The year 2018, which is just around the corner, will call on us all to reflect on two moments of profound significance: in January, it will be six centuries since, having concluded his earthly journey, the man to whom Romanians owe so much was laid to rest in the tomb at Cozia; whose centenary will be marked at the end of this year: the fulfilment, on 1 December 1918, of the great dream of uniting the Romanian people within the borders of a single country. The country which its very founders called not Cumania, but Wallachia. It is the name that appears for the first time in the earliest document written in the Romanian language, Neacșu’s Letter of 1521.
As Nicolae Iorga observed, the very name given to the country by its founders reflected the desire that one day it would bring together within its borders all speakers of the Romanian language. But that day was not to come for another six centuries, and Greater Romania was to last for no more than 22 years!
Ninety-eight years ago, when the one who awaits the general Resurrection in his legendary monastery at Cozia was laid to rest, human circumstances had thrust us into what seemed to be the deepest abyss into which we had ever fallen throughout our long-tried historical existence. It was as though the dust of the centuries through which we had ‘climbed on our hands and knees’ – as the poet of the Testament puts it – and the words and rhythms of the march with which we had crossed the Carpathians had been gathered up.
Even then – though they did not put it in writing – there were some who did not hesitate to believe that the end of our history had come and that we were to be excluded from the ranks of those nations that still have something to say in the world. But, to be fair, the hour had not yet come – though it has now – when our complete disappearance would be calculated and foretold, the transformation of our nation into a mere memory for those who will take our place in the lands where, for two millennia, we managed to give meaning to the adventure of human history.
In that terrible year, 1918, at the beginning of which we buried, under foreign occupation, on the banks of the Olt, the greatest architect of Romanian history, in the ocean of despair that dragged some, such as Barbu Delavrancea, to their graves, a historian thought to organise a commemoration and speak of the man who had passed into the next life following the longest and most significant reign south of the Carpathians. And there was certainly not a single soul who for a moment thought that he had gone to God to pray for us, so that by the end of this year of his death, Greater Romania might come into being. It was then that the miracle took place which surpassed all those that had accompanied and helped this nation to weather so many trials. A miracle which turned the year of our deepest collapse into the year of our supreme ascent.
…we are speaking not merely of one of the greatest leaders the Romanian nation has ever known, but of the one without whom the course of our history would have come to a halt, as happened to the states south of the Danube, swallowed up by half a millennium of rule under the Crescent. And Christian civilisation on both sides of the Carpathians would have lost the means of its existence…
Dimitre Onciul, the historian who had become truly obsessed with the history of Mircea I – whom he referred to as ‘the Elder’ until, in his final lecture at the University, he was to name him, like Matei Basarab, B. P. Hasdeu and A. D. Xenopol ‘the Great’, delivered a memorable speech on 31 January/13 February 1918, which was immediately published to shed light on the darkness that seemed to be taking hold of both souls and the country. He was fortunate enough to live through the early years of a Romania belonging to all Romanians, being spared – unlike Nicolae Iorga – from witnessing its collapse in 1940 and the many decades that followed.
For the first and last time, Mircea the Great was commemorated in Romania after 1 December 1918, on Sunday, 15 May 1938, when the Great Voivode Mihai of Alba Iulia, the future king (for the second time!) of Romania, as well as a number of historians: Nicolae Iorga, Ioan Lupaș, Father Nicolae M. Popescu, and other members of the Romanian Academy, as if sensing that they were doing so for the last time. Father Professor Nicolae Șerbănescu, of blessed memory, devoted an extensive article to this commemoration, published in the journal Biserica Ortodoxă Română, CXI, 1993, nos. 1–3, January–March, pp. 68–82, and reprinted in the volume Mircea the Great – the Shield of Europe, Bucharest, Roza Vânturilor Publishing House, 2009, pp. 679–698.
It would take three decades before, in 1986, this time not the end of his earthly life but his accession to the throne was commemorated following a decision by the authorities of the time, but by which time the green light had already been given both in the West and in Moscow for the ‘destruction of Romania’ (as testified by the historian Ioan Talpeș, transcribed from the television programme in the afterword to Tudor Opriș’s book The Drama of Romanian Education Today, and also in his 2009 book In the Shadow of the Great Hidalgo).
To avoid offending Nicolae Ceaușescu’s feelings regarding the nickname ‘the Elder’, those involved in this final official tribute to the Romanian prince resorted to a stratagem: Father Ciprian Zaharia, abbot of Bistrița Monastery in Moldavia, asked the writer Fănuș Neagu to pen an article calling for a return to the epithet ‘Mircea the Great’, first used in a document by Matei Basarab and by the historians B. P. Hasdeu and A. D. Xenopol, as well as in Dimitrie Bolintineanu’s famous poem Mircea the Great and the Envoys, and even on a series of postage stamps from the time of Carol II. As the brilliant writer was renowned for his love of wine, Father Ciprian Zaharia promised him, as royalties, a cask containing ten vedre of Cotnari wine. Which our unforgettable and great writer received without delay.
The article was published on the front page of the magazine Luceafărul, issue no. 15 of 12 April 1986, and was immediately handed to Nicolae Ceaușescu by Ștefan Andrei, during the very meeting of the Executive Committee, where – with Nicu Ceaușescu’s support – the decision was taken to mark the 600th anniversary of ‘Mircea the Great’s’ accession to the throne.
