The Days of the King (22 page)

Ion C. Brătianu
(nicknamed the Vizier), who appears many times in the novel, played a major role in the politics of Carol's era and founded a political dynasty that lasted well into the twentieth century. Brătianu, from a wealthy Wallachian family, was an advocate of the Moldavian and Wallachian union, and independence from the Ottomans, from the 1840s onwards. He served in Cuza's government as a leader of the Liberal party and was instrumental in the ousting of Cuza and the choice of Karl Ludwig. Under Carol, he held a number of offices, including minister of war. He had a stormy and complicated political career, including involvement in the Ploesci rebellion of 1870, but would eventually preside as Prime Minister over the longest stable government in Romanian history, 1876-1888.

The historical precedent for a unified Romania made up of Moldavia, Wallachia, and Transylvania was set by
Mihai (or Michael) the Brave
in 1600. A Wallachian prince, Mihai conquered Moldavia and Transylvania, and ruled all three for a short period. His victory was soon overturned, and Mihai had no nationalistic project, but he became the symbol of Romanian unification in the nineteenth century. Mihai is referred to as a "voievod," a Slavic title denoting the commander of a military force.
Stephen the Great,
also mentioned, was Prince of Moldavia in the late fifteenth century. Powerful, victorious in many battles, and pious, he is a hero of Romanian history and represents Moldavian glory.

The years that
The Days of the King
is set in, 1866 to 1881, were years of frequent military conflicts across the European continent, as the most powerful states—Austria, Prussia, France, Great Britain, Russia, the Ottoman Empire—jockeyed for control over territory and systems of government. The first war mentioned in the book, the one that is beginning just as Joseph Strauss leaves Berlin, is the
Austro-Prussian War,
fought from the middle of June through late August of 1866. (Switzerland is neutral during this war, which is why Joseph originally travels to Switzerland for a Swiss passport; with a Prussian passport, he would not have been able to pass through Austria into the United Principalities.) The opposing sides were Prussia, led by Prime Minister Otto von Bismarck, and its ally Italy, and Austria, along with its allies, a number of the German states including Bavaria, Saxony, and Hanover. It resulted in a decisive Prussian victory after the battle of Sadowalköniggrätz in East Bohemia. This is also the war in which Prince Karl's younger brother, Anton von Hohenzollern, is wounded and dies, after encountering the Crown Prince of Prussia himself on the battlefield.

The war that is the cause of anti-German sentiment in Bucharest and the attack on Lipscani Street (
[>]
) is the
Franco-Prussian War
(1870-1871). The combatants were Prussia, led by King Wilhelm I and Bismarck, and France, led by Napoleon III. The war was fought primarily on the border between the two countries; it ended in French defeat and the surrender of Napoleon at the battle of Sedan in northern France. In the United Principalities, a strong tradition of Francophilia influenced public opinion about the war. From approximately the 1830s onwards, there had been great admiration for and a sense of affiliation with all things French, political, cultural, linguistic, and otherwise. Indeed, in the founding myths of Romania as a modern nation state, France is the "older Latin sister" and Romania an "island of Latinity" in a "sea of Slavs."

The war that Joseph Strauss eventually enlists in as a medic is the
Russo-Turkish War
of 1877-1878. The conflict began in 1875 with anti-Ottoman uprisings in Bosnia, Herzegovina, and then Bulgaria. The uprising in Bulgaria in particular was brutally crushed by the Ottomans with the use of
ba^buzuks.
In short order, Serbia declared war on the Ottoman Empire, and was soon militarily overwhelmed. Then Russia followed suit and declared war on the Empire, ostensibly on behalf of the Bulgarians (who were Orthodox Christians) but also to restore Russian influence in the region, which had been much reduced after Russia's defeat in the Crimean War. In Plevna, a town in northern Bulgaria, the Ottomans dug in and were besieged by the Russian Army which initially suffered heavy losses. They appealed to the Romanians for reinforcements and Carol I agreed, on the condition that he would be in charge of both armies. Shortly after signing a treaty with the Russians, allowing them to pass through Romanian territory, the Romanians formally declared their independence from the Ottoman Empire in May 1877. The Russian-Romanian coalition defeated the Ottomans and the northern Bulgarian province of Dobrudja was given in tribute to Romania.

