Stephen the Great's Day

(July 2nd) An unparalleled champion of the Anti-Ottoman cause and a luminary of Romanian medieval art - the famous monasteries in Northern Moldova/Bucovina still stand proof of the unique style developed more than half a millennium ago under his reign - has been also evoked in contemporary history as a guardian spirit of the territories at a certain moment lost to the Russian Tzars Empire and later on to the Soviets, provinces  meanwhile wandering in a limbo of "independence" or part of other post-Soviet countries that ignore the elemental right to one's language, culture, and education for the Romanian communities there. Here is Eminescu's "Doina" in the original and in the exquisite translation of the much lamented Corneliu M. Popescu who passed away in his teenage but left behind an amazing number of English renditions of Eminescu's poems.

Courtesy of Gabriel Ditu's blog:

From Tisa to the Nistru's tide
All Romania's people cried
That they could no longer stir
For the rabbled foreigner.
From Hotin down to the sea
Rides the Muscal cavalry;
      [note: Muscal is obsolete Romanian for Muskovite, kept as such by Popescu in his translation]
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