An unexpected turn of events then took place: a number of people, including historians, opposed the adoption of this epithet. They won over Elena Ceaușescu to their side, forcing Ion Pătroiu (who was editing the commemorative volume for the Romanian Academy) at the last minute to change the title on the cover to ‘Mircea the Great Voivode’ (though within the volume the title remained ‘Mircea the Great’). A legend subsequently circulated – and became entrenched amongst the uninformed – that the former dictator had ‘renamed’ the voivode. The true story is as follows.
It is clear that attempts are now being made to undo the achievements of an entire team, in order to restore all the truths that have been turned on their head and are now obscured by deliberate ignorance.
Thirty years have passed since then, and there has been no official anniversary dedicated to the voivode, save for what took place at Cozia, at the memorial services held every January, to which historians who were kind enough to attend the symposia organised there were also invited.
No further volumes have been published, with the exception of the three edited by Roza Vânturilor in 1995 with the support of Mr George Constantin Păunescu, dedicated to the six-century anniversary of the victory at Rovine on 17 May 1395. In 2000, Publiferon published the doctoral thesis by the historian Alexandru V. Diță, Mircea the Great – Between Medieval Reality and Modern Historiographical Fiction (Bucharest, 2000), and in 2009 the volume Mircea the Great – the Shield of Europe, with six authors, the first of whom was Fănuș Neagu, and the article cited from Luceafărul.
Last year, in issue 929 of 9–15 June 2015, the Pitești-based publication Săgetătorul. The cultural pages of the daily newspaper Argeșul devoted a whole page to the article Arguments for the Canonisation of Mircea the Great, Prince of Wallachia. An open letter addressed to His Eminence Varsanufie, Archbishop of Râmnic, in which I expressed my commitment to ‘obey’ by setting out the arguments supporting the initiative of the Archdiocese of Râmnic, personally by His Eminence, Archbishop Varsanufie, to begin the process for the canonisation of the founder of Cozia.
These pages are a continuation, rendered necessary in the meantime by the publication in the first issue of 2016 of the journal Historia, under the byline of Marius Diaconescu, of an article entitled Mircea the Elder Beyond the Myths, an article which attempted, for the benefit of the uninformed general public, to dismantle what had been achieved over these three decades of efforts to clarify the many issues that have preoccupied historians for over a century. This article is a collection of untruths which compelled the author to fulfil the obligation he had undertaken towards his sponsors to carry out what Dinu Săraru referred to in his article in the latest issue of Clipa magazine as ‘stripping the bronze from the statues’.
It has now become an absolute imperative to launch, under the auspices of the Church and, in particular, under the patronage of the Archdiocese of Râmnic—from where he who now rests with nothing but dust in his tomb at Cozia watches over us— a collective effort to make the commemoration in January 2018 an opportunity to restore the historic icon of Mircea the Great…
It is clear that attempts are now being made to undo the results achieved by an entire team in order to restore all the truths that have been turned on their head, and which are now also shrouded in deliberate ignorance.
It has therefore become an absolute imperative at this juncture to launch, under the auspices of the Church and, in particular, under the patronage of the Archdiocese of Râmnic – from where he who rests, with nothing but dust in his grave at Cozia, watches over us – to launch a collective effort to make the commemoration in January 2018 an occasion for the restoration of the historic icon of Mircea the Great, beginning with his very name and the removal of the soot that has settled upon this icon for various reasons, not always intentional, from this icon.
For this is not merely one of the greatest leaders the Romanian people have ever known, but the one without whom the course of our history would have come to a halt, as happened to the states south of the Danube, swallowed up by half a millennium of rule under the Crescent. And Christian civilisation on both sides of the Carpathians would have lost its means of survival, coming to a halt itself at the point reached by Bayezid the Thunderbolt (or the Lightning), who crossed the Danube with the largest army since that of Imperial Rome. But he was forced by the Romanians to cross back ‘without a ford’, as recorded in the Chronicle of Wallachia.
The victory on the Argeș on 17 May 1395 determined the entire subsequent course of events for four centuries, and the way in which the author of the article in Historia portrayed this indisputable reality in his writing was, unfortunately, like a funfair mirror.
It turned out that it took half a century of effort to move from the absolute negativity of Demostene Russo and P. P. Panaitescu to the canonisation in 2009 of Saint Voivode Neagoe Basarab. But let us hope that the 30 years that have passed since 1986 will not require another two decades. And especially since the campaign to ‘strip the bronze from the statues’ will be no more successful than what was hatched as far back as 1985 and revealed to the historian Ioan Talpeș in Stuttgart: the destruction of Romania.
Standing in the way of this unique ‘programme’ of action currently directed against us—just as it did six centuries ago in the path of Bayezid— the towering figure of the military leader, diplomat and statesman whose greatest victory and most complete merit nevertheless remain his churches, as well as the fact that we were able to canonise, even before him, Stephen the Great and Holy, Saint Neagoe Basarab and the holy martyr Constantine Brâncoveanu and his family. That is to say, the princes who, without him, would never have existed, just as the emperors of Byzantium and the sovereigns of Bulgaria and Serbia no longer exist.
And in these days, when a veritable storm has been unleashed upon the Church by those enlisted in the ranks of the ‘great degrader’ (as André Malraux called the devil), the presence amongst us of the figure depicted at Cozia with both hands supporting the Church—like a ‘memento’ addressed to all future generations of the Romanian people— yet with a sword at his hip, serves as a reminder even to those who seek to make us forget who we were, who we must remain and – in the words of Petru Rareș – who we must be in the future.