Targoviste city

If we want to travel along the Romanian history trace, Targoviste city is definitely a unique destination, full of charm, suspense, noble and legendary facts. Walking on its streets, it is easy to note that besides the elegant urbanistic footprints and the sophisticated tendencies of the modernization process, the city breathes the atmosphere of the past centuries history.
With a population of about 89,000 inhabitants, nowadays is the municipality, the county seat and the largest city of Dambovita County.
Royal residence and the capital between 1396 and 1714, Targoviste held for more than three centuries, the status of the most important economic, political-military, cultural and artistic center of the Romanian Country.

IENĂCHIȚĂ VĂCĂRESCU (~1740 – July 12, 1797) – poet, philologist, historian. He came from an old noble family with strong traditions in Romanian culture. He carried out extensive political and diplomatic activity, which he later described in the work “The History of the Most Powerful Ottoman Emperors”, one of the earliest memoir writings in Romanian literature. Although limited in size, his literary work strongly influenced the later development of Romanian poetry. In recognition of his contribution, the first secondary school bore his name – today the National College “Ienăchiță Văcărescu” – in front of which his bust also stands. A street in Târgoviște also bears his name.

ION HELIADE-RĂDULESCU (born January 6, 1802, Târgoviște – died April 27, 1872, Bucharest) was a Romanian writer, philologist, and politician, founding member of the Romanian Academy and its first president, considered the most important founder of pre-1848 Romanian culture. He was born in Târgoviște on January 6, 1802, the son of Ilie Rădulescu and Eufrosina Danielopol. He authored numerous translations, adaptations, and interpretations of classics of world literature (Boileau, La Fontaine, Dante Alighieri, Goethe, Byron, etc.). He advocated for the unification of the Romanian literary language through Romanian Grammar (1828). He was a founding member of the Romanian Academic Society (Romanian Academy) and its first president (1867–1870). He was also an advocate for human rights, although he supported moderate actions and opposed ultranationalist revolutionaries. Heliade dominated half a century of Romanian poetry.

VASILE CÂRLOVA (February 4, 1809, Buzău – September 18, 1831, Craiova) was a poet and military officer who, although he wrote only five poems, entered George Călinescu’s History of Romanian Literature. In 1828, he wrote “The Ruins of Târgoviște”, published on March 20, 1830, in the same newspaper, with an introduction by Heliade Rădulescu, who predicted a brilliant literary future for him: “his poetic genius promises much for the Romanian language, so beautiful under his pen.”

GRIGORE ALEXANDRESCU was a Romanian poet and fabulist. He was born in Târgoviște on February 22, 1810, in the Lemnului district. He remained orphaned and poor, but from an early age showed remarkable intelligence and extraordinary memory. He learned Greek and French and became a student at the National College “Saint Sava” in Bucharest, where he was a classmate of Ion Ghica. He became acquainted with Ion Heliade Rădulescu and amazed everyone with his poetic talent. For a time, he lived in Heliade’s home, who published his first poem, Midnight, in Curierul Românesc, followed by the elegy Farewell. He was briefly an officer but resigned in 1837. Because of some writings (The Year 1840 and The Swan and the Raven’s Chicks), he was imprisoned. He later held minor public positions. In 1848 he became editor of the newspaper The Sovereign People. During the last 25 years of his life, he suffered from mental illness. He died poor in Bucharest in 1885. In a letter sent from Paris to Alexandru Papadopol-Calimah, Vasile Alecsandri lamented society’s indifference toward Romania’s greatest fabulist: “The death of poor Alexandrescu did not sadden me so much (for he had been dead for many years), as did the indifference of the current generation toward him and the oblivion into which his once brilliant fame had fallen.”

ALEXANDRU VLAHUȚĂ (born September 5, 1858, Pleșești, today Alexandru Vlahuță, Vaslui County – died November 19, 1919, Bucharest) was a Romanian writer. One of his best-known books is Picturesque Romania, which Dumitru Micu described as “a commented geographical atlas, crossed by a warm love for the homeland.” He was born on September 5, 1858, the son of a small landowner. He attended primary school and high school in Bârlad between 1867 and 1878, taking his baccalaureate exam in Bucharest in 1879. He studied law for one year at the University of Bucharest but abandoned his studies because of financial difficulties, becoming first a schoolteacher and later a teacher in Târgoviște. Between 1884 and 1893, he taught at several educational institutions in Bucharest. In 1888, he became school inspector for Prahova and Buzău counties. He edited the magazine Vieața (1893–1896), then Sămănătorul (1901), together with George Coșbuc. From 1901, he worked as a referent at the School House administration. In 1905, he married for the third time, to Ruxandra, daughter of a landowner from Dragosloveni, Râmnicu Sărat County. During World War I, he lived in Iași and later in Bârlad, where young writers visited him for guidance, among them V. Voiculescu. Vlahuță died in Bucharest on November 19, 1919. The house in which he lived is today the “Alexandru Vlahuță” Memorial Museum.

