Thank you to Mala Teaha for this delightful trip around the Romanian Peasant Museum…
Beyond the door time begins. Dare ! Open the door ! Ouvrez la porte !”
The message written on the wall was that one that confused me. Maybe, the initiatory journey through time was that one what made me to open the door. Maybe, that pink shade of the building, in the form of Neo-Romanian architecture, made me go beyond that door of the Museum, at whose foundation, The King Carol I and Al. Tzigara-Samurcaş had hard words to say. With a history of a royal house whose motto you can feel it in every corner of the building, the museum makes you to simple whisper, when you leave its rooms: Nihil Sine Deo. And, since nothing is by chance, The cross as a symbol of sacredness is the dominant theme of all that lives and breathes within. Beauty of Cross, Fast, Meditation, The Power of the Cross, Together, are some of the rooms where color, matter and spirit, dance its artistic genius in simplicity. Objects apparently few, a simple, minimalist decor but phenomenal supported by object by itself, color, light, shadow and that unseen mythical… you already feel it. A nineteenth century taste of that ‘Tree of the Cross , which beat out the meaning of so famous Trevi Fountain ! And so many others ! How can I stand right in front of these wonders? How can I stand right in front of the memory of those peasants or artisans who wrote my history as an individual human belonging to this sweeps piece of land ? For him, for Tatomir, the Romanian-European peasant who knew how to make his life good without any kitch and surrounded by less and simple objects without a purely decorative or impersonal meaning, I wrote what I wrote today. For the museum that makes the martyr of those hands which talk free, I’ve gathered these sounds or images into words. And, I also have written it for my soul that has risen up to reverie in those 3 hours of starving ’view’.***
Romanian Peasant Museum, Bucharest, Romania
Custodians: Horia Bernea (painter&designer) & Irina Nicolau (philologist)
Opened daily from 10.00 to 18.00. On monday is closed.