The predominant faith in Romania at the time this book is set was Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and the largest and most imposing church in Bucharest was the Cathedral of the Metropolia, presided over by His Beatitude Metropolitan Nifon. Born Nicolae Rusailă, he entered the brotherhood, taking the name Nifon, in 1809 at Cernica Monastery. He rose through the ecclesiastical ranks and in 1865, he became Metropolitan Primate, head of the Orthodox Church in the United Principalities. He founded an ecclesiastical printing press and using the revenues from his estate at Letca, south of Bucharest, he built and restored churches, established a seminary, and performed other charitable works.

Certain customs unique to the Eastern Orthodox Church appear in the novel, for instance, the custom of having godparents for weddings, as well as for baptisms. When Joseph and Elena are married, they have a godfather and a godmother who participate in the ceremony and whose relationship, as in a baptism, is not confined merely to the event; the godparents become spiritual parents to the couple thereafter.

Eastern Orthodox Christianity does not, in the religiously open Bucharest of the time, mean only the Romanian Orthodox Church: Elena belongs to the Serbian Orthodox Church, which has its own national and local saints, though the major feasts and the rituals are the same. The Russian brothers from the Visarion quarter whom Otto Huer recommends to Joseph Strauss are "Old Believers," a sect that broke from the central church in the seventeenth century, protesting the liturgical reforms of Patriarch Nikon in 1652. They adhered to older forms of prayer, forbid the shaving of beards, and practiced an ascetic lifestyle. The brothers are referred to as "Filippovian" (Russian
Filippovetsy)
, indicating that they are members of the group of Old Believers who emigrated from Russia to escape persecution under Peter the Great and settled in the Danube Delta.

When Joseph Strauss and Peter Bykow go rabbit-hunting in the countryside, near Bulgaria, they encounter a co-religionist of theirs, a Catholic priest, Necula Penov, who addresses them in Slavonic and Latin. Old Church Slavonic is in fact a dialect of Old Bulgarian that was used as a literary and liturgical language from the ninth century; thus like Latin, used by the Roman Catholic Church, it was not a "living" language; of course, Old Church Slavonic would have been more intelligible to ordinary Bulgarians than it was to Romanians. Bulgaria was an Orthodox nation; Catholics like Penov were therefore schismatics, outcasts, forced to make a life for themselves in obscurity, in strong contrast to the religious freedom experienced by Joseph and Peter in Bucharest.

Another form of faith altogether is represented in the mention of the Blazhini (
[>]
). In Romanian and Balkan folklore, the
Blazhini
(literally "gentle" or "meek ones"; Romanian
Blajini
) are descended from Seth, the son of Adam. The
Blazhini
live at the ends of the earth, they wear no clothes and eat nothing but the fruits they find growing in the wilderness. The men and women live apart and meet only once a year in order to have children. The source of the legend was probably travelers' tales about the gymnosophists of India. The River at the Ends of the Earth is called in Romanian Sîmbăta, literally Saturday (the word is from Old Slavonic
S
bota,
cf. Russian
Subbota,
ultimately from Hebrew
shabat).
"A se duce pe apa Sîmbetei" (to go down the waters of the Saturday) means "to perish." At Easter, it was the custom to cast the shells of Easter eggs onto flowing waters so that they would float away to the ends of the earth and bear the tidings of the Resurrection to the
Blazhini.

The Days of the King
immerses a reader in nineteenth-century Bucharest. A word on spelling: Bucharest is referred to in a number of different spellings to reflect the multilingual character of the city, the different states it was part of, and the novel's diverse characters. Sometimes the city is referred to as Bucuresci, which is the nineteenth-century Romanian spelling of what is now Bucureşti, sometimes as Bükreş, its Ottoman Turkish name. Bukarest is the German and Yiddish spelling; also mentioned is the Russian Bukharest/Бyxapec
T
. (Note also that up until the reign of Cuza, Romanian, uniquely for a Romance language, was written using a Cyrillic alphabet adapted from Old Church Slavonic script. The Latin alphabet was introduced officially in i860.)

