishinev, the historical section” (Boga, 1938a, p. 291). 2. Several considerations on the editing of the documents in this collection During the brief inventorying process of June-July 1926, the archivists of Kishinev registered around 2,345 documents (several numbers are featured twice, a document was not summarised, and 13 numbers are missing), from the time of Alexander the Good to mid-19th century, when the Romanian language was re- placed fully with the Russian language in the Bessarabian administration (Poștarencu, 2012, p. 113–130). Hence, these “juridical” documents became “historical” items, and from “living” they became “dead”. Fortunately, they were preserved and they waited for the moment they would be researched historically. That moment came in 1926: in the first chest, L.T. Boga found 1,006 documents, while inthesecond chest and in the briefcase, he found the rest, up to 2,345. Besides numbering, the inventorying com- mission determined the other columns of the inventory-register (the “opis”): date (year, month, day), “a short presentation of the documents” and “observations” (language, type of documents ‹original, copy, translation› and sometimes the number of pages. As a first draft, the “opis” was probably handwritten, then typed. Hence, some of the spelling errors—concerning either the date or certain names—are also due to the typist, who failed to understand the archivist’s handwriting. As a general observation, it may be stated that the palæographer who summarised these documents was very good at his job, given the very short deadline—one month—given for processing, even as abstracts, the collection from the Lăpușna Court. However, the text of the “opis” has many spelling errors (some belonging to the typist, as we have assumed above), in terms of both deciphering the date and of calculating the chronology from Christ, as well as of reading and transcribing the anthroponyms and toponyms within the documents. Some of these errors would have been impossible to correct, if the full documents had not been edited by L.T. Boga and by the collectives of editors of Moldova în epoca feudalismului (mef,I–XII; the volumes IX– XII, also titled Documente privitoare la istoria Țării Moldovei). In the “opis” that we edit now, some of the errors—even the small and regular ones—were corrected without mentioning it, while some others 1bar, A., nr. 2648. Register, typed, 92 p. On the cover of the register, in blue pencil, the following was written: number “3” and the following title: “Documents sent to the State archives by the Lăpușna Court, in 1926. Darzeŭ ‹Dârzeu›”. On the old archive of the Lăpușna County Court 3 were noted between angular brackets (‹...›); we have inserted the additions using the same brackets, for a better understanding of the abstracts. In order to identify the names of villages and regions to which they belonged, we have used a series of older working tools (mef, VII-1,2; Dmitriev, 1973 etc.) or more recent ones (Tomuleț, 2018; Ciobanu et al., 2019, etc.). Where we have failed to understand the correct spelling of the person’s name or the locality name, we have put the word between inverted commas (“...”); a subsequent editing of the document may correct the name in question. The archivists also mentioned the language of the documents; most of them are written in Romanian, with Cyrillic characters, then in Slavic with Romanian drafting up, as well as in Russian; fewer are written in the following languages: Greek, Hebrew (or Ivrit), German, Polish and French. Furthermore, L.T. Boga and his collaborators state the type of the document and their support. Most of the acts within this collection are original, accompanied by copies or translations, but there are also many documents only as copies or translations; concerning the support material of the writing, the collection also comprises an important number of parchments.