Miorita - An Icon of Romanian Culture (Hardcover)

This book uses both words and photographs to illustrate the central role that the ballad, the Miorita, plays in Romanian culture. By combining the insights of an American and a Romanian scholar with a vision of Romanian pastoral life developed by a leading American photographer, the reader is introduced to one of the most complicated and elusive cultural icons in European civilization. It is, however, one that continues to permeate Romanian culture and offers, to those who take the time to study it, an approach to life which will resonate closely with much modern experience and understanding.

This publishing event has it origins in an American photographic exhibit intended for a Romanian audience in 1986 when the Ceausescu's communist regime was rejecting most American cultural offerings. The American hoped at that time to make a gesture of support and encouragement to the Romanians by this act of homage to one of their major cultural icons. In any event, the communist Council of Culture forbade the display of the exhibit which is now for the first time being made available for study. The two introductions, one by an American specialist in Romanian studies and one by a Romanian professor of Romanian literature, provide two perspectives on the Miorita and insure that the reader will understand why the ballad is central to Romanian consciousness and why it has a message of great seriousness and insight for modern man of any origin.