IOAN ALEXANDRU BRĂTESCU-VOINEȘTI was a Romanian prose writer, famous for his stories initially written for his children. He was born in Târgoviște on January 1, 1868, descending from a noble family. The hero of the novella The Udrești Family is one of the writer’s ancestors. He attended high school and university in Bucharest. He worked as a judge in Bucharest, Ploiești, Pitești, Craiova, and Târgoviște, where he settled permanently in 1896. His first volume, Novellas and Sketches, appeared in 1903, followed by In the World of Justice (1906) and Darkness and Light (1912). During World War I, he co-wrote with A. de Herz the play Sorana. During the interwar period, he published less prose. He is especially known for his children’s writings: The Chick (the tragic death of a quail chick), The Nightingale, Poor Tric, Niculăiță the Liar (a clever village child misunderstood by the villagers), and others.

MIRCEA HORIA SIMIONESCU was born (“astonished,” as he liked to say) on January 23, 1928, in Târgoviște, into a family descending from the Brătianu branch of Argeș and the Bucharest branch of the Căciulești family, with extensive connections in the bourgeoisie that produced illustrious names in medicine, the army, finance, and law. Due to his highly original writings—spiritually close to Caragiale, Kafka, Cortázar, Borges, Italo Calvino, and Urmuz—Mircea Zaciu considered him a trouble-fête of postwar literature, while Adrian Marino called him the author of “the best and best-organized anti-literary parody in our entire literature.” The notes from his epic laboratory were structured into the four-volume cycle The Ingenious Well-Tempered One (1969, 1970, 1980, 1983), an epic of the errors of the century, a huge joke of seasons gone astray. Later writings were added, centripetally, to confirm in fiction the naked reality. Mircea Horia Simionescu passed away on May 18, 2011.

RADU PETRESCU (born August 31, 1927 – died February 1, 1982) was a Romanian prose writer and member of the Târgoviște School literary group. He is considered one of the precursors of Romanian postmodernism. Alongside Mircea Horia Simionescu, Costache Olăreanu, and Tudor Țopa, he formed part of the “Târgoviște School.” He debuted in 1970 with the novel Matei Iliescu, but gained recognition posthumously, becoming a model for younger prose writers of the 1980s generation. He graduated in 1951 from the Faculty of Letters of the University of Bucharest. Like the other members of the Târgoviște School, he was an avid diarist and kept a journal continuously since high school. Three volumes have already been published: The Reversed Spyglass, Berenice’s Hair, and The Third Dimension, the latter published posthumously. Humanitas Publishing House later published the complete version of The Catalogue of My Daily Movements. He is considered one of the precursors of Romanian postmodernism through the transformation of diary notes into typical fictional prose. The novel Matei Iliescu inserts numerous diary pages, combining them masterfully with objective narrative discourse. Radu Petrescu was buried at Cernica Monastery.

COSTACHE OLĂREANU (born July 1, 1929, Huși – died September 23, 2000, Iași) was a Romanian writer from the generation of the Târgoviște School. Alongside Radu Petrescu and Mircea Horia Simionescu, he belonged to this literary group. The three friends debuted in book form as follows: Mircea Horia Simionescu in 1968, Radu Petrescu in 1970, and Costache Olăreanu in 1971 with View from the Balcony. In 1978 he published his second book, Parallel Confessions, and in 1979 his third, Apprentice to the Classics, which received the Romanian Writers’ Union Prize in 1980. He died on September 23, 2000, not far from his native Huși, in Iași, where he had been transported after feeling ill in Vaslui, where he had chaired the jury of a humor festival.

TUDOR ȚOPA (born May 27, 1928, Cernăuți, Kingdom of Romania – died August 10, 2008, Bucharest, Romania) was a Romanian writer and translator. Between 1946 and 1948, he studied at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Bucharest. After the educational reform of 1948, he transferred to the Faculty of Pedagogy and Psychology, graduating in 1950 and obtaining his degree in 1953. He worked as curator for the first retrospective exhibitions of Theodor Pallady, Nicolae Tonitza, Ștefan Luchian, and Dumitru Ghiață (1955–1956), librarian at the Central State Library and the Central University Library (1957–1962), and later as a scientific researcher at the Institute for Pedagogical and Psychological Research. He debuted in prose in the magazine Luceafărul in 1968, at the age of forty, and became a member of the “Târgoviște School,” together with Mircea Horia Simionescu, Costache Olăreanu, and Radu Petrescu. Distinctions: The Romanian Writers’ Union Prize for Prose in 1985 for the novel Bridge.