LE SYMPOSIUM INTERNATIONAL LE LIVRE. LA ROUMANIE. L ...

chrysanthos notaras the Patriarch of Jerusalem... 395
educational institutions placed under the patronage of the ruling princes.
By the end of the 17 th century on, the Greek language and its cultural,
social and political values is been promoted throughout a coherent policy,
replacing the long established Slavonic that, not being endorsed by any
intellectual return, served only official and cultic purposes. the Greek,
the language of ancient philosophy and knowledge and of the orthodox
tradition, is becoming by the second half of the 18 th century the choice
language of the high instruction institutions that followed by now a Western
european type academic curriculum. Digested in phanar, this curriculum
left the levantine imprint on the already heterogeneous configuration of this
latin-speaking area. handicapped by the restricted use of the old Slavonic
and lacking a solid background of expressing cultural values, the cultural
development of Walachia and Moldavia was hampered at the level of the
ancestral tradition, ignoring – in a Christian country nevertheless – even
the intellectual opening of the Christian teaching. With its overwhelming
cultural character, the Greek language posed a great intellectual challenge to
a cultivated expression of the local tradition, which boosted the development
of what will become the modern romanian language and culture. 3
Along with Greek intellectuals, many other Greeks settled and
developed businesses in Walachia and Moldavia, these countries soon
becoming their homeland. Greece being then a very poor ottoman province
placed under a repressive rule, for the intrepid Greek in matters of economy
the two Danubian countries, with their quasi-autonomous political and
economical status, were the proper place to conduct affairs. Among so
many compatriots, the colporteurs of political ideas found a convenient
place too, at a healthy distance from Istanbul’ authority and close to russia,
then the safe haven of political refugees. A correspondent of Chrysanthos
notaras wrote to him from Bucharest “All phanar is here; I no longer yearn
for Constantinople”.
From the encounter of this striving to survival and well-being of the
Greek-people with the local customary system, an embryo of what, not
very much later, will become romanian cultural and civil values, started
to develop. the often misunderstood and derogative description of today
romania as a “Balkan” or “levantine” country traces its roots to surviving
habits originating in this period of absorption of oriental behaviors, mainly
3 An old, yet comprehensive, study about the context of the Greek cultural influence
in Walachia and Moldavia is Gh. M. IoneSCu 1900, Influenţa culturei grecesci în
Muntenia şi Moldova cu privire la biserică, şcoală şi societate (1359–1873), Bucureşti,
Tipografia şi Fonderia de litere Thoma Basilescu (The influence of the Greek culture in
Walachia and Moldavia regarding the Church, the School and Society).