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. 2. The poem Erotocritos by Vincenzo Cornaro had significant circulation and echoes in Romanian culture. See the most recent edition prepared by E. Dima, Poemul Erotocrit. 3. Literally “cup-bearer’, a minor official rank open to members of the boyar class. Turcica, 50, 2019, p. 285-317. doi: 10.2143/TURC.50.0.3286577 © 2019 Turcica. Tous droits réservés. 286 CONSTANŢA VINTILĂ-GHIŢULESCU of manuscript, written in Romanian in the transitional alphabet, but with some dialogues in Greek and Bulgarian, is striking for its humour and irony, and, above all, the unusual stories it contains. On the last page of the manuscript, the author writes: “20 September 1817. Dumitrache Merişescu, 20 years of age. Dălhăuţi.” The inscription might lead us to assume that the text was composed around then, espe- cially as the events narrated are close in time to 1817, but the handwriting points rather towards the middle of the nineteenth century, a period char- acterized by such literary products. Merişescu’s manuscript is unusual, and may be a retranscription of his initial notes, as in places the writing has been corrected with a chemical pencil or amended with interventions above the line.4 My article concentrates on the value of memorialistic writing for knowledge and interpretation of a historical period. 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 look back on a life spent in the vicinity of the “great ones” of the time and ending somewhere in 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, memoirs), focusing on the way in which Dumitrache 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 the anonymity of the group. The rise of the memoir, a literary genre that had been almost non-existent in the Romanian lands before 1800, coincided with investment in education and gave anonymous individuals 4. 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]. “I BELIEVE IN STORIES” 287 the courage to believe that their memories would be of use to someone, someday.5 We may ask ourselves if Dumitrache Merişescu is a representa- tive individual for his social group, and if he can define “the character- istics of an entire social stratum in a specific historical period.”6 In other words, can I say that I have discovered a “Menocchio’? It remains to be seen. 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 belong to the so-called “middle class:” being petty boyars, merchants, or holders of minor positions in the chanceries of the great boyars. It is his style that differentiates Dumitrache Merişescu from his fellows, because he recounts his memories in a heroic manner, considering that his deeds are 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 represent inestimable testimonies for the historical reconstruc- tion of processes of identification and representation of a population caught between various ethnic, 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 Osman-Aga of Temeşvar,10 Hanna Dyâb,11 and Markos Antonios Katsaitis.12 5. Note in this connection the importance of memorialistic literature 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 memorialistic genre back into discussion with her recent book: Sajdi, The Barber of Damascus, 2013. 6. An allusion to Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, p. xx. 7. See Vârnav, Istoria vieţii mele; Hartulari, “Istoria;” Solomon, Amintirile colonelului Ioan Solomon; Iorga, “Un cugetător politic.” 8. For this type of writing in the Ottoman Empire and the relation between simply people beginning to write and the birth of a literary genre, see also Sajdi, “A Room of His Own.” 9. See Göçek, East Encounters West; Agai, Akyıldız, Hillebrand (eds.), Venturing Beyond Borders. 10. See Hitzel, Prisonnier des infidèles. 11. See Dyâb, D’Alep à Paris. 12. See Limona, Markos Antonios Katsaitis. 288 CONSTANŢA VINTILĂ-GHIŢULESCU Education The young Dumitrache was educated at the church school of the Biserica cu Sfinţi suburb in Bucharest, where he lived. This education reflects a world of ethnic diversity: Dumitrache speaks and understands Romanian, Greek, Bulgarian, and Turkish. His memoir is written in a vernacular Romanian, which would appear to be, more than anything else, a “Balkan” or “Phanariot” language, 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 uses 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 Bul- garians 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 prestig- ious institution? Erotocritos and Orestes are the two main characters who dominate Wallachian and Moldavian literature of the end of the eighteenth and 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 manu- script, translated and copied countless times in various miscellanies.15 13. Kitromilides, The Enlightenment. 14. Camariano-Cioran, Academiile Domneşti, p. 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 the extended familes of Merişescu and Merişanu, which were relatively numerous at the time. 15. See Romanian Academy Library, Fond Manuscrise, MS 342 (hereafter BAR, followed by the pressmark), 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 June 20 1772 and finished on August 2 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.