Cartea de aur a Centenarului Marii Uniri

Abstract

This anniversary edition is the second golden book dedicated to the Great Union. The first Golden Book - dated 1929 - is part of the national movable cultural heritage and is a hand-made manuscript on parchment, produced to celebrate the first 10 years of the Great Union. The unpublished copy - published for the first time in its entirety in the last chapter of this volume - was decorated, like medieval incunabula, with traditional painting in the Art Nouveau style by the painter Cecilia Cuțescu-Storck, commissioned by Princess Alexandrina Gr. Cantacuzino. The present volume incorporates, continues and develops the first Golden Book and was realized for the celebration of the Centenary of the Great Union. For the commemoration of the first 100 years since 1918, we have illustrated the arduous historical path, marked by so many sacrifices and sacrifices, which would eventually lead to the union of Bessarabia, Bukovina, Transylvania, Banat, Crisana, Sătmar and Maramures with the Old Kingdom and the formation of the Greater Romania. While the first Golden Book is more of a book of honor intended for the signatures of the personalities who took part in the Alba Iulia celebrations in 1929, this second Golden Book is an anniversary volume containing a scholarly selection of holograph documents and vintage images of the Great Union. In both cases, paraphrasing the somewhat emphatic subtitle of the 1929 edition, we can admit, once again, that the Golden Book is indeed the honoring of those who, in the great historical moments, fulfilled the millenary dream of all Romanians: the unification of Romania. And even if the dream of uniting all Romanians into a single unitary nation-state was not a millenary one (the idea only took shape in the mid-19th century) and did not last very long (Great Romania collapsed territorially in 1940, only 22 years after the Great Union), the image of 1918 remains, without doubt, the astral moment in the entire history of Romanians. This second Golden Book is therefore a modest homage to the memory of those who made the birth of Greater Romania possible.