Bucharest's main street,
Podul Mogoşoaiei
, now called Calea Victoriei, appears many times in the novel, especially during the courtship of Joseph and Elena. Long the main throughfare and most fashionable street in Bucharest, Podul (so-called because it was paved or floored
(podit)
with oak beams) Mogoşoaiei was created in 1692, during the reign of Constantine Brîncoveanu, Prince of Wallachia. The road led from Constantine's palace in Bucharest to his estate at Mogoşoaia, a village outside the city.

In Joseph and Elena's walks along Podul Mogooaşiei, they pass many institutions of nineteenth-century Bucharest life: shops, theaters, clubs, hotels. A particular feature of Bucharest, and part of its Turkish inheritance, were the inns, like the Zlătari, the Kretzulescu, and the şerban Voda. The inns were large buildings with four wings arranged around a courtyard, with merchants' shops on the ground floor and rooms for travelers on the upper floor. Some of the inns were owned by and provided revenues for a church or monastery. An example of this is the Stavropoleos Inn (
[>]
,
[>]
), which was connected to the Stavropoleos Monastery and its exquisitely beautiful church. There is a similar interconnectedness between districts of the city, churches, and trades: the various districts (Udricani, Brezoianu, Calicilor, Visarion, Batiştei, Silvestru, among others) were each associated with a church and were home to different trades, as the Scaune quarter is identified in the novel with butchers (cf. the passage on
[>]
when Joseph hears all the bells of the quarters' churches ringing).

In terms of important bodies of water, there is the
Dîmbovitza
and the
Bucureştioara.
The Dîmbovitza River is a branch of the River Argeş, itself a tributary of the Danube. During the time of the novel it supplied most of the city's drinking water, distributed by water carriers. The Bucureştioara (a diminutive of "Bucureşti"), a tributary of the Dîmbovitza, was a stream that flowed through the Scaune district. Its water was used by the butchers who plied their trade there. And there is also
Cişmigiu Park:
Cişmigiu is the oldest public park in central Bucharest and was laid out between 1847 and 1854 by Viennese landscape gardener Wilhelm Mayer on the site of what had been an area of insalubrious marshes surrounding a small lake, called the Lake of Dura the Merchant. The name derives from the Turkish çeşmeği, the title of Bucharest's director of public drinking fountains (Turkish çeşme, Romanian cişmea—drinking fountain), who used to live on the shore of the lake.

Significant public buildings in the book include the
Colţei Tower
and two train stations,
Filaret Station
and
Tîrgovişte Station.
The
Colţei Tower
was built in the eighteenth century as a watchtower against fires and military invasions; for a long time the tallest structure in the city, it was taken down in the 1880s. Filaret was the Bishop and later Metropolitan of the region of Rîmnic in the late eighteenth century. On the hill named after him in Bucharest there was a white marble fountain in the Turkish style, and it became a favorite spot for promenades. In time, the fountain fell into disrepair, and was demolished in 1863. Bucharest's first railway station was built on Filaret Hill in 1869. The building survives, but is now used as a bus station. The Tîrgovişte Station, now called Gara de Nord, is Bucharest's largest railway station. The foundations were laid by Carol I on September 10, 1868, and the station was inaugurated September 13, 1872, serving the Roman-Galatzi-Bucharest-Piteşti line.

And some locations outside of Bucharest:
Sinaia Monastery,
where the royal family spends summer vacations, dates from the seventeenth century. It was founded by Prince Mihail Cantacuzino after a pilgrimage to the Monastery of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai, whence the name. It is situated in the Prahova Valley, in the southern Carpathians. It was in this picturesque, alpine setting that Carol chose to build Castle Peleş.