EMINESCU NEAR STAVROPOLEOS
AND A FEW
TEMPORAL-ASTRAL CONSIDERATIONS

COSMIC ROMANIA 45

-text and photos Andrei Dorian Gheorghe
design Florin Alexandru Stancu

“Time just passes, time just comes,
All is old and all is new,
What is bad and what is good
You have to think and to view.”

-Mihai Eminescu (in an English version)-

Trying to adorn these introductory verses (in my translation)
from Glossa by the Romanian national poet Mihai Eminescu (1850-1889),
I took the sunrise series above
close to 15 June 2013,
124 years after Eminescu passed to eternity,
while the moon series
represents the first Full Moon after 15 January 2015,
165 years after Eminescu was born.

Both series (Sun and Moon) from above were taken from a building
placed vis-à-vis to the historical centre of Bucharest,
where he was a journalist at the… Time (“Timpul”) newspaper in the 1880s
and, after work, he used to develop cultural debates
with another Romanian genius, his colleague Ion Luca Caragiale
(1852-1912, dramatist and humorist),
in a close coffee house (founded in the 1780s).

Since Eminescu was interested in the history of religions,
he often went to a pearl of that zone,
the Stavropoleos Church.

That’s why I invite you
to visit it, too.

You can go anywhere in the world
to see what is to be seen…

…when, for the Sun’s circulation,
the traffic light is green.

The Stavropoleos Monastery was founded in 1724 by a Greek priest,
Ioanichie Stratonikeas,
and built in a Brancovenian (Brancovenesc) style,
the cultural-artistic-architectural influence of the
former “voievod” and “domnitor” of Wallachia,
Constantin Basarab Brancoveanu
(killed by the Ottoman Sultan in 1714)
remaining immense.

It was an age in which many Greeks (Orthodox Christians)
came to the Romanian countries for a life better than in the Ottoman Empire,
bringing with them a specific cultural infusion.
(As a consequence,
even today the choir of this church continues to be specialized
in Byzantine music).

Later, its annexes were remade in the 1890s in a Neo-Romanian manner
by even the main founder of this architectural style,
Ion Mincu.

So that today the Stavropoleos Monastery appears
as a living corner of Romanian-Greek history,
conserved from hard times for Eastern Christianity
and, through its artwork
(which includes even a Biblical sculpture with Samson killing the Lion),
an occasion for the elevation of the human being to the Cosmos.

The Sun and the Moon sculpted on the church door
inspired me to try a photographic poem.

Seeing also Venus (under the Moon) and Jupiter in the sky
in the first part of 2015 in this zone,
I tried to prolong the photographic poem…

And close to 15 January 2015,
right 165 years since Mihai Eminescu was born,
a strange, foggy sunrise,
various clouds, Sun and Moon,
Venus near a crane,
Jupiter near the Moon,
an airplane apparently passing under the planet Mars
and the constellation Orion among tree branches
made me try the following work:

PSEUDO-GLOSSA
-astro-photo-poem by Andrei Dorian Gheorghe-

Time just passes, space just remains,
And this gives birth to our dreams:

Some of them are terrestrial
(Regarding our normal lives)…

…Other ones are universal
(To conquer the solar system and further…)

We cannot hide ourselves from time,
But we can travel
In the past through memories
And in the future through illusions…

…(o-la-la,
the clouds are variable models…)

…(wow,
but time is constant!)

…While space always waits
To be filled with our gestures.

We cannot build a bridge to Venus,
It’s too close to the Sun
(He who will gulp our planet someday)…

But. after we’ve already touched the Moon,
The biggest planet, Jupiter,
Will be a short future destination
Beyond the belt of asteroids.

So our human race,
Surrounded by time-space,
Seems condemned to fly among the stars
With the first halt on the planet Mars.

EMINESCU NEAR STAVROPOLEOS AND A FEW TEMPORAL-ASTRAL CONSIDERATIONS

EMINESCU NEAR STAVROPOLEOS
AND A FEW
TEMPORAL-ASTRAL CONSIDERATIONS