20-24 septembrie 2009 - Biblioteca Metropolitana Bucuresti

The centre and the margins of Europe... 881The gestures of the Dacian priest are those of the orthodox priestsduring the sacrament ‟he put his hand an my head and whispered a prayer”and of the baptize because passing through the hayfield covered by dew,‟I was wet from top to toe as if I had come out of a river”.It is interesting that we will meet some places names from thisnovel – Poiana Marului, Paraul Sarat – in the second novel too Theknight of resignation. Here the privileged space is the forest and the highplace is the forest. The prince Radu Negru is the one who will discoverits virtues on his return from Venice – travel which proved to be a hugefailure considering the Anti-Ottoman league. The fortified town where hewanted to leave forever enjoying the arts and the commodities of life – isirremediably lost among alcove intrigues, political parties, corruption andall sorts of treasons.Radu Negru returns alone in Wallahia with no armed help and onsecret ways: the premonitory dream, the forest, suggest the prince the mostefficient war technique in order to defeat the Turkish – ‟one thousandpeople and two hundred horses” were against Wallahia. Being in numericalinferiority and adopting Basarab I’s war strategy against Carol Robert deAnjou by throwing down trunks, branches and stones against the enemy,Radu Negru and his Wallahians had a famous victory, the first after manyyears of lost battles: ‟in the middle of the flag raised by a peasant at the endof a branch the Wallahian eagle was fluttering the wind of the high”. TheWallahian forest is not just an agent of the victory but also of punishing thetraitors: the sword bearer Dragomir is crushed by a tree: ‟he had betrayedus, said Radu Negru. He had taken the Turkish side. He had denied hisreligion. The forest punished him”.The Wallahian forest – as a high place, secured, is also a place ofthe sacred dimension (it used to shelter a monastery), being the only freeterritory, not occupied by the Turkish, where the Wallahian court found itsrefuge.In the novel Further than the North, the monastery Voronet is thecentre of the spiritualised centre, of the magic geography, is the high placeMatteo Muriano discovers shortly after its building. There are not manypages written by this author which have such a content of emotion and soulvibration like the ones in which Vintilă Horia describes the holly space.‟The monastery overwhelmed me like a ghost, as it happens I supposein the state of moving to a higher space of the holy parents. It could nothave been real although it was” – says Muriano. The discovery of theexternal paintings by the Venetian doctor, firstly the colours and then theircontent, is the same as the discovery of a key for understanding of the